Company Culture and the 90-minute 15-minute Meeting

Company culture is a funny thing.  It’s as essential to the success of any company as anything else, and yet typically gets little serious attention.  We may think about it now and again, but in most companies it happens when no one is looking; there are always seemingly more important things to worry about. The popular wisdom is that the company culture is a reflection of everyone in the company, but most of all of the CEO’s and others leaders’ strengths and weaknesses; for better or worse I believe that’s true (and any company leader should be humbled a bit by that, I think).  Certainly culture is an emergent effect that’s difficult to control. And yet I believe strongly that it has an effect on the kinds of products we produce and how we feel about the experience afterward.

(Hmm, no pithy question or call-to-action here; I’m interested in what makes company culture work – read on, and please add your thoughts!)

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In Praise of Ethics — and Money, Part 1

There were a few topics that bubbled up at this year’s GDC and in follow-up blog posts:

• The impact of social games as something more than a fad
• General disdain for Zynga as a game developer, if not as a money-printing machine
• Game designers having to confront monetization in and as design

The first is exciting; the second is predictable, deserved and unfortunate.  The third is inevitable, and not nearly as unwelcome as many seem to think – I believe this is actually an important victory for game designers.

I’m going to cover this in two posts: ethics first, then monetization-as-design.