Changing the Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Future of Business (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Ethan Mollick (Author)
Key Phrases: user innovation communities, integrated product placements, recruiting game, Second Life, Changing the Game, Burger King (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Despite growth challenges in some parts of the entertainment industry, such as music and print media, the video-games industry is thriving. No longer just the providence of the first-person shooter mentality, the concept of video games has opened up with the popularity of virtual worlds such as the Sims and Second Life. “Massively multiplayer online role-playing games” such as World of Warcraft can support thousands of players simultaneously as players join forces with others to go on “quests,” slaying dragons and finding rare hidden items. The authors, who are both affiliates at MIT, discuss how games are being utilized by companies for product placement (“advergames”) and as teaching and motivational tools, making it fun to do business. The military has embraced video games in a big way, utilizing them for recruitment and battle simulation. These game enthusiasts create a compelling argument as to why games matter, because “at their best, they represent the very essence of what drives people to think, to cooperate, and to create.” --David Siegfried

Product Description

Use Video Games to Drive Innovation, Customer Engagement, Productivity, and Profit! Companies of all shapes and sizes have begun to use games to revolutionize the way they interact with customers and employees, becoming more competitive and more profitable as a result. Microsoft has used games to painlessly and cost-effectively quadruple voluntary employee participation in important tasks. Medical schools have used game-like simulators to train surgeons, reducing their error rate in practice by a factor of six. A recruiting game developed by the U.S. Army, for just 0.25% of the Army's total advertising budget, has had more impact on new recruits than all other forms of Army advertising combined. And Google is using video games to turn its visitors into a giant, voluntary labor force--encouraging them to manually label the millions of images found on the Web that Google's computers cannot identify on their own. Changing the Game reveals how leading-edge organizations are using video games to reach new customers more cost-effectively; to build brands; to recruit, develop, and retain great employees; to drive more effective experimentation and innovation; to supercharge productivity!in short, to make it fun to do business. This book is packed with case studies, best practices, and pitfalls to avoid. It is essential reading for any forward-thinking executive, marketer, strategist, and entrepreneur, as well as anyone interested in video games in general. *In-game advertising, advergames, adverworlds, and beyond Choose your best marketing opportunities--and avoid the pitfalls *Use gaming to recruit and develop better employees Learn practical lessons from America's Army and other innovative case studies *Channel the passion of your user communities Help your customers improve your products and services--and have fun doing it *What gamers do better than computers, scientists, or governments Use games to solve problems that can't be solved any other way

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: FT Press; 1 edition (October 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 013235781X
• ISBN-13: 978-0132357814
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #80,329 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book for humanists as much as for businesspeople, October 20, 2008

By	Johanna Klein (Manila, Philippines) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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!

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars informative & entertaining with great case studies, October 16, 2008

By	B. Gannon "Games Kotaku" - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

What I liked most about this book was the way it addresses pretty much every major potential use of video games in a business setting. Most other books that I'm aware of have tended to focus on a single topic, like games and education. I also like the way the authors blended corporate case studies and academic research; again, most other books on serious uses of games tend to be overwhelmingly academic.

The part I personally liked most was the final chapter, which was probably the most speculative but also the most intriguing. I love the idea of using video games to turn complex problems into fun experiences that people play voluntarily and therefore solve the problems voluntarily! The book's examples of this, like Google's "Image Labeler" game, were very good.

I suppose my main criticism of the book is that precisely because it tackles so many subject areas, it doesn't often get into the nitty gritty of game development. It does offer very useful tips at the end of every section though.

Long story short I'd call this one of the most entertaining and informative books I've read on the subject of serious games. Well worth a read, especially if you're a business person looking for insight into the practical uses of games within every day corporate life. Most game books simply aren't written with a general business audience in mind.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent read for business executives--Read full review at TMR, October 20, 2008

By	Jon Aleckson (Madison, WI. USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

A BUSINESS ANGLE ON ONLINE GAME PLAY
Changing the Game by David Edery and Ethan Mollick deserves five stars because it will have a impact on the interest in using games for business training and marketing objectives. This book describes the game-based marketing and training phenomenon in such expert and objective detail that if executives have not previously considered funding a game or simulation, they will after reading it. This is the business case for investing in online game development!

The current "craze over online game-based learning" has altered the risk-reward ratio of sponsoring a game. The serious attention game aficionados and professional groups such as the eLearning Guild have given to the issue has slowly tilted training executive opinion in favor of experimenting with Internet-delivered games. This book is a "game changer!" Read the rest of my review at www.tmreview.com