We cannot emphasize enough how often the origins of the productive game rest not with actions of the first person to act, but with the person who defines the game by supporting and adding to what the first person is doing. The second person is the unsung hero of the game.
Ethan Bauley sent me a link that’s a perfect depiction of the ‘Unsung Hero’ idea. Take a look at this video shot at the recent Sasquatch Music Festival outside Vancouver:
The first dancer, Collin Wynter from Calgary, deserves credit for initiating well. He’s having fun, and he’s high energy, connecting with the music and the rest of his environment and not at all caught up in his own little world. He is acting on his environment (the hillside and the soft grass and the music) and as a consequence, the environment ‘acts on him’ as his dancing becomes infectious. But it doesn’t become a scene, it doesn’t find its game, until the second dancer joins. The second dancer adds and heightens, and from that point on, there’s no stopping this scene.
The second dancer learns the ‘rules of the dance’ from the first dancer, then yes-ands, making dance even more playful by falling to the ground and crawling through the first dancer’s legs. It is the second person who defines the game and plays it in a way (by yes-anding) that others cannot resist joining.
After the third person joins, the joining becomes a wave that lasts until the music ends. (And maybe beyond, that’s where the video cuts.) This same dynamic is characteristic of any productive game. A game played alone has finite potential, while a game that invites joining has unlimited upside. It is the second person to play who signals to the crowd that your game is worth joining.
This article in the Calgary Herald celebrates Collin Wynter as being some kind of hero, but does not mention the second dancer, or even the existence of the unsung hero of the game.
As the toxic cloud of the Bush-Cheney era in America begins to lift, we are beginning to see the scope of the mess they’ve left us in. The boys from Delta House have been partying hard for eight years, and now we’re supposed to move in and live here like nothing has happened? The party is over the the place is a disaster. The trees are filled with underwear! The toilets have exploded! And nobody’s laughing, because it’s real, and it’s on us to clean it up.
Some of the clean-up work is so vast in scope, the banking industry shitstorm that shows so sign of abating , for example, or our crippling dependence on fossil fuels, that nothing short of a federal government strategy can begin to dig us out of it.
Every one of us, however, can find ways to support the clean-up work on a personal and practical level. Cleaning house presents us with opportunities. A chance to evaluate inventory, and eliminate waste. It can be the impetus for a much-needed remodeling.
Here’s a GameChangers checklist for what to Toss and what to Keep as we clean up and remodel an economy that has been Skulled and Boned into the pathetic shape it’s in today: (more…)
Over the holidays, our friend Dean Read, the national sales director for RedDot, loaned us his copy of Young@Heart, an outstanding British-produced documentary about a singing group of old folks from Massachusetts who inspire audiences by rocking out on young songs. Formed by its musical director, Bob Cilman, in 1982, the group originally sang lots of old standards, but has steadily gotten younger with its music over the years. In their concerts today, they perform numbers by the likes of the Talking Heads, The Clash, and Coldplay. The film deservedly got a lot of attention when it was released in 2008. (more…)
Skillful players can play many roles. This is usually a good thing. It lets one relate to one’s audience and fellow players in ways that result in communication, learning and transformation–the triple-score for brands operating in the Networked World.
When a monster like Bernie Madoff gets away with such a long-running scam as the $50 billion-plus Ponzi Scheme he got busted for last month, it’s because he has been able to use his improvisational talent to obfuscate instead of communicate and indoctrinate instead of educate. Ultimately, he transforms wealth into information (i.e. news) instead of the other way around.
Madoff played all his ‘public facing’ roles — Philanthropist, Country Clubber, Yachtsman, Fisherman, Palm Beacher, Hamptonian, Bon Vivant, Patriarch, Temple Elder, Wall Street Guru–so well that it never occurred to his victims he could be fronting a crooked game, or that he had the role of Con Artist in his repertoire. Reportedly his office was adorned with a collection of bulls, the symbol of prosperity and growth on Wall Street. He cloaked himself in the wardrobes and placed himself on stages that were trusted, and so the people who got swindled made assumptions about the integrity of the game he was playing. They trusted good old Uncle Bernie without really knowing anything about what he was doing with their money. Today those victims are saying the same thing about Madoff that they say after seeing Sean Penn play Harvey Milk: “I totally believed him!” Of course you did! That’s what he was counting on!
It’s interesting that those who sniffed out and avoided the Madoff scam did so not by basing their judgment on the integrity of his character–skilled players perform every character with 100% integrity–but on the integrity of the game he was playing.
James Hedges, founder of JLH Securities, says he refused to invest billions with Madoff back in 1997 when during a two hour meeting “We could barely get past page one (of a 40-page due diligence questionnaire) with Madoff before alarm bells were going off. On the strategy itself, when I asked him to explain his investing strategy, it didn’t line up.”
In a recent piece for Portfolio.com, journalist Erin Arvedlund describes how she suspected in an article she wrote for Barrons back in 2001 that something was not kosher in Madoff’s story: “I went with the facts: Nobody, but nobody, on Wall Street traded options the way Madoff did and made the money that he made. Years later, a hedge fund manager whom I had known since the late 1990s said simply: ‘Nobody traded options that successfully. That should have been a big red flag.’”
The lessons of the Madoff Scandal are crystal clear:
Honest players play honest games.
It is easier to spot a crooked game than a crooked player.
Last night (Tuesday) at the USC President’s Dinner, we sat next to the director of the USC School of Journalism and got into a discussion about the need (we agreed) for journalism students to improvise their approach to their careers because–well, they really have no other choice. Journalism as it used to be is over. Journalism as it will be defined in the future is just beginning. The end of one story is always the beginning of another. By the end of dinner, it was clear that this conversation will continue soon and will probably come to include those USC students next semester.
Today (Wednesday) at breakfast, we sat in Manhattan Beach with two guys named Rick, one from L.A., one from Chicago, and mapped out how the movie studios can change the game with distributed production models made possible by a new broadband network called Darkstrand that comes online in January and can move data at 40 gigabytes per second. Darkstrand is the newly-privatized network that until now has been the exclusive domain of the Defense Dept. and university research scientists. See, the two Ricks were literally describing how to turn swords into plowshares. Or Disney shares anyway.
Today, we hung out in a garage in East L.A. with a friend of ours from Florida, a Taiwanese-American entrepreneur living in Santa Monica and two mechanics from Colombia flown in by our Florida friend to install an Italian-made hydrogen fuel conversion system called JiffyGas in a car originally manufactured in Japan. All the players in the scene had connected with one another via Google. Later this week, the friend from Florida and the two Colombians will do a JiffyGas conversion on a test car for NASA.
Before the end of the day we introduced the friend from Florida to an acquaintance from Denver who is a partner in iCAST, which creates jobs for impoverished communities in the U.S. and abroad. Next week, our Florida friend will talk to iCAST about how to build a jobs-creation scene with gasoline-to-hydrogen conversions as the game.
And now here you are. Welcome. Feel free to connect and play along.
One of my favorite metaphors for the Networked World comes from a source I can’t attribute. I believe I came across it in Wired Magazine in the late 1990s. In the article, the writer cited a sci-fi story that describes a future in which game kiosks have been installed on busy street corners. The kiosks alert passersby when there’s some kind of rotten thing happening to the human organism — a famine, a war, a currency devaluation, a water shortage, etc. When the alert is issued, pedestrians take to the kiosks and play a massively multplayer game designed so that the playing generates whatever kind of energy or economies are needed to correct the imbalance in the world. (more…)
To introduce her students to the concept of improvisation, Viola Spolin, the godmother of modern improv, used to summon half a dozen students onto the rehearsal stage, and then say nothing to them. Literally nothing. No direction. No reason for them to be there.
Scene #1: Bad Games in the U.K. According to the BBC, criminal fraud cases in the U.K. are up by 14% in 2008 over 2007. The top crooked games are boiler room scams, credit card fraud, tax cheating and identify theft. The Beeb says the total yearly cost to victims is over 504 billion Euro. Analysis: First of all, it’s a statistic, so there are several ways it can be read. Maybe cheating is up, but it’s just as likely prosecution is up 14% while crime remained steady. Or maybe crime has dropped by 5% but prosecution is up 19%. And this is the crime we know about. Maybe the crime we don’t know about is up 200%. Who can tell? We don’t know about it. My guess, just from what we’re learning daily about the games the financial industry has been playing, is that crime we don’t know about is hockey-sticking. (more…)
It’s only the most valuable brand in the world these days, so in one sense any kind of accolade, even one as prestigious as the GameChanger of the Month Award (“The Gamey”) with its winning prize of this blog post, is pretty obvious and lame.
What’s not so obvious or lame is how Google’s culture is built on fundamental concepts of improvisation. (more…)
My father, whose military medals and discharge papers were stashed in a wooden box buried in a closet, never spoke about World War II. The discharge papers said that he came out of the service as a corporal, a sharpshooter, and had served with distinction behind enemy lines. The medals suggested battles fought and valor under fire.
We got an occasional hint that he’d experienced his share of awfulness. We did not own guns, and we did not allow hunting on our land, anomalies among the farm families from our neck of the woods. My uncle once told me my dad had been in an ambush where only he and another guy in his unit survived. When we balked at eating all the food on our plates, he would sometimes end the dispute by declaring flatly: “You’ve never seen people starving to death.” He was right. We had not. And so we’d soldier on, through the boiled beets or the cauliflower, wondering all the while who he’d seen starving to death, and why.
Over the holidays, our friend Dean Read, the national sales director for 
Skillful players can play many roles. This is usually a good thing. It lets one relate to one’s audience and fellow players in ways that result in communication, learning and transformation–the triple-score for brands operating in the Networked World.
