Check out this webcast/interview I’ve done for arvetica (the company I work for) on how (traditional) companies can learn about innovation from the computer & video game industry.
Nicolas highlights three major practices/processes which are common in the game industry and lead to innovation:
- user centered design approach
- expand beyond traditional (industry) boundaries
- user generated content
Check out the webcast/video on arvetica’s blog!
Greetings!
It was a very interesting video, and i cant resist commenting it:
Firstly, i don’t think that the game industry is being very innovative. There are, of course, exceptions like the ones mentioned by Nicolas: Nintendo and Second Life, but those are not the rule. If you look at the computer game shelves in the supermarket, you will see that most of the games will fit in a handful of well categorised genres (first person shooter, real-time strategy, MMORPG, etc.). The business model in those games follow the traditional retail value chain. Even the software is developed in the traditional waterfall process. The reason for this is simple: the market is very risky. Most games cost more than $4M to develop and market, and it require about 700.000 sells to return the investment.
Another interesting thing pointed by Nicolas is the crescent trend to bring the Web 2.0 concepts into the game industry. Currently, Second Life has the best approximation, but the ideas are out there. Raph Koster and Richard Bartle (2 of the biggest names in the game industry and design) created a company, Areae, that seems to be working around that concept. They are not alone in that idea- shhhhhhh!
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Tiago A.
Thanks Tiago, at arvetica we recently bought a number of books on the topic – one of them was Bartle’s book on designing virtual worlds…