Tom @ TED, courtesy of the TED blog
Earlier this year, I went to Oxford to speak at the TED Global conference. The video of my talk is now online, and you can watch it on the TED site. I was talking about the topic that consumes most of my time when I’m not thinking about arts or books: videogames, and the staggering amount of human time and effort they claim every year. It’s a $50bn global industry projected to surpass $80bn in a few years’ time, while some games are—to the great concern of many—better than almost anything else we’ve ever devised at getting people to pour very real effort, time, attention and affection into virtual worlds.
This year’s TED was about “the good news,” so I tried to look beyond the understandable worries that games can feed, and to analyse the structural reasons that games are so
Peter Ward
Excellent points! I wish I’d been there
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Essentially, these points seem to me like a summation of how we learn and progress in “real life”. It’s sad to think how far away from this approach work has become. I’m sure that we could fix appraisal systems by using this approach, thus boosting performance through improved feelings of success.
As a personal performance coaching specialising in work/life balance and work-related stress issues for IT professionals, I see how work can grind people down when they can no longer see the bigger picture and when their motivation system is disconnected from that of their employer. I see that these points could really help to reconnect people to their employers, to everyone’s benefit.
Amazing what can be learned from games!