Games At Work dot Biz

Episode 49 – Crowdsourcing & Crowdfunding

MichaelMartine — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 21:58:08 +0000

Episode 49, Crowdsourcing & Crowdfunding was recorded Friday the 14th of June 2013.

While Michael R is recovering or enjoying (or perhaps even both!) from his 6-shot espresso drinks, Michael M and Phaedra discuss adaptable games, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and much more in this episode of the podcast. Concepts such as gaming as a service and simulations as a service are explored, as Phaedra and Michael consider how micropayments, donations and volunteerism can speed the delivery of key functionality in games for the education and defense spaces while leveraging marketplaces such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Waze and Dragon Box surface as some key examples, alongside some tried and true games such as Fold.it, Civilization, Ingress and oh, so much more.

Selected show links
From fantasy to reality: The story of Vugar Huseynzade — http://espnfc.com/blog/_/name/bootroom/id/330?cc=5901
Football Manager — http://www.footballmanager.com
The Screen Savers — http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0240295/combined
Soda, Pop or Coke — http://web.ncsu.edu/abstract/science/you-say-tomato-i-say-soda-or-is-it-pop/
Civilization — http://civilization6.com
Railroad Tycoon — http://www.2kgames.com/railroads/railroads.html
Eterna — http://eterna.cmu.edu/web/
Fold.it — http://fold.it/portal/
Ingress — http://www.ingress.com
Waze — http://www.waze.com
Noah Falstein — http://www.linkedin.com/in/gamedesignexpert
Internet Response League — http://internet-response-league.com/
Crowdsourced searching for Jim Gray — http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-08/ff_jimgray?currentPage=1
Kickstarter — http://www.kickstarter.com
Indiegogo — http://www.indiegogo.com/
Dragon Box Algebra game — http://dragonboxapp.com
Microprose — http://microprose.com
Bean Traders — http://www.beantraderscoffee.com

We are just delighted to have had you dialed our way. You can find us on G+, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter and more. Please comment, friend, tweet and favorite us with topics you would like to hear more about!

A slight delay

MichaelRowe — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 11:19:38 +0000

Due to unforeseen events Episode 49 will be slightly delayed. Our hope is to post it by Tuesday late night, instead of our normal Sunday time. We apologize to our listeners.

Episode 48 – Live at the Bean

MichaelRowe — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 13:20:24 +0000

A miracle occurs and our three co-hosts (Phaedra, Michael M. and Michael R.) all end up at the same location, at the same time, on the same day to record a Live show at our favorite coffee shop, BeanTraders. We begin by looking at how storytelling has changed over the years, and wonder if games like Haunting Melissa are the future, or just an expensive look into the past. We look into how incentives can back fire and what kind of cool games you could play for improved boarding of airplanes, and end the show looking at the latest startup festival in Durham, NC. So sit back, brew yourself a nice cup of BeanTraders Coffee (yes they do ship their beans!) and enjoy Games At Work dot Biz!!

Photographic Evidence:

Live from the Bean!

The Michael’s

Links:
Haunting Melissa
JRR Tolkien – Biography
Thumb Wrestling
Lucha Libre
Rock’em Sock’em Robots
Paradoxo
Palinka
Cherry Coke
World of Coca-Cola
Bean Traders

Episode 47 – Reward Substitution

MichaelRowe — Sun, 02 Jun 2013 10:00:12 +0000

At full strength the team discusses how reward substitution can be used for improved results. We also go on a bit of a rant about reward substitution in negotiations, and how it may be killing all the creativity in the Serious Games community. But before we start are Rant, Michael shares his experience watching the live stream of graduation from the School of Science and Math. Why he shares, you may ask, because it’s all about Star Wars, Jedi’s and reward Substitution. In honor of that we present you with two great Star Wars related pictures:

(for you Darth Vadar Mail Box fans!)

And –
(for fencing fans).
Michael R. then mis-remembers how you make a light saber sound- what he actually remembered was the sound of the blaster.

Michael M. gets us back on track with how Reward Substitution was used in getting people to inject themselves with interferon in early liver disease research. After this we decided that we need to get a bit more healthy by eating some bugs. Which left a bad taste in our mouth, and we ended up going on a bit of rant. And both Michael R. and Phaedra try to get Michael M. to jump on the rant with us! So we all get out our buggy whips and start beating on the car manufactures! What do you think of some of the ridiculous constraints that people are putting on serious games development? Comment below!

Show Links:
Dan Ariely
Screen Shot
LiveStream from Graduation
Cicada based Sushi
The Lost Colony and Cannibalism
Eating Bugs on Fear Factor
Call back to I game alone
Google IO
Unity 3D
Cocos2D/A>
Fold It
Flip Teaching
Diablo III
Microsoft One Announcement
Star Craft 2 – Heart of the Swarm
Zombie Level – Black Ops
Wasted Time App
Dots
Star Command
Dead Ahead

Episode 46 – Cards Against Humanity

MichaelRowe — Sun, 26 May 2013 19:33:00 +0000

The Michael’s decide to take a break from Electronic games and end up talking about some cool, fun, and mind expanding card games; while our co-host, Phadera, is unfortunately unable to join us. We check out both a highly irreverent game (Cards Against Humanity) and a much more serious game of One Hat At A Time. We quickly go back and forth between old school (physical cards) to new school (with applications like “unstuck”).

So next time you have a problem take a look at a deck of cards and perhaps you will get a few new ideas. If not, how about a drink with our favorite new Raspberry Pi kickstarter – Bartnendo!

Show Links:
Cards Against Humanity
UnStuck and Site
One Hat At A Time
Creative Whack Pack
Bartendo – Kickstarter
The Robot that wants you to drink
Bender
Michael’s new Bag

Episode 45 – Googlely Fun

MichaelRowe — Sun, 19 May 2013 10:00:13 +0000

Michael, Michael, and Phaedra get back together for an exciting show all about the latest games related to Google Glass, and while we are at it we talk about the incredible Google IO Keynote and Larry Page’s triumphant return to the stage. Google comes out swinging at this year’s Google IO conference, talking about openness, games, education, and it’s all available on Google Island. If you’ve not seen it, watch it here:

After talking about 3D printing the other week, we discover even more craziness with a high capacity assault weapons now available from your nearest 3D Printer, and While we talk about all this Googlely fun, we also play a bit of GeoGuessing.

Show Links

Google Glass Games
Google Island
Google in the classroom
Cheap 3D Printer Kickstarter

Tweet

Episode 44 – Machine Games

MichaelRowe — Sun, 12 May 2013 12:00:23 +0000

Michael R talks about listening to last week’s show while on a plane, and he liked the “Mother fudging snakes, on the Mother fudging plane.” And all the cool things he’s been up to lately, including how machines can be social when they all start talking to each other. While you may have had M2M communications for 40 years now, we are living in interesting times as all the machines are starting to get more social and integrations are driving cool new solutions which will start changing human behavior. Imagine the game that many people play with Usage Based Insurance and trying to drive down their car insurance rates. Michael M, however will only entertain the idea of the social machines but is it really here?

We then look at Mind Meld, a cool new social way of pulling things together by listening to your chat and conversations to pull together a mind barf of all the related thoughts. This get’s us to talking about the drinking game – Everything is related. Which takes us to drinking games at work! Check out the keggorator story!

Finally, we get to talk about last week’s episode on snake reciprocity! We’d love to get your ideas about how reciprocity and incentives could be used to drive more collaboration across a development team. Drop us a tweet or a note.

Show Links:
Connexion 2013
Augmented Reality car repair
Peter Coffee
WarpStock 1999
Facebook making an offer for Waze
Mind Meld App
Beer drives civilization

Episode 43 – Snakes on a Game

MichaelMartine — Mon, 06 May 2013 21:37:53 +0000

Michael M and Phaedra discuss San Francisco Gamification Summit, the ModSim conference in Virginia and touch on gamification, loyalty, collaboration, wearable computing, ethics and much more.

Rajat Paharia’s keynote from the Gamification Summit sparks some interesting thoughts on Loyalty 3.0 — not just to products and services, but also to missions and organizations. Harley Davidson is often cited as an example of customer loyalty and the ecosystem/community that surrounds a product, service, or in the case of HD, the lifestyle. It will be interesting to see how games build loyalty.

Michael and Phadera riff on the idea for how gamification and business analytics could help by envisioning how a mobile device salesforce could be encouraged to take action based on what is selling when certain team members are on the floor and how to handle stock out situations in one location with available supply in another, driving a collaborative win for the company using big data and real time feedback.

The Simpsons: Tapped Out is used as the jump off point for this salesforce riff, given the April-May game within a game where players collect snakes to win virtual prizes and eggs, which have no value to the player collecting them, but have high value to friends of the player, who may ‘hatch’ those eggs to collect the snakes within them. By giving away eggs, a player may receive eggs from her friends to continue the gameplay. Consider how a serious game designer leverage this principle for business use, where an asset for one player has no value to that individual, but to another player, that asset does have value.

Simpsons Tapped Out: Lots of Eggs

Google’s “a Google a day” game is an intriguing game to make you a more adept searcher, or perhaps Google a more responsive search engine, or maybe something much, much more…

Looking forward to next week’s show where we will be back at full co-host power!

Selected show links

San Francisco Gamification Summit — http://gsummit.com/sf13/speakers/

Will Wright — http://www.stupidfunclub.com

Nolan Bushnell — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Bushnell

Rajat Paharia — http://www.bunchball.com/about/management

Rajat Paharia’s new book: Loyalty 3.0: How Big Data and Gamification are Revolutionizing Customer and Employee Engagement – http://www.amazon.com/Loyalty-3-0-Revolutionize-Engagement-Gamification/dp/0071813373

ModSim World 2013 — http://www.modsimworldconference.com

A Google A Day — http://agoogleaday.com/#game=started

Episode 42 – Physiotherapy Games

MichaelRowe — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 17:24:33 +0000

The Michael’s have special guests Marilyne Lopes and Alexis Biller on this week. Marilyne is a French Physiotherapist working in the United Arab Emirates, using games and technology to help children improve balance, recovery from injuries, and cerebral palsy. Alexis, a long time listener to the show and husband of Marilyne, also brings a history of technology to the show and provides us with a sanity check on many of the medical terms. Between the two of them, we also get a great lesson in Latin!

We discuss various technologies and how they are used in therapy and speculate on what the future may hold as more and more technology goes from being high end, custom developed solutions, to more off the shelf but significantly more engaging.

Show Links:
KUUR Rehabilitation – twitter
Wii Balance Board
Google Glass
Leap Motion
Flexible Sensors
Moves App
Garmin Swim
Self Quantification
Cool Tech from London 2012 Olympic Games
Blood Oxygen Levels
Jawbone Up
Kinesio Taping
Jane McGonigal

Audio Only Games – Thank you WideawakeWesley
The Pit
Papa Sangre
Blind Side

Episode 41 – The Paymeium Currency

MichaelRowe — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 17:48:59 +0000

The Michael’s are on together and get to talk about some incredible architecture, the long tail, and generational change before we jump in deep on some cool and fun games to help change the way you do things. Both Habit RPG and Chore Wars are great ways of leveraging your love of Dungeons & Dragons to help you game your way to new behaviors. We even talk a bit about how we can leverage this to improve our attendance for the show! We also include a great listener link on gamefication. We wrap it up with a bit of Nimble Quest: Go check out a video we’ve posted here and .

We are a including a ton of link references this week for your benefit.

Show Links
Sagrada Fam The Pillars of the Earth – by Ken Follett
Pompeii
Habit RPG
Chore Wars
Dungeons and Dragons
White Box Set and Reprint notification
Vile in a Vial
More Pixel People
Cialdini
Dr. Dolittle
Super Stickman Golf – iOS
Super Stickman Golf – Android
Midway Arcade – iOS
NCAA Leg Break – don’t watch if you are squeamish
Gauntlet Video
Nimble Quest

Listener Link:
Gameification by Deloitte