That is actually a great idea. I'd love to go to work if I could do it in video game form.

Like, say I get a job as a farmer. I'd have a tractor out on a farm in North Dakota or wherever, drone-rigged so I could control it remotely from the comfort of my own living cubicle, thousands of miles away. In real life, the tractor would be plowing fields of, I dunno, corn or something boring like that, but augmented reality software would spruce up the scenery on my Google glass monitor. Instead of driving a John Deere through a MidWestern corn field, my tractor would look like a Transformer, it'd be ridden by a half-naked anime girl, and I'd be driving through a war-torn Mad Max wasteland. Things I should probably avoid driving into, like big rocks or gophers, could be reskinned to look like landmines, or zombie gophers. My sponsoring company could let me buy new, licensed characters and skins for a nominal fee, advertisers could offer me free stuff ("Gecko Tractor Buddy when you sign up for Geiko!"), and I could choose to take overtime payment in the form of real money, ingame premium microcurrency, or bonus XP.

I'd love that shit. Opiate of the masses right there.

Cheaper solution: Let the proles keep their shitty jobs but provide them with a daily ration of opium.

According to "The Omnivore's Dilemma," most large-scale modern farming (which is mostly corn, soybeans, and cotton) is done by drone tractors already anyway. There's a dude whose job it is to sit in the cockpit of this giant thresher and just make sure that no kids have fallen into it and otherwise it's all automated.

Opium makes it difficult for people to work. That's the problem with allowing the proles to use recreational drugs; drugs make them happy, but drugs also make them lazy! It's good to keep the proles docile, but not at the cost of their productivity.

Another thing to consider is that the underclasses will have to be culled, and soon. When that happens, the twenty million or so middle-class survivors will have to take over the jobs left vacant by the now extinct Redneck and Immigrant Men. And we can't just inject drugs into college educated coastal people, it would be inhumane!

Satire aside I actually think a big cull is just what we need as a species :)
Also interesting somewhat related contemporary issue: A lot of jobs nowadays are societies form of pointless busy work. If people didnt bother turning up there would be no practical downside and it would lower their carbon footprint.. Some countries are considering a universal wage to be payed to all citizens no strings attached. (Switzerland is actually voting on enacting this for real, though this is a bad example as it is a quite crazy and evil country)

There was actually an iOS app while back called Epic Win that basically turned your average to-do lists into sort of a mini RPG thing. You created tasks, assigned them an XP reward based on how hard you thought they were, then completed the quests by doing the actual thing. So, in a sense, there have been apps (like Zombie Run for example) that try to gamify mundane things. It would not surprise me if stuff like remote yard keeping ever became a thing.

http://www.wired.com/2008/07/wargames/

Maybe y'allz know about it, but that was my reference.

Mr Cat, I was all set to write up a tl;dr on the idea of universal wage (I've discussed it before, perhaps not here on poetv?)... but then i found out that Robin Williams died, and that killed any motivation I might have right now. Maybe if someone submits a video on universal wages in a day or two? (Lindybeige did a good one last year)

IZ, yeah, a friend of mine was a drone pilot, and it's basically gaming. Really fucked up, high stress gaming - the psych requirements are absurd, way more strict than you might think - but the basic components are there. Wht I'm saying is, it's a good approach to working, at least when you combine it with augmented reality software to make your daily grind less boring and tedious.

SP, Zombie Run was a really neat idea, and remote yardkeeping could conceivably get my Farmville-loving friends to actually do stuff about their lawns. One of my buddies, his father offered to give him the old family house, and he's thinking about turning it down...because he doesn't want to live anywhere where he's got to do yard work. The house is all paid off, no mortage, nice area, and *mowing the lawn* is a deal-breaker. His wife agrees!

yeah it actually sounds like a better and better idea there more it spins around in my mind. Like not serious farming but smaller tasks.. I dunno I know about as much about farming as I do about war, which is to say I've seen Full Metal Jacket, played Tribes a bunch and liked mowing the lawn when I was a kid so I'm a total Luddite.

But some sort of apprenticeship or even a paying job for tasks that could be done remotely via drones would be really cool! Just pass some sort of training like DPSST and get to work regardless of any physical disability.. just so you're not gonna go around hitting the cows GTA style. I like this and I think it could help farmers down the line. Hmm.. :)

MY PLOW IS AUGMENTED

CUATRO VEINTE

Right on!

It's the third game the 15 is for the year.

This is shit, you can't even get married in this one. How do you upgrade your plow from silver to gold huh?

BULLSHIT

Oh, thank you.

Is it one of those free to play, pay to harvest deals? I hate those.

this is just an offline sim game series, afaik

What I want to know is why everyone is suddenly too good for Harvest Moon.

Dude, you buying the special edition preorder pack or are you going to get the season pass once it goes live? I can't wait for my free urban camo skins that I paid extra for!