…Taking a brief break from the glories of Tokyo to highlight the following:

Two (one, two) decent articles in the MIT Sloan Management Review about hiring, motivating, retaining, and empowering the best employees. Both are a bit verbose but if you slog through to the end, I think you’ll be glad you did. PDF format.

Raph has unveiled Metaplace. It sounds awesome. Quote: “Now you can create a world in just a few minutes… as part of that, we also committed to an open markup standard for our network protocol… you can have a game world that is also a website, or use Web data to populate your world…. we knew it was all coming together when one of our team made a game in a day and a half. And then stuck that game on a private MySpace profile…. you can inherit someone else’s world (if they let you) and use it as a starting point… use an RSS feed for your NPCs.”

Bungie has posted information about the multi-user level editor in Halo 3.

The first GameTap Indies games have launched.

Another funny cartoon by Chris Avellone. If you like cartoons about cannabis, flatulence, and pepper spray. I kinda do.