experience + expertise: Pioneer

McGonigal argues that good game players create a better corporate climate, better jobs, better products and services and enable greater satisfaction – a commodity that will be increasingly rare in the future. “Companies need to take a new approach when it comes to games,” she explains. “Games are not an entertaining way of escaping reality. On the contrary, through proper use of games like Superstruct, knowledge workers can be involved in innovation processes.” She predicts, “In the next decade, many business will make their biggest breakthroughs by playing games.”

For McGonigal, ideally, games are not just a reflection of reality: they are a better reality. And she recommends creating working environments that correspond to gaming environments: “The world around us should be better designed so it works more like a game. More and more people already feel more comfortable in a game than in real life.” McGonigal, who lives in California, thinks that companies should modify their world of work in line with computer games, i.e. the way players move from task to task, collect rewards and collaborate with others.

Even today, McGonigal refers to virtual environments designed to provide a stimulus and set an example to CEOs as “alternate reality games”. McGonigal was head designer at 42 Entertainment, the company that practically invented the genre. An alternate reality game consists of questions, problems and puzzles that can be solved via e-mail, the Internet, using a cell phone, on foot or in the office. If a company is the game master, the puppet master who pulls the strings and issues new clues on a regular basis, they will ultimately gain useful insight for new products and services or intellectual property. The findings from Superstruct, for instance, provide market forecasts that would otherwise cost serious money.

Since 2006, 11,000 researchers from pharmaceuticals player Pfizer have taken part in 150 brainstorming games within the scope of an open innovation program. Each round generated up to 100 new, potentially useable ideas for products and processes. For Jane McGonigal, who was hailed a Top Innovator to Watch for 2009 in Business Week, this is clear proof of her belief: “A game beats any meeting.”

Part one of article