Skip to content →

Your work personality: games-player or puppet-master?

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

How fast will the 2010 be?

We talk of the world becoming faster.  But in many ways, this pace is an illusion.  Try getting a decision out of someone!

Will we be any better organized?

There is a strata of the world that is not particularly accountable to any one.  Fads and fancies are adopted and dropped.

Will we put into play the basics of organization?

The issues of organization remain the same.

  • We need to have people “close up” who deal with fast cycle events and who thus don’t have the overall perspective.
  • We need people who operate one or two steps back from events who can collate and detect patterns.
  • And we need ways for these two groups to communicate.

Will the internet help us implement the basics of good organization?

What the internet allows us to do is to be both redundant and to communicate laterally with greater ease.

Alternative reality games illustrate this principle.

The plays contribute information “to the point of redundancy” so it is fine for any one person to dip-in-and-out at their pleasure.  Any one player is effectively redundant to the game.  As long as sufficient people are playing at any one time, the marginal value of the last player is redundant.

We need the number and diversity of players that “kicks” the game into a phase state consistent with the 3D Lorenz butterfly.  No one as far as I know has studied the critical mass of players.  Nor has anyone studied how the lateral communication of the internet affects the number of people we need.  So far, people have just noted that the lateral communication allows us to treat individual contributions as marginally redundant.

Interestingly, successful games have ‘puppet-masters’ in the background.  They’ve designed the game, they moderate the game, and they write up the game afterward.

Will the internet change the tiered-nature of good organization?

Alternate reality games have those familiar two layers: the day-to-day actors and the background ‘puppet-masters’.

Where do you like to play: games-player or puppet-master?

It’s a personal choice where we play.  We might also choose to play different parts at different times or on different games.

Which is your preferred role?  Games player or puppet-master?

Published in Business & Communities

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: