my.bicycle

"The fundamental design of the game became 'Here's a stop sign in your gameplay, you can stop now and come back in a day, or you can keep on playing and it will cost you three bucks, or a buck, or ten bucks, or whatever it is," he said. "Not just because it seems unsavoury and I think people will burn out on it, but once you go down that road and start designing the game mechanics around that you can't help but design the whole game around that," he added. "I mean, I could be wrong about that, and I hope I am, because that would be a lame future for games." Stewart Butterfield, CEO, Tiny Speck Glitch dev warns against social "scorched earth policy"

"Process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity. When I was CTO of a web design firm, I noticed in staff meetings that we only ever talked about process when we were avoiding talking about people. "We need a process to ensure that the client does not get half-finished design sketches" is code for "Greg fucked up." The problem, of course, is that much of this process nevertheless gets put in place, meaning that an organization slowly forms around avoiding the dumbest behaviors of its mediocre employees, resulting in layers of gunk that keep its best employees from doing interesting work, because they too have to sign The Form Designed to Keep You From Doing The Stupid Thing That One Guy Did Three Years Ago." - Clay Shirky

Sure, there are tons of young people out there who want to work in gaming, but trotting that argument out whenever people complain about working conditions is not just cynical and nasty - it also shows a pretty tenuous grip on reality. Yes, you could continually burn out your staff and replace them with fresh, naive graduates. Yes, in the process you'd conveniently replace people asking for higher wages with people happy to work for a pittance. Unfortunately, you'd also be replacing people who know what the hell they're doing and have the experience and understanding to turn out high quality work in a way that fits into the development processes around them, with people who have to be trained up from scratch - and who's going to do that, if everyone worth their salt is already burned out and gone off to work in an industry that doesn't treat them like pack mules? GamesIndustry.biz

" Gamification is also being used in corporate contexts , where employees can earn points for dealing with boring tasks such as updating documentation. Gartner even claims that more than 50 per cent of organisations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes by 2015. Perhaps I’m old fashioned, but I thought that doing your job actually involved doing your job, and there was no requirement for it to be fun." In other words, "Humbug!" I recall an article predating the use of the term "gamification," and predating 10 years I've lived in Japan, where a research group was tasked with improving a bank's new employee training program. The consultancy used games to educate the new employees. It produced some astonishing results, with greatly improved knowledge retention, greater sense of job satisfaction, and improved communication across the participants. When the results were shown to the executive board which had paid for the study, de...