April 19th, 2010
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Occasionally we’ll tweet excerpts from our book, Total Engagement, and then give more context here on our blog:
Twitter Tidbits #6 and #7:
Gamers already perform every category of information work imaginable, from grind-it-out drudgery to sophisticated analysis and team building. Pg 5
Gamers organize, categorize, analyze, evaluate, diagnose, invent, buy, sell, lead, and follow. Pg 5
Tweets in Context:
Gamers already perform every category of information work imaginable, from grind-it-out drudgery to sophisticated analysis and team building, all in the course of digital play. We found evidence of every category of serious work we examined, even though the gamers were doing the work merely because they thought it was fun. Gamers organize, categorize, analyze, evaluate, diagnose, invent, buy, sell, lead, and follow. We found gamers who were manufacturing pharmaceuticals to sell to doctors who healed warriors, roleplaying CEOs who were negotiating financing packages for spaceship leases, guild officers conducting performance reviews for probationary players seeking admission to top teams, and hundreds of people performing jobs that were far less glamorous—casting a fishing pole in a lake hoping to catch (by mere random chance) a prize worth a few gold pieces, searching for hidden
January 22nd, 2010
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The word that avatars have a serious place in the workplace has made it to Harvard Business Review. See our guest blog post about how James Cameron’s magnificent new film teaches more than you might expect about the future of work. The post describes how self representation via an avatar can transform workplace collaboration, innovation and productivity. Avatars are only one of the ten ingredients of great games highlighted in Total Engagement that can be used to transform today’s enterprise work.
The full list is here:
- Self representation with avatars
- Three dimensional environments
- Narrative context (great stories)
- Feedback
- Reputation, ranks and levels
- Marketplaces and economies
- Competition under rules that are explicit and enforced
- Teams
- Parallel communication systems that can be easily reconfigured
- Time pressure Read the rest of this entry »
January 17th, 2010
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With the enormous popularity of the movie Avatar, the Stanford Report recently interviewed Byron Reeves, co-author of Total Engagement, on how avatars can be used in the workplace. This story outlines the advantages of using avatars to create a more engaged workforce as well as the possible ethical implications. Read the full article on avatars in the workplace.
October 13th, 2009
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With the publication of Total Engagement this month, we’d like to use this blog to comment on what we’ve learned since delivering our manuscript to the Harvard Business School Press and to create a place where others can tell their own stories.
How we got here
Two swim dads standing around our daughters’ team pool in 2003, we began to compare notes on our mutual fascination with the psychological power of design principles in interactive media. There is a lot of time to talk, because kids swim for only a few seconds out of every hour and these girls have meets all year round. We discovered that we not only shared a lot of common ideas, but that the subject matter was vastly deep, interesting, and timely. Read the rest of this entry »
