Following on to the recent Pew finding that 53% of all American adults play games, it looks like one of Obama’s key information planners is a dedicated World of Warcraft player, causing gamers to analyze his playing style for policy hints. On a similar note, the essay “If Gamers Ran the World” is a thought-provoking article on what games have to teach, even if we don’t always agree with some of its more far-out conclusions.
According to the LA Times, over half of the teams in the NBA are using NBA Live 2008, the popular basketball game, to simulate potential trades and evaluate personnel. The general manager of the Houston Rockets said, “I don’t play EA Sports as a game. I use it as a tool. Say if you’re thinking about acquiring Ron Artest. On the game, you can see how adding Artest can change the dynamic of your team. You can program it to run offensive sets with Artest and any combination of your players.” As the complexity of games increases, they become less toy and more tool. We expect to see much more of this, in areas beyond sports, in the near future.
There is ever more evidence that video games are great pain management tools. The latest: Snowy Game, a “basic 3D environment where the players move along a snowy path and fire snowballs at nonmoving targets. They wear a virtual reality headset that ensures the patients aren’t viewing their therapy, and the challenge focuses their mind on aiming instead of the physical discomfort. The cool imagery takes their mind away from the burning pain, and the “shooting” keeps their minds occupied. This sort of pain management benefits not only the patients, but the staff dealing with burn victims. (Emphasis on the last sentence is mine. BTW, for a fascinating insight into burn-related pain and the way it causes psychological pain to both victim and hospital staff, I refer to Dr. Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational, who wrote a remarkable paper about his own experience as a burn victim.)
Changing the Game is now available as an audio book. You can listen to it at Audible (They provide downloadable audio books, I have been an addict for their services for the past eight years), or get it from iTunes. We didn’t know that this was coming, but I am pleased to say that the reading is very good, even if we couldn’t get the guy who read the Harry Potter novel to narrate.
My second guest post on the New York Times Freakonomics blog is up; in this one, I explore how two video games, Rock Band and Guitar Hero are fundamentally changing the way that music industry executives think about promoting and selling music. While this story is interesting in and of itself, I chose it because it’s a powerful example of the way that games can be used to reinvent moribund markets. Almost anything can be turned into a game, with enough creativity and effort.
David has a neat column up on the Freakonomics blog of the New York Times that draws from our book. Take a look!
Both David and I were giving talks today, at two different conferences. Dave was speaking to an audience of game industry veterans and investors at GameON, where he gave a keynote drawing from our book. Dave argued that people in the game industry need to be thinking about how their products can be used for marketing, training, and productivity. His talk was blogged by Gamasutra.
I was running a session for the MIT Innovation Lab on the use of games for innovation, but this session was targeted at managers from Fortune 500 companies. We had speakers including Luis von Ahn of Carnegie Mellon, Phaedra Boinodiris of IBM, Ross Smith of Microsoft, ARG designer Dave Szulborski, and Bill Ferguson of BBN. They spoke about the way games are transforming everything from work productivity to recruiting, and I’ll be posting presentations later in the week, and will try to link to them from here.
Changing the Game has been the subject of features in the two big gaming-industry news sites: Edge and Gamasutra. We also were the suggested weekend read in the widely-distributed Smartbrief newsletter.
Edge has published an interesting article about the US Army’s new suicide prevention game. From that article:
Specialist Kyle Norton is a 19-year old soldier two months into his first deployment in Iraq. Already lonely for his fiancée, Anne, Kyle receives a “Dear John” email along with the news that Anne is pregnant with his friend’s baby. Feeling as though his life is turning into a bad soap opera, he initially receives some support from his buddy, Specialist Brad Blair. Unfortunately, Kyle is soon hit with another devastating loss–Brad is killed in an ambush…
While not the story lines usually associated with video games, reality-based situations that test the emotional resiliency of today’s soldiers are redefining the next generation of military gaming and simulation. Internal battles such as Kyle’s, portrayed in the Army’s new suicide prevention game, Beyond the Front, confront users with complex personal challenges in the context of war.
There are lots of interesting articles on games and business recently. A slightly older one is a BusinessWeek slideshow on 33 ways that game companies can make money from games, some of these methods are only relevant to game companies, but they offer interesting hints as to how game companies and other businesses can work together. A Swiss engineering company is using techiques right out of games to create compelling point-of-sale displays. Another article looks at the way some games tackle serious issues, ranging from tragedy to war, in an intellectual way. And, on the lighter side, humor site Something Awful imagines what business skills a few well-known games might advertise themselves as teaching.
Changing the Game (order via Amazon or B&N) is a fast-paced tour of the many ways in which games, already an influential part of millions of people’s lives, have become a profoundly important part of the business world. From connecting with customers, to attracting and training employees, to developing new products and spurring innovation, games have introduced a new level of fun and engagement to the workplace.
Changing the Game introduces you to the ways in which games are being used to enhance productivity at Microsoft, increase profits at Burger King, and raise employee loyalty at Sun Microsystems, among other remarkable examples. It is proof that work not only can be fun--it should be.
