Pankinecticon?

After reading changed's article "Much Ado About No Controller, Or, Further Meditations on Immersion/Interactivity",  I found my attention grabbed by one of the points he had made about the possibility of a "pankinecticon". Based on the concept of a panopticon, which is a closed-circuit network that allows supervisors to view employees or citizens without their realization, changed adapted the concept to include devices such as the Kinect, a "controller-free" technology recently released for the Xbox 360.  He makes a joke about how there would soon be amazing news on how some major criminal or would-be terrorist was nabbed thanks to the Kinect and then comments on how people have paid to have what amount to surveillance technology in their homes, all so that they can interact in a new way with their games.


I find the concept to be both extremely intriguing and disturbing.  On one hand, technology such as the Kinect could be a huge help to law enforcement agents.  Using free surveillance provided by consumers to track the movement of dangerous targets, they could gain access to potentially case-making evidence.  The technology of Kinect could also help combat crimes such as domestic violence and drug-trafficing (ok, maybe that's a stretch, but still, the possibility is intriguing).  


However, the pros of this technology in the home and readily available to the government comes at a huge cost to the personal privacy of the Kinect users.  Imagine that, at any moment in time, a government agent could be watching your every move, looking for evidence that a law has been broken.  It's not hard to envision the uproar that this would cause.  The use of such technology for crime fighting, or for anything other than its intended purpose, would have to be heavily regulated, protected by laws just like any other form of personal privacy.


The idea of a gaming accessory being used for something like crime fighting, while not necessarily a new concept, shatters the concept of the magic circle.  The Kinect is meant to allow the player to immerse themselves even fuller into the game that they are playing by removing the controller and letting the player controller the actions onscreen with their bodies; instead, it can be used for real world applications such as security and law enforcement.  While the Kinect's intended use does coexist extremely well with the concept of the magic circle, the possibility of its technology being used for other things make it hard for the magic circle to truly coexist with a technology like the Kinect.