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Got Game
1980s-era Nintendo-thumbed teenagers are now adults moving into senior positions in the workforce. As they move up, a cultural rift is forming in the workforce between the old guard who've never held a controller, and those who grew up hunting for the Triforce. Got Game proposes how to bridge this gap.
Beck and Wade argue that a massive culture gap began in the '80s when video game systems like the NES suddenly appeared in tens of millions of households across North America. Games radically reshaped youth for a whole generation by creating a new leisure activity with a distinctive culture. Ever since, gaming has become deeply embedded in our society and in the lives of each cohort over the last two decades.
At its core, Got Game is a guide for senior managers stumped at how to manage their gamer employees. Its purpose is to teach them that they must treat video games as serious preparation for the workforce, and that gamers possess a unique set of skills necessary in the modern business world:
"Anyone who actually looks at the games selling and being played knows that the typical video game is not the blood-spattering, media-grabbing, parent stressing cartoon that makes the nightly news on a slow or tragic day. Instead, it's a massive problem solving exercise wrapped in the veneer of an exotic adventure. Or it's the detailed simulation of an entire civilization, or a pivotal battle that affected the course of world history. Or it's a serious opportunity to try coaching a sports team or setting military strategy. In short, even if their surface is violent, sexist, or simpleminded (which is not true nearly as often as non-gamers believe), games are incredibly complex computer programs that lead the brain to new combinations of cognitive tasks."
The book is divided into two parts. The first three chapters are a primer for non-gamers, outlining video game culture, dispelling myths, and generally building the case for treating games and gamers seriously. Chapters four through eight, though, are where I thought the most innovative thinking lies. Here the authors draw explicit parallels between the skills people hone to win video games, and those needed in our global, techno-centric workforce. These chapters also go the extra distance by instructing managers on how to restructure their style to harness the skills in their gamer employees.
As a casual gamer, I found these aspects of the book helpful. By outlining the instances where managers and executives from outside the game generation don't see things the way I do, and then translating into terms they can understand, it is possible for me to effectively bridge the culture gap. Building understanding and common language reduces tension, making work less stressful, more fulfilling (and ultimately more like a video game!)
Here are some of the top insights in the book for non-gaming managers:
Tap into the gamer instinct for heroism
Gamers "have a hero's appetite for a challenge that requires full attention. Meeting these needs, giving the potential heroes who work for you a challenge that will inspire extreme efforts - can unleash enormous commitment."
Don't let superficial badges of culture mislead you
"Remember the old fogies who thought men with long hair automatically couldn't be trusted? We boomers now have the chance to replicate the fogies' mistake, or to build on major assets that out less open-minded peers overlook."
Don't dismiss gamers' ability to focus and multitask
"Gamer employees will prefer to be surrounded by extraneous noise and attentional clutter. They might want to have two or three activities assigned to them at once so that when they tire of one, they can move to the next, and then come back to the first when they have something useful to add."
Manage your teams as group video games
"Structure team assignments like a game, providing clear high-level direction but also lots of room to explore. Tell your team, 'here are the boundaries; you can't go outside them, but inside try anything - open all the doors, run into the walls, find a way to succeed.'"
Beck and Wade support their points of view with a commissioned study involving 2,500 business people. Graphed results are presented throughout comparing how gamers and non-games view risk, teamwork, decision-making, and responses to authority. While I realize that providing statistical support of ideas is essential, I didn't find the graphs or conclusions very compelling.
What I do appreciate is that in publishing this book, Harvard Business School Press is sending signals to the business community that video games are an important part of our culture and that we ought to consider the serious impact gaming is having in offices throughout the country.
The scope of this book goes beyond the 'important books for managers' genre. Proactive employees could easily benefit from strategically giving a copy to a boss to kickoff a conversation on refining a working relationship. For the more adventurous gamer, I'd recommend absorbing the business insights and using them to manage upward and get ahead in the workplace.
This will not be the last book about gamers in the workplace, but it does a good job kicking off the genre. I extend thanks to Beck and Wade for bringing attention to this real phenomenon.
Reviewer Eli Singer lives in Toronto. Apart from technology consulting, he blogs at singer.to and sends biking tours to Europe. You can purchase Got Game from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Can someone give me a one sentance summery of the article? I'm in the middle of playing World of Warcraft while I should be debugging some filter engine code and cant be bothered to read it all.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
what's your frags per minute?
Speaking as somebody who has played a wide assortment of computer games since the days of the Atari 2600 and Vic20, I would just like to point out that this has got to be the dumbest goddamned book to have come out in the last ten years.
Do you want to know what's useful in the workforce? Communication skills.
Learn to make yourself clear, in both written and spoken interactions with others, and stop praying that your high score on Ms. Pac Man will someday look good on your resume, because it won't.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Not every single task that you can do in a workplace can be equated to finding the triforce and saving princess Zelda.
Otherwise, from the review, it seems like a very interesting book, especially for someone like me who grew up on videogames.
I think an analysis on what kinds of games people grew up with also needs to be made. For example, someone who started on an Apple II vs an Atari, or a IBM PC vs a NES. Same Generation, different kinds of people imo.
Computer games don't affect kids, I mean if Pac Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive music.
With credit to Marcus Brigstocke.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
for some reason my boss doesn't apprecient me fragging my co-workers
hack a day
Gamers problem solving strategy in the workplace: while (!success) { trySomething(); } Non Gamers: while(planMightFail) { thinkMore(); } finallyTryPlan();
You are one of those people who sees a tree and ignores the forest behind it.
mastering the ALT-TAB while keeping a consistent facial expression.
I was always under the assumption that businesses were "competitive" and they would understand the need for game playing and/or outmaneuvering your competition.
But the normal logic seems to be to avoid competition at all costs and the company momentum should be A + B = Profit! And when you ask "Well what happens if that doesn't work out?" you get the stock "Well, we'll all be out on the street, won't we?"
I see this in companies with very intelligent people as well... Now you're telling me it's because I'm a gamer and they're not? It's an appealing idea, but I'm not sure if it's that simple a reason... (To wit, I know several gamers who couldn't problem solve their way out of a paper bag in real life... But can tell you how to pull off the super Dragon Punch...
- Many of the challenges faced by the gamer generation have attainable solutions - which leaves us open to try any approach
- A gamer can become an expert in whatever game world they land in - which makes us more willing to learn a new concept, program, technology, and crack open a ton of black boxes to find that knowledge
In all it was a decent book, but I lost interest when I was drudging through the business-oriented "intro" chapters.-- In Soviet Russia, radio listens to YOU!
I am kind of concerned that at least from what i read in the review, this "advice" is just an unempirical opinion. I don't see much of citations about gamer's being motivated differently or doing better multitasking, etc. There are such things as social sciences, you can actually study these things in an organized and meaningful fashion. you know formulate a hypothesis, collect data, test hypothesis.. I would guess that some gamers actually are actually very good at single-tasking. The problem is making the job the exciting thing and not the game. (anyone besides me have a roommate who just did nothing but play starcraft for 3-4 straight days, skipping all classes...when he actually did somethign productive it was about the same method of operation.)
Somebody didn't make it past the Pretzel level! :)
Oh how my family criticized me, saying things like "you won't be able to put your Contra high score on a resume."
The day I dreamed of is getting closer...
Click here for a free picture of an iPod!
Games have had positive and negative effects. My generation, or at least a majority of it's members, has spent years being driven half-insane by puzzles and intellectual challenges both to reasoning and patience. There have always been such challenges, but nowhere near as often, as common, as widespread, or as twistedly intricate and lovingly built as what has existed since the early 80's.
On the positive side, from an early age we have been taught the value of patience, and the rewards of outright persistance. Anyone who's played many games has seen what happens when you give in to impatience and end up blowing anywhere from 5 to 60+ minutes of effort in one badly timed move. And without persistance, you couldn't beat many games in the first place - to achieve your goal, sometimes you have to bang away at it until it's done. You become very goal-oriented, having played games, and you also become competitive - not so much competitive in general, but competitive about doing your work faster, more intelligently, and more efficiently than anyone else around you.
On the negative side, we're quite a bit more reward-oriented than previous generations (when we accomplish something, we damned well want to see something come out of it). We do have a collective taint of what amounts to ADD, being able to focus tightly on short tasks like no generation before, but having trouble sticking to one course of action for the long haul. We're always looking for the shortcut, believing fully that it exists. And sometimes, even though it's often an asset in business, we can be a bit inhuman in our logic, dispassionately accepting losses, risks, and sacrifices when it furthers our goals.
Reminds me of a quote: "If Pacman had affected us as kids we'd be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive music."
Do not confuse "Freedom of Choice" with "Free Will".
I'm old and all, but I'm pretty sure I remember it as
U U D D L R L R B A Start
Whoa... Turns out I was right
My video game skills did pay for something! Gimme mod points, gimme mod points, gimme mod points!
"I'm sorry Mario, but your paycheck is in another castle!" Toad
Life is not for the lazy.
I can tell you one thing, it's a good thing the business world isn't a world of anonymity. I've played enough online games to know that the day that happens, the collective maturity of individuals will decrease. Competitive atmosphere = Good. Competitive atmosphere + Anonymimity = j00 R a l0s3r
Within the context of the World of Warcraft auction house and the /2 trade channel, I find myself learning the basic skills of supply and demand, negotiating a price on an item, marketing, etc. etc... I've actually never had this much practice negotiating prices in my whole life. I've found that the more data you have to back up your price point, the better... just like in real life (for you WoW'ers out there, look up LootLink and Auctioneer for some great in-game info) In fact, I'm getting pretty wrapped up in finding good deals (cheap buyouts) and doing turnaround sales. Which is strange, since I'm pretty much a geek and not a sales guy, but I'm actually doing OK at this. Lastly, I realized that I needed an angel investor to REALLY start earning the G's (just like in real life!), so I had 2 guildies lend me 50 gold each and that has seriously improved my profit margins, I will be paying them back soon...
This may sound funny but this all seems based on actual business principles
Not to freakin' dis, but anyone who put's a bloody "i" and a dash in TurboGrafx clearly didn't grow up with it. TurboGrafx-16 man! not to mention the other systems and the cd add on. noting that NEC made some of the first external cdrom drives for ATs at the time.
I'll challenge you to some Bonk's Revenge or Alien Crush any day.
Ok, I'll admit, I'm still trying to justify why I asked my parents for that instead of Genesis... given the price of about 2x an NES with 1.5x the performance...
I must stop before I start weeping openly in public.
It did have the best pinball games, though. Time cruise anyone? any one?
From this article, the book appears to be a really big stretch of some very basic ideas in behavioral psychology (re: goal theory, Locke). Goal theory basically says that people accept and work towards goals that meet their needs and that they agree with. Goals must be proximal (i.e. you get the reward at the end of the month, not during your evaluation next year) and salient (i.e. useful, wanted). Trying to make gamers feel like they are some special group of individuals (man, nobody understands me maaaaaaannnnnnn) with some nonsensical special powers in the workplace is laughable. As someone else said: where is the data? There are plenty of kids who have not played videogames for 10,000 hours + during their lives and a simple quasi-experiment could be designed to examine this hypothesis. My guess is the author is some blowhard gasbag trying to stop feeling guilty about wasting his youth in his friend's basement playing Dragon Quest.
Lets see the suggestions:
>Tap into the gamer instinct for heroism
Gamers "have a hero's appetite for a challenge that requires full attention. Meeting these needs, giving the potential heroes who work for you a challenge that will inspire extreme efforts - can unleash enormous commitment."
You mean give people non-repetetive, interesting work? God knows only gamers can appreciate that!
Don't let superficial badges of culture mislead you
>"Remember the old fogies who thought men with long hair automatically couldn't be trusted? We boomers now have the chance to replicate the fogies' mistake, or to build on major assets that out less open-minded peers overlook."
Um...this sounds like a cultural shift, not something that gamers have a corner on the market. It's like saying "women in the workplace? Only gamers can appreciate that because of their exposure to female heroes."
>Don't dismiss gamers' ability to focus and multitask
"Gamer employees will prefer to be surrounded by extraneous noise and attentional clutter. They might want to have two or three activities assigned to them at once so that when they tire of one, they can move to the next, and then come back to the first when they have something useful to add."
I don't have much to say about this one, other than that it sounds like total bullshit, and there is no telling about what the QUALITY of a product made by a multitasking, distracted person might be like. I'm not sure why this is gamer specific...kids who grew up with annoying siblings always fighting and blasting music may have the same abilities to work in "busy" environments...
Manage your teams as group video games
"Structure team assignments like a game, providing clear high-level direction but also lots of room to explore. Tell your team, 'here are the boundaries; you can't go outside them, but inside try anything - open all the doors, run into the walls, find a way to succeed.'"
Thank you for reinventing goal theory, which has been shown to apply to that special group of folks we call humans.
Again, a metaphor taken way to far in order to provide gamers an excuse to complain about how lame their jobs are.