Finally back home from Birmingham and now I have some time for the World Cup. But wanted to share my presentation from the IHRM conference.
So I am now in Birmingham, sitting at the Aston Business School for a conference on International Human Resource Management. It was a really great time in Bogotá, the organizers took really good care of us and we had the chance to see some stuff. Additional to that met some great people and had the chance to participate at the EMMA vs. LAMMA football game (European and Latin America Media Management Associations).
What can we learn from Game Leaderhsip?
View more presentations from Tobias Scholz.
Back from Rome, have to say it is a really beautiful city, however I had not much time to look into it. For the conference, there were some interesting presentations and my presentation worked well, too. I already got an idea for a paper next year in Talinn. Below you will find my presentation I hold.
Different Jobs Need Different Cultures
View more presentations from Tobias Scholz.
Finally we hold the first eSports Yearbook in our hands (after the Post needed nearly two weeks to deliver it) and it looks great and we hope you will like it too. You will find a short overview about the book at Google and currently it is available at Amazon Germany, United Kingdom (should be soon buyable) and Japan. But with the ISBN (978-3839164310) it should be orderable at any book store. Soon the book will be available at Amazon.com and an eBook is in work.
We hope you like the book and we would love to see you holding it in your hands, so please send us your pictures with the eSports Yearbook 2009 and we will upload them to the site. Additional to that you can already think about your articles for the next book and start sending them to us now. Please send us your articles until 30th of November 2010. However you can contact us over contact@esportsyearbook.com.
My little Gnome Warlock back in the beginning of World of Warcraft
As I am currently reading a lot about Game Design I stumbled upon an interesting article about the panel of Rob Pardo (Executive Vice President of Game Design at Blizzard Entertainment) at the Game Developers Conference. He was talking about the Game Design of Blizzard. He stated eleven elements, which are essential for a Blizzard game.
Gameplay First: This is an interesting fact as the game has to be fun and fun is hereby the way to direct the gamer into the right way. Additional fun is a great way to increase the long-time motivation for the player.
Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master: The game has to be simple, with simple mechanics and objectives, so everybody can play the game and everybody has an easy entrance to the game. However there has to be more depth to the game than easy learning, in World of Warcraft you see that raiding and arenas are more difficult to master.
What is Fantasy? Rob Pardo was talking about the look of the game, especially the UI in World of Warcraft. This was a failure for Blizzard, as the vast majority of the gamer customized their UI, instead of using the standard interface.
Make Everything Overpowered: I have to admit, I played a Gnome Warrior and tanked some pretty big stuff, and often I did not see the whole model of the enemy. But as Rob Pardo said, this made it extremely special to challenge those enemies and defeat them. Make it overpowered and it is an epic adventure.
Concentrated Coolness: There are only few classes in World of Warcraft, if you compare it to the classes in Warcraft 3, however Blizzard took only the best elements and concentrated them into the few classes in World of Warcraft.
Play, Don’t Tell: That is interesting, as players tend to not read the quest text, but still want to experience the storyline. So Blizzard has to find ways that the quest text is only an enhancement for the story. For example the death knight starting area is a good example for that way.
Make it a Bonus: Players don’t like punishment, however if this effect is changed into a bonus players like it. Rob Pardo stated the Rest System of WoW as an example. In the beginning players are punished for playing too long (drop from 100% xp to 50% xp) and the players hated it, however he changed it into rested players get 200% xp and not-rested players stay at 100%. From the math the same system, but somehow the players loved the change.
Control is King: Blizzard had to sacrifice some cool animations and effects for the game play. Rob Pardo takes for example summon a mount, which appears beneath you in a puff of smoke. However a different animation would be cool, the control for the player would be less.
Tuning it Up: “Tuning is easy to do, hard to do well.” Thus it is important to tune your game for an audience it is necessary to still have hooks and try to know why you are tuning it this way.
Avoid the Grand Reveal: That is something interesting, Blizzard tries to show their stuff early and not until it is finished or perfect. Game developers have to establish an environment where feedback is encouraged and you can fail.
Culture of Polish: Polishing is not only for the team which tries to make a good game. Blizzard also brings in so called strike teams, people from other teams. They test the game as well and give feedback and a fresh perspective.
Definitely an interesting panel and it gave me some interesting insights into Game Design.
Newspaper Distribution in Oslo
Great, a third paper got accepted at the International Human Ressource Management Conference in Aston. The topic was International Talent Management – Tentative Implications from Cultural Background and Cultural Intelligence and here is the abstract:
Talent management reveals potential talents, trains them and keeps them at a company, however in a globalized world the cultural factor is disregarded. Talents will be generalized on grades and experience, but not on their cultural background. However we will shortly review talent man- agement and afterwards look into the cultural diversity and its beneficial influence on team per- formance and thereby probably beneficial for talent management. If we integrate the cultural background and the cultural intelligence into talent management, it should be possible to find even more fitting talents and keep them in the company with less incentives, as they found a fit- ting job to their cultural environment, additional to their eagerness of performing well. The cul- tural background directly influences the recruiting process and the cultural intelligence directly the human resource development. This paper shows that cultural background and cultural intelli- gence seem to have implications of talent management, especially on recruiting and training.
European Football Finals in 2008: Spain with the better Culture for Football?
And another paper got accepted, this time for the European Academy of Management in Rome. I handed in a paper with the topic “Different Jobs need Different Cultures“. It is based on the survey I made for my diploma paper and here is the abstract:
Team performance is affected by cultural values; in this paper we propose that cultural differences have different influences in distinct job-fields. The implications are based upon a survey of software development teams in the game software industry. We focus on the game software in- dustry as it represents an under-researched field, and the game software development teams are truly international work teams and are predestinated for cross-cultural research. Based upon cross-cultural information systems and teamwork literature, we develop a conceptual model with the constructs of cultural values, cultural intelligence, mindfulness, teamwork quality, and team performance and tested it on a sample of 179 game developers. The results show that cultural values have an influence on team performance and more important these values differ in the job- fields.
This is a extremely interesting speech of Jesse Schell from Carnegie Mellon University at the DICE 2010 about the future of Gaming and how it could affect our Life and it is just a must-see, watch it!
Especially interesting was the part about Grading, Jesse Schell mentioned a experience system for grading, used by Lee Sheldon at the Indiana University, however students get experience points for participation, homework, assignments and everything else. This led to an increase and advancement in the class.
Additional the future could be scaring, which Jesse Schell predicts, he is correct this gaming aspect could be beneficial for us, as I has to admit achievement points are motivating for me.
Counter-Strike Game at the EPS Finals XIV in Cologne
So got my first conference approval for the 2010 year and I will be going to the World Media Economics and Management Conference in Bogotá. This is the most important Media Management Conference so I am thrilled to present there a paper about video games and especially World of Warcraft and Counter-Strike.
Here the abstract of my paper: Current Leadership faces severe problems, since the workforce is changing and it becomes more complicated to motivate employees. Therefore this paper looks into how video games are handling the topic of leadership. Gaming is part of the modern media world and as research indicates it gives insights into leadership of future organizations. In this paper leadership theory will be compared with two cases of games: On the one hand World of Warcraft and on the other hand Counter-Strike. Both games give different insights of the intuitive game leadership training of these players. After comparing these cases with the leadership theory, we see that they are mostly fitting to the leadership theory, thus their approach to these principles is different. Therefore the cases allow us to learn diverse tactics of leadership, as the cases focus on the fun and the motivation. The players enjoy the learning of new skills and align with other peoples and different abilities. In summary this paper shows, that gamer already learning several skills for leading companies and teams, however they also learn to participate in teams on their own. Companies can learn that motivation and keep raising the bar are essential for organizations in order to attract the new gamer generation. We also learn about the importance of the fun in work, which becomes more essential for the gamers.
Blizzard Picture from Diablo but still it is a Video-Game Picture
Probably some of you will have played Mass Effect 2 until now or at least heard about it, so I will try to avoid major spoilers. Vaguely speaking, this game is about a hero who assembles a team of aliens and humans in order to defeat an evil enemy. However, it is interesting that Bioware, the developer, stresses the interaction and the atmosphere between team members and the hero/leader. It is essential to raise the loyalty of every team member in order to succeed in the game, as these team members work or fight better if they trust the hero. Special at Mass Effect 2 is that Shepard (the hero character) searches for team members based on their skills and not based on their race. Therefore, he seeks for example a weapon specialist, an assassin, a warrior and several other extraordinary talents. However, contrary to the general tone in Human Resources, these talents are cutting edge in their field because of their race. Another example, the scientist in the team is a Salarian. “Salarians excel at invention, preferring to use cutting-edge technology rather than settle for anything less.” [1] As you can see, it is obvious that Shepard is choosing a Salarian as scientist having the best cultural requirements for the job. This demonstrates a key finding in my research field. Choose the best and use the cultural background. Sure, it is easy to do such things in a video game, where there is a big evil at the end, which destroys everything, however it is still necessary to forge a team, and this game shows a great way of forging. Beside the common goal, it is important to establish trust and loyalty observing the team leader. In Mass Effect 2 Shepard helps the team members to solve issues of their life, finding the lost father, defending by a trial. Sure not realistic in the world, but still it is interesting to watch. Shepard teams up with the best in the universe, who also are sometimes the scum of the universe, helps them to solve their past, gives them purpose to show their skills and, additionally, contribute to a project, in this case save the universe. Somehow excessive for the common job world, but still fascinating to see the parallels between multicultural high performance teams and Team Shepard.
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