Published 9 September 2024

Co-hosts Michael and Michael start things off by reflecting on last week’s episode with a couple of articles related to last week’s episode on music streaming royalties.   

Next up, is a listener link on MiniMax, a new text to video GenAI capability, which sparks (✨) a conversation on individualized customized entertainment.  After touching on the Brave browser, the co-hosts marvel at a mycelia powered robot – another listener link.  Michael and Michael are reminded of how trees communicate with one another – check out the links below for Pando and the book Michael M couldn’t remember at the time, The Overstory by Richard Powers.

Then, some speculation on the upcoming Apple Event next week – Ready to Glow.  Michael R points out that the Apple Watch announcement was 10 years ago, which is hard to believe.

Rounding out this episode is the announcement between Nike and LEGO which is fun to speculate on what this partnership may bring, and an MQTT / NodeRed enabled garage door home automation solution that does not require sharing data to any cloud.

What other biohybrid robots have you heard of?  Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz@botsin.space (our home for now) and let us know! 

These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot.  All rights reserved.  That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Selected Links

Streaming Heist

New York Times article: The Bands and the Fans Were Fake. The $10 Million Was Real.

Ars Technica article: FBI busts musician’s elaborate AI-powered $10M streaming-royalty heist

Games at Work e479: Listen Up, Outlaws!

ABA Journal post: Prominent 1970s musicians sue music companies for copyright infringement

AI

Tom’s Guide article: Forget Sora — MiniMax is a new realistic AI video generator and it’s seriously impressive

Games at Work e478: Doomed, I Say!

Brave

Futurism article: Scientists Grew a Mushroom Into This Robot to Act As Its Brain

Cornell Chronicle Article: Biohybrid robots controlled by electrical impulses — in mushrooms

Wikipedia article: Pando (tree)

Smithsonian Magazine article: Do Trees Talk to Each Other?

The Overstory by Richard Powers

Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard

Apple

Macworld article: Ready to Glow! iPhone, Apple Watch, and everything else to expect at Apple’s event

Sixcolors post: Apple’s September event: The delight will be in the details

Apple Events

Random Thoughts blog post: WWDC 2024 Impressions and insights

Miscellany

Nike press release: Nike and the LEGO Group Unite to Elevate the Power of Sport and Creative Play

LEGO Group press release: The LEGO Group and NIKE, Inc. unite to elevate the power of creative play and sport

acquired.fm season 13, episode 1: Nike

Ars Technica article: I added a ratgdo to my garage door, and I don’t know why I waited so long

Ratgdo

Photo by Samuele Errico Piccarini on Unsplash

Published 11 September 2023

This week, Michael R and Andy hold the fort while Michael M is on secret missions! The show kicks off with regulation around tech in the UK and in the EU. Andy is still able to use of iMessage and WhatsApp for a little while longer after the UK Government backs down from breaking end-to-end encryption – but for how long?

Moving on to the car industry. BMW has been in the news again, choosing not to require consumers to subscribe in order to use hardware capabilities (like, heated seats). More worryingly, the Mozilla Foundation has published an extensive review into the privacy policies of a huge number of car manufacturers, and the results are… not good…

There’s a brief chat about American sports players and wearables, Rockstar Games selling pirated / cracked copies of their own games via Steam, and a look at 3D tech from Magic Leap and Lenovo.

We round out the show with a couple of fun links about using a Gameboy Camera over USB-C with iPadOS 17, and what our digital assistants get up to in the break room at the office when we’re not asking them questions.

Let us know what you think in the comments, or via Mastodon @gamesatwork_biz@botsin.space – and join us for more, next time!

Selected Article Links

Bad regulations

Andy’s safe – For now – https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/6/23861030/imessage-bing-european-union-commission-digital-markets-act-dma and https://www.wired.co.uk/article/britain-admits-defeat-in-online-safety-bill-encryption

Auto roundup

BMW – https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/7/23863258/bmw-cancel-heated-seat-subscription-microtransaction

BWW and Amazon –  https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/5/23859450/bmw-aws-cloud-autonomous-driving-data 

BMW EV Concept – https://mashable.com/article/bmw-neue-klasse-electric-concept-car

Cars suck at privacy – https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/its-official-cars-are-the-worst-product-category-we-have-ever-reviewed-for-privacy/

Gadgets in sport

FSU Apple Watch –https://9to5mac.com/2023/09/06/apple-watch-lsu-fsu-game/

Piracy and video game preservation

Rockstar and DRM – https://www.dsogaming.com/news/rockstar-just-proved-how-important-piracy-is-for-game-preservation/

3D stuff

Magic Leap end of life – https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/01/magic-leaps-original-headset-will-stop-working-at-the-end-of-2024/ 

Lenovo 27 inch 3D monitor – https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/lenovo-adds-glasses-free-3d-to-a-27-inch-monitor-for-2999/ 

Fun

Gameboy Cameras and FaceTime! https://9to5mac.com/2023/09/07/ipados-17-game-boy-camera-for-facetime-calls/

Behind the scenes – AI Assistant server break room (watch to the end!) – https://sfba.social/@jonathankoren/110991484729591248 

I was listening to a security podcast recently and they discussed the idea that we’ve all become overwhelmed with our own security requirements.  Many people have just given up on trying to stay up to date on their security and privacy settings.  When was the last time you have checked your Facebook security and privacy settings. Companies, like Facebook, assert the right to change their settings and defaults at any time, and as such just keeping up with those changes could be a full time job. 

By default, email is inherently an insecure protocol on the internet.   In order to route email between end points the meta data is not corrected.  So you already give up privacy on who you are sending email to.  Most email users will not change their settings to actually encrypt their email content.  

Over the years, I have used PGP encryption in my emails.  PGP is an example of public key encryption, which will allow you to encrypt the email content and ensure the receiver that the email has not been changed in transit, as well as ensure that it actually came from you.  However, for some reason, every time I upgrade my operating system my PGP tool fails, as they  must be hooked into the OS land thereby lag in compatibility. This is an unacceptable outcome for the average consumer.

I believe we need to change the fundemantal architecture for email to make encryption, security and privacy the default setting.  It may take another 10 years or more to migrate the web to this architecture, as we have the problem with defaults – most people don’t change them.  What do you think?

When we heard that she was moving into the world bots as a product manager for growbot, we just had to check it out.  Growbot monitors slack channels that you invite it to and captures metrics about employee performance.  As drones in the corporate world, our three co-hosts all have to deal with the periodic rankings and appraisals, and I for one am really bad at keeping track of all the positive things people tell me about work I am doing.   Imagine if Growbot could do that for me?

Of course, systems like this do have a challenge, people can game the system.  I tested this when I sent a “kudos” message as a repsonse to “kudos” I had received.  And growbot was smart enough to see what I was doing.

This was a fun test, and I loved the emoji that they are using for NO!

The other thought I had while playing with Growbot over the last few weeks is all about Flair.  If you’ve seen the movie “Office Space”, Jennifer Aniston’s character works at a theme restaurant where the servers are required to have buttons on their vests.  The buttons are considered “flair”.  She get’s a dressing down for not having enough flair on her vest.  I worry that if there is large corporate adoption of bots like growbot, we will end up with competitive situations where managers give you a dressing down for not having enough “kudos” this week.

In the mean time, I am enjoying playing with growbot on our podcast slack.  And I am sure that as they enhance the bot it will be more fun to figure out what makes a positive comment and what makes a negative.

What bots are you playing with lately?

A tweet from earlier this week resonated with me — and a few others. Holger Müller ( @holgermu ) shared the following post: “Best line on #DisruptTV so far – @mikeettling – Waiting for PokemonGo app for HR – catch talent or a leader. ;-)”

Such an HR app would not just be focused solely on catching, it would include engaging and retaining as well. Novel ways of catching the attention of prospective employees, whether through puzzles, code breaking or alternate reality games have worked well, and augmented reality lends itself well as a technology to do the same. What would employee engagement and retention look like through the use of augmented reality? How could augmented reality be used for aligning strategy to employee action? What if there was a new product line that required a different sales approach… Could this HR app be used to identify ideas for how to attract the right kinds of people who are most aligned to the offering and sales approach?

Much to think about… What are your ideas?

Stay alert at all times and be aware of your surroundings!  Happy hunting.

Snow Dragon Say’s “No show this week!”

We hope to be back up to full strength soon! So in the mean time why not drop us a comment or tweet and tell us what are you playing.

with the new AppleTV released on Friday, one of the most exciting games I was looking forward to playing was multiplayer Crossy Road, partially because of my memory of playing competitive Mario Brothers on the Apple ][ and partially because my kids just love playing the game and unlocking new characters.  It was with great anticipation for my kids to get the AppleTV set up — which was very easy to do with the iPhone, as was the installation of the app from the AppleTV store.  What proved to be more challenging was getting the iOS device to be recognized by the AppleTV for the second player to control their Crossy Road character.  Looking on the web for help, there were some good articles, such as the one from iMore, however there was one important tip that the Crossy Road app itself pointed out, but in our zeal to play, we had ignored.

in order for the AppleTV to recognize the iOS device, they both need to be on the same WiFi network.  in our home setup, I have the AppleTV hardwired with an ethernet connection to the router so as to help with bringing down movies in the absolute fastest possible way, and because the AppleTV was smart enough to recognize the ethernet wire, it did not enable a wireless connection.  Then, once we had rebooted the AppleTV on WiFi, restarted Crossy Road and selected two player, the iOS device was recognized, and as they say, hilarity ensued.  the kids proceeded to play, pushing one another’s characters into oncoming trucks and the water, giggling and laughing.

My schedule has been impacted by a bunch of customer visits and conferences lately, one of those conferences was RSA in San Fransisco.  RSA is one of the largest security conferences each year, and it was completely overwhelming.  You can go to my other blog for my daily quick reports on the conference over at Triangle App Show. There were two items at that conference that I think would have made great discussion topics on this podcast,  however, I will blog about them instead.

Bugcrowd and Cyber Patriot:

Bugcrowd – is a crowd sourcing platform which specializes in security testing of public applications.  It uses many of the traditional gamificafion techniques of leaderboards, non-traditional currencies (Kudos), and adds in real bug bounties for cash.  Companies will hire bugcrowd to get a group of testers who are unleashed on a site or app, and have to report bugs that they find.  While talking to the team at bugcrowd one of the original founders at topcoder came up and asked how they vet their participants.  This was a big issue for TopCoder when they looked at offering a similar service, and due to liability they decided not to offer it.  How do you stop a would be black hat from using the service to uncover bugs and not report them, only to then sell them on the gray market.  To me this was the part where bugcrowd didn’t understand the dynamics of the game.  Their basic premise is they only open up the call for participants on public sites or apps, so a real black hat wouldn’t join the game and just do their hacking independently.  I am not sure that this is true, since the black hat can see what exploits others are finding and sell them as short lived zero days.  I have been reading the book Future Crimes by Marc Goodman, and the value of zero days on social sites, even short lived, could easily be worth more on the gray market than the entire bounty of the bugcrowd game.  Setting up the right game mechanics could solve this, but could reduce the incentive for participants to build on the work of others.

Cyber Patriot –
The Cyber Patriot program is a aimed at grade school kids to teach them about ethical hacking, security and privacy on the internet. At the RSA conference there was an area with an entire focus on cyber safety for kids. This area included many interesting companies (more on them over at my other blog – Triangle App Show. At the time of the show, the Cyber Patriot program had two competitions, one for Middle-school kids and one for High School kids. The structure of the contest allowed for state and regional competitions all leading to a national competition where the best of the best got a free trip for the team and their instructor. The national competition allows for students to compete head to head on identifying and solving a cyber security challenge. What I found interesting talking to the individual at the booth, was that they Cyber Patriot program recognized that waiting for Middle School was too late. As such they were about to launch in a few weeks (and they have by now) a program for younger kids – all the way down to Kindergarten. The younger children will get a much more “mario type” gaming mechanic as a way to help them learn and understand cyber safety and cyber security. I find this a great way of teaching kids the implications of our online lives.
A quick parallel to the last thought, as we’ve had more and more breaches of customer information in the news, healthcare systems, store credit cards, social networks, etc. the issue of identity theft is becoming more critical. Not just the identity of an adult, but that of our children. If a cyber criminal can get an identity tied to a young child, they can leverage that for 10+ years of fraud, ultimately ruining the future reputation of your children. Think about how you are protecting your children from this identity theft.

As we move forward with the podcast, I am sure we will be opening the aperture and extending our topics beyond just the gamification discussion. Having said that, please drop us a note if you have any ideas of what you’d like to hear more of. Thanks for all your support – and keep Playing Games!! AT WORK!

While there are a ton of good tech news podcasts and games podcasts, we are thinking that our love for general tech and games, could be included in this podcast, without requiring a tie to Gamification. What do you think?

Are there other topics you’d like us to expand too? We’d value and appretiate your feedback soon so we can get ready for next year. Happy Holiday! And Merry New Year!

Your Co-Host

We look forward, to your tweets, emails and comments on the site, to come back charged with more great shows!

In the mean time, while you are enjoying feasts with families, check out this app that co-founder Michael Martine found: Dungeon Runner: Fitness Quest

Let us know what you think, and what would make Games At Work dot Biz more valuable to you. Thank you for all your support to date.

• Simpson’s Tapped Out
• Real Racing 3
• Clumsy Ninja
• Threes
• Tiny Tycoon
• Dungeon Keeper
• World of Warcraft

Each of these games takes approximately 10-15 minutes out of my day, and as such can be a bit of a time sink. As such, I’ve decided to start cutting back. I have way too many things going on and can’t give-up that much time each day. On top of that I have to balance what the benefit I get from the game, verses the amount of time that it takes each day. So let’s take a look at which games are going to make the cut to keep consuming my days.

Simpsons Tapped Out – I really enjoy the show, and have been watching it since it first came out. The developers of the game have done a really good job of updating content and tying it back to the TV show. I find that the social aspects of connect to other friends’ Springfields to be cool. Everyone builds them with a different aesthetic in mind, or just to hit certain achievements. And while some of the content can only be achieved thru in app purchases, there is enough content that can be achieved without in app purchases. I’ve been playing this for a few years now.

Real Racing 3 – My day job includes working with the automotive industry and create connected vehicle platforms. The physics and the graphics on the iPad are incredible, and the choice of cars and tracks continues to open up while you play. Each race can take between 30 seconds (drag racing) and 8 minutes (long tracks). You can race in real time with a pickup race with random match ups, or virtually race with others, via time comparisons. There is a mechanism to upgrade your cars, and buy new cars, based on your winnings. Started playing this one over the Christmas holidays.

Clumsy Ninja – Leveling up a clumsy ninja requires that you use various devices to send him bouncing around, deflecting items, punching things, and jumping from great heights. The designers have used the cuteness factor along with great physics to make a very compelling experience. The grind is slow, and repetitive. You can fast past some of the grind by buying gems. I’ve been playing this one since the Christmas holidays.

Threes – Math and puzzles with a competitive bent, what could possibly be better than this? After hearing about this one, and seeing that Michael M. has been playing this one for a few weeks, I had to pick it up. Each game requires that match up multiples of three, and increase the numbers. However, you end up moving large parts of the board at a time, and when you can’t add up new multiples of three the games is over. A great feature is this games is a purchase game with NO in app purchases.

Tiny Tycoon – We’ve talked about this one for some time on the show. You basically use FourSquare information to buy properties, upgrade them, hire people to work at your locations, and then level up your own skill by doing various jobs at the locations. The game also requires you to use bucks to buy more properties or get more supplies. You can earn bucks over time, or use in app purchases to get more. I’ve been playing this game for a while.

Dungeon Keeper – A great PC game from the 90’s reimagined for the iPad. You get to play an evil builder of Dungeons and you get to build up various rooms, use your minions to build things, train up various evil creatures, raid other dungeons, and protect your own from invasion from others. This game has great sentimental value. You can speed up the game thru purchase of Gems, but you need to use gems for a lot of other activities. I’ve been playing this game for a month or so.

World of Warcraft – The mother of all good MMOs, I can’t believe it’s been around for 10 years. Blizzard keeps adding expansions, adding new races, more end game raids, and continuing the model of community for Guilds. Blizzard has recently made the game both a monthly purchase, and adding a store for in app purchases. I’ve been playing this game since 2005.

So, how many am I going to give up? I recently deleted Tiny Tycoon and Dungeon Keeper, and will probably delete Clumsy Ninja. The constant need push to get you to use in app purchases is a major distraction to any value or fun I might get from these games. I’ve also given up on the various Angry Birds games and Plants vs. Zombies. What are the games you are playing? Are you going to give up any of them and why?

In the meantime, there is one topic that we’ve been very interested here over at Games At Work, and that deals with location-based computing, coupled with games. The intersection of iBeacons (and other low energy Bluetooth) and gaming has been very promising for some time, and MacRumors posted an interesting story on the game Tiny Tycoons.

Tiny Tycoons is a cross between Foursquare, Monopoly City Streets and Ingress, where you can travel the world, both physically and virtually, to buy and trade properties. I’ve downloaded the game and will be giving it a whirl, and will look forward to sharing my insights on how this could be adapted for business purposes. I’m going to be the mayor, um, owner of a few new properties shortly!

Thank You

Oh yeah, and life is getting in the way a lot lately. We’ll be back shortly!

We’ll be back soon!!

Show Links:
CDC Games for Health Game Jam
Saudi Arabia Female Gaming Convention
Nike
Apple’s M7 Chip and iBeacon
Monktoberfest
Mixing real and virtual gaming
Cheating Spouse Nailed by a game!
Game of Life and on iPhone version

Your Hosts Vizify info:
Phaedra Boinodiris
Michael Martine
Michael Rowe

Links for discussion:
Gaming Talent Management
Gamification is Baloney

Drop us a comment! We’d love to hear your thoughts.

We’re aiming for Tuesday, so stay tuned!

Since there will be a delay in producing the audio podcast for this past Friday’s recording with Michael M and Phaedra, I thought I’d share a couple interesting things. This morning, on our way to Visegrád for the annual Palace Games, we stopped at the Deák Ter Starbucks for some caffeinated encouragement. I noticed the chalk sign in the coffee shop and shared it with Foursquare, and remembered the Lewis Black comedy routine where Lewis said that there are places, such as in Houston, where you could walk out of one Starbucks, and see another right across the road. Good news for those visiting Budapest, that there is a map right in the Starbucks to find another Starbucks.

A listener shared a link with us this morning that had me practically spilling my coffee — the “worst video game ever” from the New Yorker.

The fact that this video game would grant one, (yes, you got that right) one point to the player who successfully completed one full, real time equivalent eight hour trip from Tuscon, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada is only the start of the fun. There is nothing to see or do in this game, except to pilot your bus from Arizona to Nevada. No pausing, no breaks, and driving the bus requires constant correction. I’m laughing again just thinking about what this gameplay must be like… A challenge to our listeners for the next show… Give the article a read, and mail/tweet/post to Facebook, G+, Tumblr your suggestions for what kind of business games could be launched given a similar setup.

With some good luck, my hard drive replacement and data restoration will be complete, and the show will be posted by Wednesday. This post was written from my iPad after formatting the newly installed hard drive and kicking off the restore. Maybe there’s a game in this, where I would have to stay up for hours, clicking on ‘ok’ buttons that would time out and require me to restart the whole operation again if I didn’t respond within 30 seconds. While I’m laughing a bit, I’m also concerned, since I do need this hard drive restore to work!

The podcast community has been asked to help find prior art to invalidate the patent in question. For more information please check out the following link. Also, if you are a Podcaster, please link to this article and ask your community to help out too.

Links:
Wicked Paradise
Oculus Rift Co-Founder Dies in Police Chase Incident
Leather Goddesses of Phobos
Infocom
Leisure Suit Larry
Wall Street plays Cyber Warfare!
Chaos Monkey
Gamers really do see reality differently!
Adaptive Learning
Behind the scenes of the worst parking ever!
Desert Island Jukebox
Phaedra – Guild Wars 2
Michael R – Mine Craft
Michael M – Guantlet
Breakout!
Punch Out

Photographic Evidence:

Live from the Bean!

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

We learn that most senior executives are actually playing games at work almost every day! Check it out –

Tell your boss you are emulating your Senior Executives

We also talk about two really cool examples of music, learning and fun:
Bobby McFerrin – World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale
Ben Zander – “Ode to Joy”

Links:
Vodka
Go-Gamestorm Site
Doodler, unite!
Earth destroyed?

Follow James at @macgeo
and don’t forget to tweet with the hashtag #gamestorming

Wow has it been 4 years since it’s release? We also talk about the mobile App – Highlight.

Chris also talks about his upcoming session at the East Coast Gamers Conference… Check it out here!

Links:

Zynga Buys OMGPop

Is Google Being Evil?

Next episode we are looking forward to talking to one of the Authors of the book “GameStorming”

Bonus Links:

Nest thermostat

ePredator’s thermostat stats

Hopefully we will have one of the authors of – Gamestorming on an upcoming episode.

Exposing Games:
HTML5 Capabilities

Bonus links: