10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A book for humanists as much as for businesspeople, October 20, 2008
This review is from: Changing the Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Future of Business (Hardcover)
I blazed through the book in about five hours. I thought that it flowed
well, was logically organized, very well researched, etc. I think that, as an introduction for a manager to how to think about appropriate uses of
games in their business, it is actually a very helpful book - it doesn't
give a blueprint for what a company should do, but it definitely does make a strong case for what to consider when starting to think about the challenge. (This should be taken as very high praise, since I don't read business books, ever, preferring instead to mock them viciously.) Some stuff I particularly liked:
Given that there are two authors, the tone is amazingly consistent. I
thought the writing was excellent - I was buoyed along by how fluid and smart it was. On a related note, I loved how funny the book was - I started reading it in my gym and kept hooting with laughter on the elliptical. "Those sights include underground cities, murky swamps, troll-infested jungles, scorpion-filled deserts, and beautiful beaches - all of which seem even more remarkable when viewed from the back of a soaring griffin." (Now I, a non-gamer, want to play World of Warcraft!) "Of course, just because you want to see advertisements on the hood of a NASCAR stock car doesn't mean that the same ads belong on the side of a unicorn." I love it...
The thing that I liked best about the book, though, was sort of hard to put into words. But basically, the whole phenomenon of people playing games strikes me as immensely HUMAN. People are just people - we respond to the same impulses, whether the forum is online or "real life," and those impulses include a vast desire to create things, build communities and populate them, caretake, solve puzzles, collaborate, and to have things that are pretty or rare. Over and over again in the book, I was amazed at how much time people will spend taking care of sims, or virtual pets, or designing virtual t-shirts byte by byte, or whatever, just for the sake of doing it. I think this was well illustrated by the comment: "Game players have been known to create vibrant economies, develop complex social systems, generate innumerable pieces of digital content, and even perform boring data entry tasks, all on an enormous scale."
It's all amazing to me, that people do this in the absence (generally) of
financial incentive, and when all of this caretaking doesn't involve real
people or real objects (i.e. that they spend a ton of time to get a sword
that glows, but the sword is still just an online object) - and yet at the
same time, it makes complete sense. The internet gives people a forum in which they have a little microcosm of the world, in which to do all the things that humans want to do normally, but in which they have much more power and control than they do in normal life. I liked the comment "SimCity is a remakably undirected game, with few overall goals except for the player's desire to build the city that they want to build." Of course we want to build a small city and arrange it as we see fit. And of course we want every available tool to facilitate this, which is why I thought the anecdote about the DeCSS code being hidden in and disseminated through songs and pictures and haikus (!) was so hilarious and amazing and wonderful. Games give people a way to manifest their human impulses in a much less constrained way - even the use of avatars means that they can dispense with the physical (and personality) constructs that usually bound their activities in real life, further empowering them to do everything they might to do in life.
Anyway, that sense of joy in creation and collaboration, which came out both in the content of the book, but also in the tone of the writing, was the thing that I liked the best about it. This was a book written for humanists as much as businesspeople!
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
On the bleeding edge- an introduction to our future of work, learning, and interacting., January 25, 2010
This review is from: Changing the Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Future of Business (Hardcover)
A very good, broad view of many trends and technologies that are changing the way information is shared and value is built in business and broader society. The first part of the book was a an overview of the new technologies or mechanisms individuals and organizations are using, so it was a bit general (overview of wisdom of crowds concepts, console industry, etc) but then the authors did a very nice job of tying it all together.
You may be familiar with some of these new services or game types but probably not all of them. I was especially excited to read about Ross Smith, a test leader in the security group that I know- he really is an innovator and the reference to Ross and his work really speaks to how current and valid the research in this book is. I found the book to be very valuable and thought provoking. I highly recommend it!
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
(Video) games people play at work, December 7, 2009
This review is from: Changing the Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Future of Business (Hardcover)
Video games are so commonplace that you probably don't see them as a launching pad to the next frontier of innovation, but David Edery and Ethan Mollick will make you think twice about that. They present an eloquent, persuasive case for the enormous potential that video games have to transform business. The authors illustrate the way that a growing number of organizations are utilizing virtual worlds to advertise their goods and services, train their workers and attract potential employees. They'll amaze you as they recount how rapidly video games have progressed since Pac-Man and Space Invaders first appeared in bowling alley arcades. getAbstract applauds the authors' scholarship and research, and their ability to illuminate this topic for a corporate audience. Anyone involved in technology innovation, or personnel training and management, could learn a lot by playing along. Video games are serious business and they generate serious money.
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