Friday, February 12, 2010
The Total Engagement Blog on Games in the Workplace Has Moved
We've recently moved our blog to the Seriosity web site. You can find it here. This new version is more user-friendly and will be updated more frequently. We hope you'll subscribe and become a regular reader.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Tweeting Total Engagement
We've recently moved our blog to the Seriosity web site. You can find it here. This new version is more user-friendly and will be updated more frequently. We hope you'll subscribe and become a regular reader.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
A few times a week, we will tweet (@seriosity) a sentence from Total Engagement that illustrates a key point in our thesis. Then, we will post a short companion piece here that includes the full paragraph from which the sentence was pulled. We hope these “Twitter Tidbits” will help to expand your thinking about the possibilities of gaming in a business environment.
Twitter Tidbit #1:
"For anyone convinced that engagement is a key ingredient of the future of work, games are the definitive model." Pg 4
Tweet in Context:
Games will change how Jennifer and all of us work; this book is the story, as yet untold, of how and why that will happen. One hundred million Americans, and many more around the world, played a computer or video game last week with levels of engagement and focus rarely seen at work.1 Some of this play was simple shooting, racing, or turning cards, and much of it appealed to adolescent boys. But an increasingly large portion of play was complex, strategic, social, and gender balanced. The hours flew by for people engaged in sophisticated online interactions, stealing time from real-world relationships, television, and work and providing alternative environments in which to meet people and learn new skills. For anyone convinced that engagement is a key ingredient of the future of work, games are the definitive model. We’ll tell you about their most important implications for business productivity during economic times when engagement is especially important but even harder to achieve.
The full first chapter can be found here.
Also: A couple of great Wikipedia articles provide background on the notions of “employee engagement” and “work engagement.”
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
A few times a week, we will tweet (@seriosity) a sentence from Total Engagement that illustrates a key point in our thesis. Then, we will post a short companion piece here that includes the full paragraph from which the sentence was pulled. We hope these “Twitter Tidbits” will help to expand your thinking about the possibilities of gaming in a business environment.
Twitter Tidbit #1:
"For anyone convinced that engagement is a key ingredient of the future of work, games are the definitive model." Pg 4
Tweet in Context:
Games will change how Jennifer and all of us work; this book is the story, as yet untold, of how and why that will happen. One hundred million Americans, and many more around the world, played a computer or video game last week with levels of engagement and focus rarely seen at work.1 Some of this play was simple shooting, racing, or turning cards, and much of it appealed to adolescent boys. But an increasingly large portion of play was complex, strategic, social, and gender balanced. The hours flew by for people engaged in sophisticated online interactions, stealing time from real-world relationships, television, and work and providing alternative environments in which to meet people and learn new skills. For anyone convinced that engagement is a key ingredient of the future of work, games are the definitive model. We’ll tell you about their most important implications for business productivity during economic times when engagement is especially important but even harder to achieve.
The full first chapter can be found here.
Also: A couple of great Wikipedia articles provide background on the notions of “employee engagement” and “work engagement.”
Friday, January 22, 2010
Harvard Business Review: Avatars in the Workplace
We've recently moved our blog to the Seriosity web site. You can find it here. This new version is more user-friendly and will be updated more frequently. We hope you'll subscribe and become a regular reader.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
The word that avatars have a serious place in the workplace has made it to Harvard Business Review. See our guest blog post about how James Cameron's magnificant new film teaches more than you might expect about the future of work. The post describes how self representation via an avatar can transform workplace collaboration, innovation and productivity. Avatars are only one of the ten ingredients of great games highlighted in Total Engagement that can be used to transform today's enterprise work.
The full list is here
1. Self representation with avatars
2. Three dimensional environments
3. Narrative context (great stories)
4. Feedback
5. Reputation, ranks and levels
6. Marketplaces and economies
7. Competition under rules that are explicit and enforced
8. Teams
9. Parallel communication systems that can be easily reconfigured
10. Time pressure
In the comments, someone took exception to the way we described a Gartner study, and Byron has provided excellent follow up on the point. It is copied here:
January 22, 2010 at 2:48 PM
Not so fast please on dismissal of the Gartner information. The author of the estimate at Gartner, Christy Pettey, confirmed for me today that her projection that 80% of internet users will have an avatar by the end of 2011 included enterprise as well as entertainment uses.
And the age of the Gartner study shouldn't be comfort for those concerned about a trajectory of greater avatar use. There's plenty of recent data that confirms interest in avatars and virtual environments.
Thinkbalm.com, a consulting group tracking the immersive internet, has excellent reports on their website. Erica Driver, Co-Founder and Principal at Thinkbalm, told me that based on their current work, her estimate is that within three years (the end of 2012) there will be an early majority of companies involved with virtual environments, including a significant installed user base within the Global 1000 and large public sector organizations, and a solid list of successful large-scale deployments of 10,000+ users.
Here are three quick company stories from the Thinkbalm website that are interesting:
* In September of 2009, Cisco Systems held its annual sales kickoff meeting online using a virtual event platform, with 19,000 attendees.
* BP extended its 2009 Game Changer program, which has been focused on the Immersive Internet, for an additional six months because the company was seeing so much value from it.
* IBM’s CIO office has a vision of deploying immersive technology to their entire workforce — that’s nearly 400,000 people
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
The word that avatars have a serious place in the workplace has made it to Harvard Business Review. See our guest blog post about how James Cameron's magnificant new film teaches more than you might expect about the future of work. The post describes how self representation via an avatar can transform workplace collaboration, innovation and productivity. Avatars are only one of the ten ingredients of great games highlighted in Total Engagement that can be used to transform today's enterprise work.
The full list is here
1. Self representation with avatars
2. Three dimensional environments
3. Narrative context (great stories)
4. Feedback
5. Reputation, ranks and levels
6. Marketplaces and economies
7. Competition under rules that are explicit and enforced
8. Teams
9. Parallel communication systems that can be easily reconfigured
10. Time pressure
In the comments, someone took exception to the way we described a Gartner study, and Byron has provided excellent follow up on the point. It is copied here:
January 22, 2010 at 2:48 PM
Not so fast please on dismissal of the Gartner information. The author of the estimate at Gartner, Christy Pettey, confirmed for me today that her projection that 80% of internet users will have an avatar by the end of 2011 included enterprise as well as entertainment uses.
And the age of the Gartner study shouldn't be comfort for those concerned about a trajectory of greater avatar use. There's plenty of recent data that confirms interest in avatars and virtual environments.
Thinkbalm.com, a consulting group tracking the immersive internet, has excellent reports on their website. Erica Driver, Co-Founder and Principal at Thinkbalm, told me that based on their current work, her estimate is that within three years (the end of 2012) there will be an early majority of companies involved with virtual environments, including a significant installed user base within the Global 1000 and large public sector organizations, and a solid list of successful large-scale deployments of 10,000+ users.
Here are three quick company stories from the Thinkbalm website that are interesting:
* In September of 2009, Cisco Systems held its annual sales kickoff meeting online using a virtual event platform, with 19,000 attendees.
* BP extended its 2009 Game Changer program, which has been focused on the Immersive Internet, for an additional six months because the company was seeing so much value from it.
* IBM’s CIO office has a vision of deploying immersive technology to their entire workforce — that’s nearly 400,000 people
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Avatars on the Big Screen and Avatars in the Office
We've recently moved our blog to the Seriosity web site. You can find it here. This new version is more user-friendly and will be updated more frequently. We hope you'll subscribe and become a regular reader.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
With the enormous popularity of the movie Avatar, the Stanford Report recently interviewed Byron Reeves, co-author of Total Engagement, on how avatars can be used in the workplace. This story outlines the advantages of using avatars to create a more engaged workforce as well as the possible ethical implications. Read the full article on avatars in the workplace.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
With the enormous popularity of the movie Avatar, the Stanford Report recently interviewed Byron Reeves, co-author of Total Engagement, on how avatars can be used in the workplace. This story outlines the advantages of using avatars to create a more engaged workforce as well as the possible ethical implications. Read the full article on avatars in the workplace.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
What is your game strategy?
We've recently moved our blog to the Seriosity web site. You can find it here. This new version is more user-friendly and will be updated more frequently. We hope you'll subscribe and become a regular reader.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Have you ever watched a friend or offspring deeply engaged in a video game and performing a highly complex but completely artificial task with incredible competence? Could that focus and attention be bottled and used for something serious? We’re convinced it can. This is not so much about how you plan to win against competitors, but how you adapt to an extraordinary new form of media that will affect your enterprise: massive multiplayer online games or MMOs for short.
Console video games have powerful lessons for business about engagement and motivation, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. If you look further into the world of collaboration taking place in the online role-playing games, every day (and night) tens of thousands of teams of 5 to 100’s of people from multiple time zones, countries and cultures, each with different and highly complementary skills self-assemble around extremely challenging goals. Sound familiar? It should. This is the new world of global business collaboration. The psychological principles and affordances found in MMOs have much to teach us about teamwork, leadership, innovation, urgency, and incentives (“what do I get when we win?”).
One of the reasons to pay attention is that these games are dramatically shaping the expectations of people entering the workforce. The gamer generation has different expectations about challenge, risk, authority, and collaboration as we have been warned by John Beck and Mitchell Wade in Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever. More recent surveys have shown the extent to which thirty-something men (and increasingly women) are playing these complex, social on-line games. What’s most important is that we know many of these gamers work at your company right now.
To be clear, we are not talking about just using games for training and simulation, although these are wonderful applications. Beyond using game technology to help people get ready to make money for shareholders, we are talking about game technology to help people while they are making money for shareholders. This could range from borrowing a few of the key psychological ingredients from great games like World of Warcraft that will make the workplace more interesting to the full Monty: re-engineering entire jobs so that workers become their avatars, building transparent and persistent reputations for tackling graded challenges with teammates inside a virtual online world as part of a compelling narrative. If this sounds fantastic, it’s worth noting that tens of millions of MMO players are already carrying out tasks inside their games that look exactly like the kinds of information work that companies have to pay people to do!
If you peel back the patina of medieval or science fiction images of dragons and spaceships, you will find a host of features that perfectly capture the essence of motivation and management in business. Games do an especially good job of encouraging people to try and fail, and try again in the context of clear and interesting challenges. They do a fabulous job of giving feedback in all of the relevant timescales for a task. Leadership emerges as a product of the environment, as we described in the May, 2008 issue of HBR. Collaboration is faster and richer with reputation systems flowing in parallel channels of information where dashboards are as important to followers as to leaders. Importantly, players use a synthetic currency to record, exchange and store value that can be traded in vibrant markets.
Because business is utterly dependent on voluntary creativity and collaboration of workers using their tacit knowledge, ignoring game inspired design principles is a huge missed opportunity. Games offer powerful tools for creating alignment, performance and engagement. And like any powerful technology, they can be dangerous if the implications for stakeholders aren’t thoughtfully considered. In future posts, we’ll share some ideas about how to discover and apply these ideas at work. In the meantime, we are interested in what you think about the notion of using game technology at work.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Have you ever watched a friend or offspring deeply engaged in a video game and performing a highly complex but completely artificial task with incredible competence? Could that focus and attention be bottled and used for something serious? We’re convinced it can. This is not so much about how you plan to win against competitors, but how you adapt to an extraordinary new form of media that will affect your enterprise: massive multiplayer online games or MMOs for short.
Console video games have powerful lessons for business about engagement and motivation, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. If you look further into the world of collaboration taking place in the online role-playing games, every day (and night) tens of thousands of teams of 5 to 100’s of people from multiple time zones, countries and cultures, each with different and highly complementary skills self-assemble around extremely challenging goals. Sound familiar? It should. This is the new world of global business collaboration. The psychological principles and affordances found in MMOs have much to teach us about teamwork, leadership, innovation, urgency, and incentives (“what do I get when we win?”).
One of the reasons to pay attention is that these games are dramatically shaping the expectations of people entering the workforce. The gamer generation has different expectations about challenge, risk, authority, and collaboration as we have been warned by John Beck and Mitchell Wade in Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever. More recent surveys have shown the extent to which thirty-something men (and increasingly women) are playing these complex, social on-line games. What’s most important is that we know many of these gamers work at your company right now.
To be clear, we are not talking about just using games for training and simulation, although these are wonderful applications. Beyond using game technology to help people get ready to make money for shareholders, we are talking about game technology to help people while they are making money for shareholders. This could range from borrowing a few of the key psychological ingredients from great games like World of Warcraft that will make the workplace more interesting to the full Monty: re-engineering entire jobs so that workers become their avatars, building transparent and persistent reputations for tackling graded challenges with teammates inside a virtual online world as part of a compelling narrative. If this sounds fantastic, it’s worth noting that tens of millions of MMO players are already carrying out tasks inside their games that look exactly like the kinds of information work that companies have to pay people to do!
If you peel back the patina of medieval or science fiction images of dragons and spaceships, you will find a host of features that perfectly capture the essence of motivation and management in business. Games do an especially good job of encouraging people to try and fail, and try again in the context of clear and interesting challenges. They do a fabulous job of giving feedback in all of the relevant timescales for a task. Leadership emerges as a product of the environment, as we described in the May, 2008 issue of HBR. Collaboration is faster and richer with reputation systems flowing in parallel channels of information where dashboards are as important to followers as to leaders. Importantly, players use a synthetic currency to record, exchange and store value that can be traded in vibrant markets.
Because business is utterly dependent on voluntary creativity and collaboration of workers using their tacit knowledge, ignoring game inspired design principles is a huge missed opportunity. Games offer powerful tools for creating alignment, performance and engagement. And like any powerful technology, they can be dangerous if the implications for stakeholders aren’t thoughtfully considered. In future posts, we’ll share some ideas about how to discover and apply these ideas at work. In the meantime, we are interested in what you think about the notion of using game technology at work.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
About this Blog (linking Seriosity and Total Engagement)
We've recently moved our blog to the Seriosity web site. You can find it here. This new version is more user-friendly and will be updated more frequently. We hope you'll subscribe and become a regular reader.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
With the publication of Total Engagement this month, we’d like to use this blog to comment on what we’ve learned since delivering our manuscript to the Harvard Business School Press and to create a place where others can tell their own stories.
How we got here
Two swim dads standing around our daughters' team pool in 2003, we began to compare notes on our mutual fascination with the psychological power of design principles in interactive media. There is a lot of time to talk, because kids swim for only a few seconds out of every hour and these girls have meets all year round. We discovered that we not only shared a lot of common ideas, but that the subject matter was vastly deep, interesting, and timely.
Questions swirled about what design features were driving the exceptional engagement of players, especially in the case of massive multiplayer online games (MMOs). What psychological theory could explain how each feature contributed and was there a common thread that tied the features together? Are players already doing stuff in the games that looks like real work? In that case, why does someone have to pay people to do the same stuff in another context (outside of the game?)
To get some initial feedback on these ideas in early 2004, we hosted a conference - in the form of a game - with intellectual and financial support from Alph Bingham and colleagues at Eli Lilly and Company. To get broader feedback, we gave a seminar at the Santa Fe Institute Business Network and learned that people from many large enterprises were also fascinated.
Leighton's colleagues at Alloy Ventures provided the resources and a home to incubate the ideas. Seriosity, Inc. was formed to further develop these ideas for information workers in large enterprises. Elite student gamers became our jungle guides and we immersed ourselves in the broader literature on serious games. We recorded hundreds of hours of game play and spoke to many great game designers.
After talking to people in dozens of large companies and hearing about their pain points, we settled in 2005 on the problem of information overload (and in particular, too much email from colleagues) and the solution we chose was to use marketplace ideas and a synthetic currency – ideas taken directly from the games we had studied. It took quite a while to build the software and it initially didn't turn out the way we had hoped. For early users, it actually slowed people down rather than making life easier. But since mid-2007, we have continued to work with a handful of talented people who have rebuilt the troublesome parts of our attention economy. It is now working quite nicely in a beta trial that must be setting records for length.
While we were waiting for software to happen, we decided to codify our thinking and experience; that is, write a book. We wrote a proposal and, Bang, our agent had signed up our first-choice publisher. We each drafted different chapters (can you guess which ones?), but we each edited every paragraph of the manuscript and can hardly tell who deserves credit for the better (and worse) turns of phrase. See our Acknowledgments in the book for the names of the many people that made Total Engagement possible or better.
Where we are going
We continue to work on new games that address broad enterprise challenges. These are still stealthy projects, but we look forward to writing about them when our enterprise partners are ready. We've also taken on some interesting behavior change projects in the energy field. More later.
If you've found your way to these pages, we bet you may have some stories of your own about using games in the workplace. Were the ideas smart or silly? What could have been done better? Post them if you like and we’ll comment and tell others about them.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
With the publication of Total Engagement this month, we’d like to use this blog to comment on what we’ve learned since delivering our manuscript to the Harvard Business School Press and to create a place where others can tell their own stories.
How we got here
Two swim dads standing around our daughters' team pool in 2003, we began to compare notes on our mutual fascination with the psychological power of design principles in interactive media. There is a lot of time to talk, because kids swim for only a few seconds out of every hour and these girls have meets all year round. We discovered that we not only shared a lot of common ideas, but that the subject matter was vastly deep, interesting, and timely.
Questions swirled about what design features were driving the exceptional engagement of players, especially in the case of massive multiplayer online games (MMOs). What psychological theory could explain how each feature contributed and was there a common thread that tied the features together? Are players already doing stuff in the games that looks like real work? In that case, why does someone have to pay people to do the same stuff in another context (outside of the game?)
To get some initial feedback on these ideas in early 2004, we hosted a conference - in the form of a game - with intellectual and financial support from Alph Bingham and colleagues at Eli Lilly and Company. To get broader feedback, we gave a seminar at the Santa Fe Institute Business Network and learned that people from many large enterprises were also fascinated.
Leighton's colleagues at Alloy Ventures provided the resources and a home to incubate the ideas. Seriosity, Inc. was formed to further develop these ideas for information workers in large enterprises. Elite student gamers became our jungle guides and we immersed ourselves in the broader literature on serious games. We recorded hundreds of hours of game play and spoke to many great game designers.
After talking to people in dozens of large companies and hearing about their pain points, we settled in 2005 on the problem of information overload (and in particular, too much email from colleagues) and the solution we chose was to use marketplace ideas and a synthetic currency – ideas taken directly from the games we had studied. It took quite a while to build the software and it initially didn't turn out the way we had hoped. For early users, it actually slowed people down rather than making life easier. But since mid-2007, we have continued to work with a handful of talented people who have rebuilt the troublesome parts of our attention economy. It is now working quite nicely in a beta trial that must be setting records for length.
While we were waiting for software to happen, we decided to codify our thinking and experience; that is, write a book. We wrote a proposal and, Bang, our agent had signed up our first-choice publisher. We each drafted different chapters (can you guess which ones?), but we each edited every paragraph of the manuscript and can hardly tell who deserves credit for the better (and worse) turns of phrase. See our Acknowledgments in the book for the names of the many people that made Total Engagement possible or better.
Where we are going
We continue to work on new games that address broad enterprise challenges. These are still stealthy projects, but we look forward to writing about them when our enterprise partners are ready. We've also taken on some interesting behavior change projects in the energy field. More later.
If you've found your way to these pages, we bet you may have some stories of your own about using games in the workplace. Were the ideas smart or silly? What could have been done better? Post them if you like and we’ll comment and tell others about them.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)