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.
The Training Media Review has an in-depth review of the portions of our book dealing with games for teaching and training, and put us in their top ten list. They give us four stars, and called us one of the best products of 2008, writing that “Corporate training executives now have a single source for facts and case examples (ammunition, so to speak) to assist in the argument to justify investment in gaming genres.”
The Financial Times has a very interesting piece on the future of serious games, citing all sorts of interesting examples, including a new “charity ARG” from the Red Cross and the use of the LittleBigPlanet game engine to graphically present Sony’s financial results. They also quote from our book about the history of games for training, and talk about some of the ways games are becoming increasingly critical to today’s businesses.
In the October issue of Inc. magazine, Changing the Game is the subject of the monthly “Skimmer’s Guide to the Latest Business Books.” The piece offers a nice summary of our argument, “Video games are the next big thing in marketing as well as powerful tools for recruiting, training, and motivating people. And not just for the Transformers set. Those of us who haven’t played anything since Frogger can benefit as well.”
The Economist has an article about Changing the Game. It’s a positive article, with some nice examples taken from the book, but it doesn’t really attempt to sum up our major theme: that games, through the fun and interactivity they provide, have the ability to transform the way we think about a wide range of business issues from recruiting to marketing to innovation.
There were further discussions about the article in Slashdot, Kotaku, and other places.