Total Engagement: How Games and Virtual Worlds Are Changing the Way People Work and Businesses Compete

Reeves, Byron ; Read, J. Leighton

ISBN 10: 142214657X / ISBN 13: 9781422146576

Published by Harvard Business Review Press, Boston, 2009

About this Item

No Flaws or Blemishes; Gift Quality. This collaboration between a Stanford University professor and a venture capitalist, both geeks at heart, turns out to live up, quite literally, to its title. By engaging their readers via immersion into fictional characters' work and play, Reeves and Read prove points 1 through 857: that games and virtual reality provide the right kind of business platform to solve common corporate people problems. [Booklist].

Seller Inventory # 010931

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Total Engagement: How Games and Virtual Worlds Are Changing the Way People Work and Businesses Compete
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press, Boston
• Publication Date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 142214657X
• ISBN 13: 9781422146576
• Binding: Hardcover with Dust Jacket
• Edition: First Edition, First Printing.
• Condition: New
• Dust Jacket Condition: New
• Seller catalogs:
  • BUSINESS / FINANCE / SELF-HELP

About this title

Synopsis

Can the workplace be more productive by including avatars, three-dimensional environments, and participant-driven outcomes? This grounded and thought-provoking book by Byron Reeves and Leighton Read proves that it is not only possible, it is inevitable.

Implementing components of multiplayer computer games in the workplace will address a host of age-old problems. Games can not only stem boredom and decrease turnover, but also enhancee collaboration and encourage creative leadership. Games require extraordinary teamwork, elaborate data analysis and strategy, recruitment and retention of top players, and quick decision making. Recreating some elements of games - such as positioning tasks within stories, creating internal economies, and implementing participant-driven communication systems - can not only boost employee engagement but overall productivity.

Of course, the strong psychological power of games can have both positive and negative consequences for the workplace. That's why it's important to put them into practice correctly from the beginning - and Reeves and Read explain how by showing which good design principles are a powerful antidote to the addictive and stress-inducing potential of games.

Supported by specific case studies and years of research, Total Engagement will completely change the way you view both work and play.

About the Author

Byron Reeves is a professor at Stanford University, and has authored over a hundred published studies on responses to immersive features of media, including games. J. Leighton Read is a physician, inventor, successful biotechnology founder, CEO, and venture capitalist.