Jesse Schell's The Art of Game Design - influential, provocative...

Like many working in games, Jesse Schell had a passion for playing and making games. Working first as a software engineer his roles grew from engineer to game designer to creative director (Disney). But Schell is aware to the challenges (risks, problems and bullshit) posed by accidental, inauthentic and downright Machiavellian misuse of the power of games.

The author of The Art of Game Design, he has gathered, created, and curated a trove of what he calls game design lenses. The game design lenses are a pirates treasure chest overflowing with influential and provocative ways of thinking about games, the game you are designing, or for thinking about any game. (You might even apply them to non-game products or services or things in the world.) (I encourage you to read Bruce Stirling's review of The Art of Game Design on Wired for a mature dose of balance.)

Schell gained a lot of attention for word sketch presented at DICE 2010, "Beyond Facebook" in which he thinks aloud about a world in which corporations have gamified nearly everything in our lives. Dystopia is just around the corner, if it hasn't already arrived. The future present is very very close to the world depicted in Cory Docktrow's short story Unauthorized Bread.

Have a look at his website to delve deeper http://www.jesseschell.com/. 

Inside Spotify

Spotify is a fascinating and a very young company, founded in 2006, just over 10 years ago. They even have a Dublin office. In Jan 2016 Spotify acquired Dublin music discovery start-up Soundwave. They have 19 regional offices and a number of other development and operations centres.

Spotify is what some would call a high-tech unicorn company - a unicorn is a startup company valued at over $1 billion - many of them, like Twitter and Uber (and Airbnb until recently), have never made a profit.

Spotify has over 1,000 employees (>1,600), 90 million subscribers and close to $2 billion in annual revenues (ref 2015). Think about that, a revenue of about $1.2 million per employee. Shares in the company are privately held but at the most recent fund-raising round (2015) it would have been valued at $8.5 billion. In intervening years it raised a further $1.5 billion through convertible bonds. There is talk of an IPO (initial public offering) on the stock market in 2018. Your guess is as good as mine as to what value it will float at. You will find more statistics at Statista

What does it really cost?

This Polygon article by Guillaume Boucher-Vidal (2014) offers an inside view of what it really takes to start your own indie game studio (link).

presskit() - from Vlambeer

From Rami Ismail (@tha_rami) of indie studio Vlambeer, the strapline is "spend time making games, not press" (link).
Have a look at the examples (no need to install the templates on your own php server). They also provide loads of templates to help organise your game business (link).

Jane McGonigal on saving the world by playing games (online)

The blame is not for failure

Jørgen Vig Knudstorp: At LEGO, Growth and Culture Are Not Kid Stuff
"The blame is not for failure, it is for failing to help or ask for help"

Grant Freeland interviews Jørgen Vig Knudstorp (Boston Consulting Group video)

The Gapminder Card Game challenges player's understanding of...

The Gapminder Card Game, a paper version of the Gapminder bubble chart. The game challenges player's understanding of national performance of social indicators. Indicators such as population, income, life expectancy, infant mortality etc. Position countries both relative to one another on absolute values.

See www.gapminder.org

They call it a game but is it a game as such?