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United Nations NGO Committee on Sustainable Development
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Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete |  | Authors: Byron Reeves, J. Leighton Read
Publisher: Harvard Business School Press
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $16.27
as of 9/10/2010 02:54 CDT details
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Seller: BizBooks
Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 70,249
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 288
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.4 x 1
ISBN: 142214657X
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.4833
EAN: 9781422146576
ASIN: 142214657X
Publication Date: November 2, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Every week, millions of people including many of your employees spend hours playing multi-player online games with a level of engagement they don t bring to work. These aren t just adolescent video games we re talking rich narrative quests with 3-D environments, cool avatars, and compelling goals and rewards. Imagine the value if you could transfer key ingredients of game design and the gamer excitement and focus that come with it to the office. What if your employees could solve customer problems, design new software, or configure better shipping routes working inside a game environment at work?
This isn t just possible, say Byron Reeves and J. Leighton Read; it s inevitable. As global competition intensifies and employee productivity and engagement become more critical, the user experience provided by game technology offers a tantalizing solution for business. This is far more than a quaint metaphor for business and it s way beyond training tools. Implemented in the workplace, elements of games can solve a host of business problems with morale, communication, and alignment all while honing skills like data analysis, teamwork, recruitment, leadership, and more.
Based on extensive hands-on research, case studies, and the authors entrepreneurial ventures, Total Engagement convincingly outlines how games will transform work, from repetitive call-center jobs to high-level teams who must collaborate with members dispersed around the globe. The authors show why you must begin building a game strategy now and offer practical guidelines for how to:
--Select the game design features that can address your company s pain points
--Use avatars to increase engagement and productivity
--Employ virtual currencies to help employees set priorities, share resources, and meet goals
--Implement participant-driven communication systems to facilitate team-building
--Discover untapped leadership skills by shifting collaboration to game-like environments
--Mitigate possible negative effects of game applications at work
Authoritative and provocative, Total Engagement shows you how to become a player to reckon with as the gaming revolution transforms the workplace.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 6
A Peek into the Future? February 7, 2010
James Fruchterman (Palo Alto, CA USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I just finished reading the book Total Engagement. It's rare that I read a book that has me wondering if the authors have caught a glimpse of an unexpected future, and that ten or twenty years from now people will be looking back and be saying: that was the book that spotted this crucial trend. Having lived in Silicon Valley for many years, I'm used to having that experience of being exposed to the future ahead of its time. This could be one of them.
The thesis is simple. Millions of people pay each month to participate in massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). I've tried them, and I have friends (and kids) that have been totally sucked into them. They punch a bunch of psychological tickets for humans: the game designers know what they're doing. The book discusses how this is done:
* an epic story line(we're saving the galaxy from the Crumlons)
* clear paths to advancement, with transparency about your skills and performance
* intensely meritocratic societies called guilds that work together in groups to accomplish major tasks
* strong social interactions with other people
* the ability to try, fail and try again rapidly, learning quickly
* the option to try on leadership roles
For many people, these games are where they come alive and truly experience their potential to solve problems, meet challenges and lead a team.
And then they go into the modern workplace, which is frequently as stultifying as these virtual worlds are thrilling. Fail!
Read and Reeves are convinced that at least some smart workplaces of the future are going to adapt some of the ways of the games to more fully engage their employees and become more effective as economic organizations. They don't have a magic formula for how to do this, but do invest a great deal of time analyzing what makes people inside these games tick and how those concepts transfer to the workplace.
Fascinating ideas, and well worth watching and thinking about.
How games and gaming will - and should - change business July 5, 2010
Rolf Dobelli (Switzerland)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book's title, Total Engagement, is a tantalizing banner, but its subtitle, Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete, is a full explanation. Stanford professor Byron Reeves and physician, inventor and CEO J. Leighton Read address the possibilities games offer at work. They explain the many ways that games might change work for the better, making it more meaningful engaging, and productive. They analyze gaming's positive and negative aspects. They are clear about the fact that since millions of people already "game" regularly, even obsessively, many changes they discuss are now under way at desks and in cubicles - everywhere that employees work with computers. Their book gives leaders the tools to use the games that are being played at their companies in a conscious, focused way. Given the broad array of topics that gaming addresses, this book can guide leaders who want to ride the gaming wave, human resources professionals who need to keep up with their shifting domain and others who are interested in workplace change (and games, of course).
Game on! Your move. July 6, 2010
Tamara Dull (Washington)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"...on average many [game] players are physically healthier, work harder, make better grades, earn higher salaries, and are more socially connected than those who play less or not at all." Total Engagement, p. 13
I have always been intrigued with the notion that one's work should be challenging, and at the same time: fun. Seriously fun. So, of course, this book by Byron Reeves and J. Leighton Read caught my attention: Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete.
The book successfully fueled my "fun notion" with compelling business cases and research showing that gaming is not just for high school boys anymore. [Or grown-up kids such as myself.] If businesses want to compete successfully in today's culture, then we will have to overcome our taboo feelings of "playing games" at work.
I could easily write a paper around this book, but I want to keep this brief - so I'll just share three ideas from the book:
* On why people play games: In short, it's all about achievement, immersion, exploration, competition and socializing. Do you see the correlation to the business?
* On virtual money: One economics professor teaches that "economics is less about money than it is about making choices in the face of scarcity." This principle is demonstrated well in the context of gaming, and aptly applied to the art of making leadership decisions.
* On which large enterprises are already experimenting in the field: Check out IBM and Oracle Sun for starters.
If you are in a senior leadership role in your company or run your own business, I invite you to visit the book's website to read the executive reviews and the excerpts. If anything, it will help you understand why the leadership practices of "yesterday" really don't work well with this generation entering the workforce.
Game on! Your move.
[This review is a cross-post from my personal blog.]
Total Engagement is totally engaging! August 11, 2010
Dickey Singh (San Francisco Bay Area, California United States)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Each chapter in this book begins with an interesting short story. The story immerses you into the plot and you want to read the rest of the chapter.
Passionate and enthusiastic employees outperform the average workforce. 3D virtual game environments, to do work in, is certainly the engaging and entertaining way to get work done with high productivity and quality, within organizations.
The book starts with a great introduction with excellent references in first chapter. You will be surprised by who plays and by how much, the topic of the second chapter, along with why these people play the games. Chapter three acknowledges that certain tacit work sucks and discusses corporate problems that games *might* solve (note emphasis). Chapter four describes the elements of best games. The book dedicates a chapter each to virtual currencies, teams, individuals and leaders. Another chapter discusses play and work productivity and suggests a natural convergence of work and play driven by the strong need of engaged workers in a workplace, and improvements in technology in the coming years.
I highly recommend this book. I still have to read chapters 10 and 12, but the authors in chapter 11, caution against the side effects of using games in businesses and concludes - the somewhat obvious - that not every type of work is suitable in a game environment.
Thank you, Byron and Leighton for this excellent resource!
Totally Engaged November 30, 2009
Jeremy Bailenson
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
As I scientist who studies behavior in virtual worlds every day for a living, I was stunned at how much I learned from reading this book. The possibilities for using virtual worlds and games in the workplace are endless, and Reeves and Read do a fantastic job in providing concrete guidelines on how to navigate and leverage the future digital workplace. They combine a hands-on business approach with decades of research about the psychology of media; the result is what is sure to be the canonical text about serous gaming. More importantly, it was downright fun to read.
Jeremy Bailenson
Virtual Human Interaction Lab, Stanford University
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 6
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