July 14th, 2010
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Have you watched Jesse Schell’s legendary DICE speech on the gamification of everyday life? If you haven’t, you should. And I mean really, all 28 minutes of it.
There are two main points that really hit home for me. The first because it deals with the thesis of Total Engagement (the Seriosity founders’ book on gaming in the corporate world), and the other because it is just so astounding. I’ll break them down below.
Point #1: Back to Reality. Schell points out that the recent major technological hits (WII, Farmville, Webkins, Guitar Hero) all have a few things in common. Paramount among these is the ability to break through to reality. Yes, these are games, but they all somehow bring us back to reality (WII=the physical body, Farmville=real friends on Facebook, Webkins=real stuffed animal, Guitar Hero= real guitar). This trend is also explored in the movie Avatar, for which we’ve already professed our admiration. Schell shows us that Avatar is all about how we can use technology to get back to nature—something ultimately real and genuine.
This is where the tie-in to serious gaming clicked for me. Employees can use games to cut through all of the corporate garbage that muddles up real achievement. Instead of PowerPoints and buzzwords, games allow people to focus on the task itself, and they are rewarded for doing so. By going virtual, real results are accomplished.
Point #2: Everything will be a game. Starting at about minute 21 of the video, Schell takes us through a day in the life of what he claims is the not so distant future. It’s absolutely riddled with games and bonus points and leveling up, and also full of advertisements for all of the companies that make these games possible. Just about when you’re sickened by the commercialization of it, he talks about how these games are making a living record of everything thing you do. For instance, your grandchildren will know every book you read because of the Kindle/Amazon game you played throughout your life. And then he brings up the ultimate question. Because of these games, and because of the everlasting record they create, will we make different choices and become better people? Or, could it drive unhealthy behavior, as we’ve talked about before?
What do you think?
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
April 13th, 2010
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Last week, the Washington Post published a video interview with me discussing how games build leaders. I received a very thoughtful response from one viewer, Matt Lincoln, and would like to share it with you here:
You hit the nail on the head: the complex challenges inherent in a game like WoW put a premium on both individual skill and cooperation, but harnessing the best out of 25 people (most of whom have never met, are wildly different ages and from different backgrounds, and are scattered across the globe) takes real leadership. On a personal level, I’ve been invested with a mantle of responsibility and authority in my virtual “guild” that, so far anyway, eclipses what I’ve been exposed to at the professional level. But over the course of many, many raids, in weekly officer meetings, and on our heavily populated guild forums, WoW has offered me a crucible for the development of my leadership skills. As a result, I’m now confident that (1) I truly love to lead and to mentor, and (2) when I’m eventually given the chance to do so in a professional setting, I’ll have the confidence to lead with conviction and humility.
I’ve always been curious what sets apart good guilds from the great ones, and I suspect much of it comes in how raid leaders handle all that instant feedback you talked about in the video clip (in other words, the strength of their leadership).
One final anecdote … about two and a half years ago we had a young man in our guild describe how he’d recently been on a job interview in the IT field. He was a new college graduate without a lot of work experience. He got the job. But he told us that his interviewer later made it known to him that one of the things that made him attractive was that he was an officer in a successful raiding guild. To them that demonstrated both teamwork and leadership skills. That was when I began to wonder, not for the last time … how long will it take before that kind of recognition arrives in the mainstream?
