Knowing and Making

They keep on doing it! Our friends (and now clients) at Six to Start have won another South by Southwest award - this year it's Best Game . The prize is for Smokescreen , "a cutting-edge game about life online", developed with Channel 4. The credits  are about four pages long, but congratulations particularly to those I know personally: Adrian Hon, Dan Hon, Claire Bateman, Margaret Robertson, Lisa Long, Dave Aldhouse, Heather Tyrrell and Alex Chapman. One prize might  be regarded as fortune...to win two looks like carefulness . I'm sure many of you will enjoy the project we're doing with Six to Start if it does go into production. I'd love to tell you about it but then I'd have to...send you to this xkcd cartoon .

I met the very interesting Margaret Robertson yesterday to talk about games and behavioural economics. Browsing her site I found this article from 2008 : Psychometric tests - widely used, but also widely criticised for being too formulaic and too easy to cheat - seem a poor and clumsy tool compared to the kind of insight a well designed game can give you into someone's ability and character. Any online gaming veteran knows how quickly games reveal whether someone's a risk-taker or a banker, impetuous or strategic, obedient or rebellious - and how hard it is to fake your responses in the heat of the moment. I wonder how true that is. Do games - instead of revealing "real character" instead show up people's lack of competence at real life? What I mean is: in most situations there is an optimal, "rational" level of risk to take. Businesses would like their employees to take that amount of risk, no more and no less. Games are generally simple enough th...