Slashdot Mirror
The Matrix For Businesses
An anonymous reader writes "The idea of using virtual reality and gaming technologies to create training exercises and business simulations has been around for years. But recent advances in computer graphics, interfaces, and massively multiplayer online (MMO) games have made it commercially viable to pursue simulations in the business world. Novel, a venture-backed startup company, is about to launch a new MMO role-playing game, called Empire & State, with an unusual goal: to use the technology and the lessons it learns from the game to create simulations for big companies that want to improve their human resources and hiring efficiencies. Imagine assessing employees' leadership and teamwork skills by jacking them into a virtual, multiplayer business scenario. That's the goal, but Novel will face challenges of all sorts — business, social, and technical — in its efforts to sell MMO technologies to the corporate world."
Today's Dilbert, quite on-topic!
THAT'S MINUS 50 DKP!!!!
Trust me, if Leadership in MMO's is going to translate into management positions, just kill me now.
That sounds great until somebody learns to game the game. Then what practical use is it to the real world?
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
see subject. I think this has already been here before, with no real success.
Imagine assessing employees' leadership and teamwork skills by jacking them into a virtual, multiplayer business scenario.
What would this offer above hiring them and seeing how they work out? Seems like a needless layer of rube goldberg complexity that doesn't make sense in the end. I guess this IS a matrix for business.
I can see it now....someone says something dumb, Frank from Accounting comes over to their side of the conference table, jumps up on it and proceeds to tea bag them.
Yeah, MMO-like corporate worlds could be fantastic.
Sent from your iPad.
I remember hearing about business doing something like this with Second Life. It's an interesting concept, one that makes a lot of sense when you think about it.
Heh, I can see the job posting now: "Need experienced creator of Second Life content do design our board meeting house. Red Light District experience a plus."
Living With a Nerd
". . . but you'll need real world skills to be successful."
*sigh*
But I play video games because I DON'T have real world skills.
Hey, I was only kidding. You don't have to MOD me "Troll" . . . again . . . .
It took me awhile of poking around the site to finally notice that this is "Novel", not "Novell". Reading carefully is important :)
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
FTFA: Players start out as citizens of an empire, and can collaborate and compete with other players to become leaders of young companies or presidents of countries. Depending on their interests, they can also become criminal overlords, military strategists, bounty hunters, or business tycoons. The game itself will be free, but Novel will charge money for transactions within the game, like when players want to purchase clothing, weapons, or housing. “Our innovation is that players have never been given the ability to explore real business practices and politics before,” Olson says. “We’ve never had the ability to do anything but kill stuff before [in MMOs].” ...Doesn't sound like something I would want my employees doing instead of, you know, being productive...
I don't think this looks very fun to play, but I think it would be very fun to work on and research with. I've never tried writing games for business.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
The summary sucks. You guys have no idea - it doesn't do it justice. I've RTFA. And to be honest, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
... event though there are a lot of human elements in it I doubt it'll have real-world value. Game != Real-life, in terms of how people interact. Ask people who play FFA in real-time strategy.
Any free-to-play game that requires purchasing items to make you better shouldn't exist. Your rank in a game shouldn't depend on how much money you spend. I don't think games like this stand a chance.
Do you get rejected for hitting the bosses in this MMO?
Check out my blog!
Virtual Universities and whatnot.
Imagine assessing employees' leadership and teamwork skills by jacking them into a virtual, multiplayer business scenario.
I could see this being used for new hires, where the typical interview process doesn't bring out their true capabilities. For already hired employees, I could see it being used as an indicator for future performance. Standard assessment methods could still be used effectively for present performance. So the virtual test might be useful as a way of preparing employees for dealing with future adverse business conditions, hostile work situations, different and/or increased responsibilities, or just normal things like how to react to rumors at the water cooler. :^)
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Leading virtual world provider Linden Labs just laid off 30% of their employees, all of whom were working on a similar concept. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/09/linden_labs_lays_off_30_per_cent_of_staff/
Become number 1 on ur server! go to EmpireAndStateHax.dum for free hax! Outscore your boss, become the new manager!
Why is this thus? What is the reason for this thusness?
they can also become criminal overlords, military strategists, bounty hunters, or business tycoons.
I fail to see how the last position on that list differs from the first....
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
actually as a business you can spin up a SecondLife type Server with a minimum of effort
you will need
1 a web server with MYSQL support
2 a copy of OpenSim
3 a few graphics types to create content
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
It's had some serious setbacks so far. Computers - with their inherent tendency to accurate process information - seem to have difficulty processing the normal levels of cronyism, petty gossip, office politics, nepotism. and "yes-man" traits required to to advance within normal corporate power structures. It's also been a major challenge to properly implement the Peter Principle. We're using a sort of inverted genetic algorithm in which the worst possible candidate is chosen to fill a vacant position. It's promising, but it seems to result in competent upper management too often to be accurate in the real world.
Fortunately, the Bullshit Buzzword component is complete; we outsourced that to this gentleman. He's got an excellent grasp of modern business communications, and beta testers were unable to distinguish his algorithm-generated press releases from actual real-world examples.
Neo: If you're fired in the Matrix, are you unemployed here?
Morpheus: The body cannot receive a paycheck without the mind. Well, except government jobs, but you get my point.
Your courageous and selfless spelling corrections have made me a better person.
People play MMOs to tackle non-real-world problems where X hours of hard work according to precise set of rules R gives you precisely defined outcome O, with loot from [L1, L2, L3, ...]. They play precisely to escape from the fact the same effort in the real world gets you one from [nada, less than nada, peanuts, laughed at].
There is space for the use of MMOs to train people and it's not new, but most of the time it's set up by people who think that gamers need to be patronised.
"Got Game" is an interesting read around this subject too.
hahahhahhaha
Using simulated gaming to solve REAL problems in the work environment, what a fucking CHEAP WAY of not hiring real humans.
And NO, being a GUILD leader in WOW does not make you a good CEO/Project Manager/whatever the fuck you want to call it, it's a FUCKING GAME
"... to create simulations for big companies that want to improve their human resources and hiring efficiencies."
So it's some kind of First Person Shooter?
This one made me laugh.
“Our innovation is that players have never been given the ability to explore real business practices and politics before,”
It's called Real Life. Maybe the reason this has never been done before in an MMO is because people Do Not Want to 'explore business practices and politics'. I know I sure as hell don't want that. I just want to kill things, to get away from life's annoyances.
“Our innovation is that players have never been given the ability to explore real business practices and politics before,” Olson says. “We’ve never had the ability to do anything but kill stuff before [in MMOs].”
Really? Because that sounds EXACTLY like every other MMO that tries to revolve around business and practices.
Empire & State even has a military element!
*sigh* People who think they are the first ones to do something need to do their research.
Consciences impede the rate of wealth harvesting in some sectors of the American economy; games requiring cooperation which also reward betrayal could provide quite useful information for, say, someone contemplating the creation of a hedge fund or the next variation of the synthetic mortgage-backed financial instruments scam.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
You know, I was just saying yesterday that I'm so glad we don't get inundated anymore with news articles that present Second Life as if it's some great business tool, and that it's somehow "Important". That meme passed, and now it's all about how Twitter is somehow "Important".
This seems like regression; been there, done that.
Learning to game the game is the essence of late stage capitalism.
"The new game is called Empire & State, and it will be in alpha release by the fourth quarter of this year,"
I would hardly call this "about to launch".
Will I be able to grief my boss?
EGOTIST, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Wonder if they will have Mac/Linux versions?
I will not be forced to install Windows just to play a game.
I can't find the article (believe it was here on slashdot) but the reason for that is simply that Linden Lab stopped paying everyone to say it was important so they stopped saying it.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
EVE Online already has an elaborate player-driven economy, corporations, an elected council, and so on. Where's the value added in Empire & State?
"I visited their conference room where geologists, engineers, and executives gather to make decisions about where to drill. Suffice to say, it involves looking at scarily accurate maps and computer-generated images of cross sections of the earth’s crust on a 10-foot-high screen the width of the room. And it’s all in 3-D."
http://article.nationalreview.com/363733/drilling-in-the-offshore/mark-hemingway
It is here already. But it is such a strategic advantage, such an ace in the hole, nobody is going to give away the secrets. Why blab? Why invite espionage? Why show your competitor any of your cards, or that you even have cards or are playing the game at all.
BUSINESS IS WAR continued by other means.
Any of the Fortune 10 have their own equivalents of an Area 51.
I wonder what the stock dudes, hand picked and groomed world class geniuses, with unlimited cash, unlimited data feeds coming over unlimited bandwidth and access to mainframes, or any other hardware they want, are doing right now? And have been doing for the last 50 years? And no Dilbert Management.
You think they are using the same 10 year old, dumbed, down stuff, we are using?
Meditate on that this evening in your quite place.
Mr. Sony and Mr. Intel probably BUILD them custom hardware, that they discuss over golf.
I have already said too much.
Any word on what technology this is built on? IMHO there's no reason not to use a platform like OpenCobalt in favour of reinventing the wheel. Especially in a business environment, where bleeding-edge graphics power isn't the point...
Hi everyone, my name is David and I'm the lead engineer at Novel Interactive. I would like to hopefully clear up some of the confusion related to the article posted here, which was recently published in Xconomy. Although technically similar, Empire & State and the business simulations are two entirely different products. While Empire & State is an MMORPG, you can think of our business simulations as being an MMO hr solution. These enterprise hr solutions are rooted in our MMO technology, but are tailored specifically towards helping to solve HR problems! For those of you who are interested in Empire & State, I encourage you to sign up for our alpha test http://www.empireandstate.com/pages/signup.
This seems pretty much exactly like an old parody video that was out a while back...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msmRwlg23Qc
What about people that don't want to become leaders? That's the problem with having "managing people" as a separate profession and putting them in positions of power. They set up the whole business structure around a few assumptions:
MBAs belong at the top of the food chain.
Everybody's goal is to become a manager.
If you aren't a manager, or don't at least aspire to being a manager (the most important job in the world, of course), you're worthless.
Don't these people realize that somebody somewhere has to do actual work for a company to survive? It can't be managers all the way down. Fucking around in powerpoint all day is all well and good, but somebody has to get off their ass and design the product, somebody needs to make it, and somebody needs to market it.
The *real* job of managers is to shield their people from all the political bullshit being generated by people higher in the organization, provide the things their team needs to be successful, and provide direction when the team isn't sure where to go next. Very important, but totally pointless without the people that actually do the fucking work.
If your goal isn't to become some sort of leader, this game they're producing is totally pointless, and just perpetuates the myth that the leader is the most important person in an organization, when they're really the least important.
The criminal overlord can execute somebody directly. The business tycoon has a 50 person minimum.
Don't know if it's been said already, but I quite like rdiff-backup. It keeps the most recent version of your data readily accessible, and then it keeps diffs between the most recent and a bunch of older versions, as far back as you like. It doesn't, however, keep an exact copy of your disk - just the files on it. But then again, with Linux, you just put those files back, get grub of lilo installed and you're up and running again in no time. So I think this is pretty much the best backup solution out there.
Imagine assessing employees' leadership and teamwork skills by jacking them into a virtual, multiplayer business scenario.
Sounds like the Kobayashi Maru scenario to me, just without any of the fun.
This seems to be following a trend where people think that adding "a game" to something mundane (usually related to soul-destroying work) can make things better. The recent example was Jesse Schell's talk at the 2010 DICE conference. There's also been a lot of people who have used the appeal of MMOs being able to gather a lot of people into one area to use these worlds as beds for research. There have been a lot of academic papers trying to glean economic insight based on the activity of players in different MMOs.
I think both these approaches forget that games and reality aren't the same. As a game designer, I would certainly argue that games can influence the world around us, but adding experience points doesn't make brushing my teeth more fun. Likewise, seeing how someone spends virtual currency that exists in endless supplies on an unending horde of enemies to slaughter doesn't necessarily give insight into how people would behave when dealing with "real" currency.
I expect that the "business" aspect to this game is something that the company founders used to stand out from the crowd of people who want to make MMOs. Given how the "business" aspects of Second Life have gone, and how much work making a game takes, I'd expect that the company is going to have a hard enough time focusing on making and maintaining the game.
Still, it's nice to see someone trying some that isn't just an underfunded WoW-clone for a change. ;)
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog
Your courageous and selfless spelling corrections have made me a better personhttp://www.elinkslondon.com/