Episode 24 – Stop Zombie Mouth

The Michael’s talk about how you can leverage gaming technology to achieve zero-overhead in your business processes by leveraging good gaming design principles. How can you enable your customers, employees and partners to level up on your business processes? We tell you how! You too can become CPO (Chief Procurement Officer) by playing games. So sit back, grab a big cup of your favorite beverage and play with us!

Links:
Zero Overhead principle Healthcare
Raph Koster – Fundamentals of Game Design
Stop Zombie Mouth
Microsoft Clippy
What is Halloween
Zamfir for your diet
The Rock Doctors
Upcoming Tech Announcements
Google’s financial woes

Episode 23 – Mystic Transitions

We continue our discussion of the Freemium model, to talk about platform expansion and extracting customer value! (Welcome to business school). Trying to figure out the fine line between fun fermium and painful exploitation, as well as how can a business successfully transition from the pay model to the Freemium model. We talk about the musical instruments we want to play, thanks to Ian Hughes who brings us a review for RockSmith. Which get’s us to think about the transitions of musical styles and musical learning. So lean forward, grab your rhythm guitar, and jam with us at Games At Work dot Biz!

Nick Lowe

Nick Lowe and Eric Hodge at Rocktoberfest in Chapel Hill, NC.

Links –
A Real Educational Game that Rocks!
The Simpsons Tapped Out
Castle Walls from Styx

Nick Lowe
Dave Alvin
Yep Roc Records

Episode 22 – Play for Free on Free to Play

Phaedra and Michael M discuss free to play game economics — both from the game designer and the game player perspective as well as how this changes when the game is focused on individual paying players vs larger enterprises as the target market.  With micropayments for in-game purchases being the revenue source for free to play games, Phaedra mentions that at the recent Game Developers Conference that free to play games can be more profitable than $50 boxed games.  Michael shares that he likes to avoid such in-game purchases, hence the title of the show.  🙂

 

Cross genre gameplay also gets the GamesatWork.biz treatment when Phaedra and Michael brainstorm on what may make for a good cross genre game.  An interesting idea emerges combining maps, geocashing and Habitat for Humanity Restore opportunities.

 

Some of the games mentioned on today’s episode include

Simpsons Tapped Out — http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-simpsons-tapped-out/id497595276

Tiny Tower — http://nimblebit.com

Plants vs Zombies — http://www.popcap.com/games/plants-vs-zombies/home

SimCity — http://www.simcity.com/en_US

Monopoly City Streets — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_City_Streets

Hivemind — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hivemind_(software)

Episode 21 – Gaming the Game Genome

The Michael’s are back at it again this time with a new website that claims to be able to figure out your gaming mood. Thinking back to the Music Genome Project, which we can’t believe is over 13 years old now, we take a look at the Game Genome Project website, which we can only hope will do the same thing for gaming. We miss our new co-host Phaedra Boinodiris again this week, but soldier on with this weeks show. We look at other ideas for Genome projects to figure out what other cool relationships we can figure out. We also talk about Legos and Fischertechnik, and the freakish contraptions you can build by mashing together building sets with a bit of 3D Printing. We also play with the idea (thank you Andy Ihnatko) of how could you game cleaning up the Apple IOS 6 map issues.

This week’s Links:
Game Genome Project
Music Genome Project
Sade
Warp 11
Pandora Media
Good Reads
3D Printing and Lego
Stack Exchange and Lego
FischerTechnik
STEM FischerTechnik
Tim Cook and Maps
Ride the Duck