I’m sorry I’ve been posting less frequently than usual, but I’ve been devoting every minute outside of Microsoft to finishing my book, which is due to the publisher in 10 days (!!) It turns out that writing a book is a lot like developing a video game — i.e., you can never have too much polish. Ethan and I have revised each chapter as few as 6 times and as many as 24, and it still doesn’t feel like enough. All I can say is, thank goodness for deadlines. Otherwise, I might be obsessing over every word five years from now.

When this is over, I’m going to spend the summer totally decompressing. Do some travelling. Play some of my favorite old video games. Buy some new board games. Do some gardening (I thought I’d start this weekend, but I don’t have time and even if I did, it’s snowing outside. Yeah, in late April. I took some pictures, but then I realized that they were just going to make me angry. California is sounding better ever day.)

Oh, and I think my family — and most especially my wife — justifiably expects a serious make-good. How exactly does one go about compensating for six months of consistent neglect?

PS. The photo is of my backyard cherry tree, pre-snow. It was a lovely Spring for a few days. :-)

When games give way to interactive art. (Cryptic description, I know. I’d also thought of calling this “the most unique reason to purchase a game I’ve ever seen.”)

Everyone should read this post on email communication. Long story short: 78% of email senders believe they are communicating clearly, 89% of email receivers believe they are interpreting the message correctly, but only 56% of receivers correctly interpret the message.

Good article by Bill Fulton on reducing anti-social behavior in online games. I took my own stab at this about a year ago. I couldn’t agree more with Bill - our efforts (as an industry) to address anti-social online behavior are insufficient and not proportional to the damage caused by that behavior. Too many developers are willing to throw up their hands and say “it’s a hard problem” or “jerks will be jerks.”

First the news that Stormfront is shutting down, now the news that Mad Doc has been acquired by Rockstar. Soon Valve and Epic will be the only big independent developers left.

Some research indicating that people seek more game-like (or perhaps “curated”) experiences in the virtual worlds they frequent.

Danc writes a thoughtful theoretical piece on how to leverage your player community for tasks like localizing your online game. (It’s a long article, but worth reading!)

Another long article, but a nice read for those of you interested in community management.

I received such good feedback the last time I revealed part of my upcoming book, For Fun and Profit: How Games are Transforming the Business World, that I figured I’d try again. This time, I’ve selected a very small piece of a much longer chapter on how games can be used to train employees. I hope you like it.

Games and Training: Everest

One game-based approach to teaching teamwork skills is to focus on very specific problems that are usually hard to identify and correct. For example, one such problem is that teams often prove dumber than their individual members. This is caused by a phenomenon known as “process loss” — the opposite of the “wisdom of crowds.” Process loss happens when teams fail to share information, get trapped by various conflicting goals, lose themselves in unproductive argument, and fall into a pattern of groupthink. A game called Everest, which was designed by Harvard Business School and Forio Business Simulations, forces players to grapple with all of these issues and overcome them as a team.

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