17 years of my life I spent as a videoconference professional. Back when I started it was a bigger deal than now. Now, decent quality video conferencing is available on your phone.<\/p>\n
Among us professionals, it was a widely acknowledged truth: the most important part of a videoconference is the audio.<\/p>\n
The image of the person is all fine and good. A smile or a frown tells you something. But if the video is great and the audio is choppy, it is unbearable. I might see a frozen image of your face, but if your voice is clear, we can have a conversation.<\/p>\n
It’s not something the salespeople tell the CEOs. But we all knew it. Things aren’t always what you expect.<\/p>\n
I’m not a video conferencing professional right now. In my new job, a whole lot of my co-workers are into video games.<\/p>\n
I have not spent much time becoming good at video games. This Christmas we bought our daughter a Nintendo, and I spent some time revisiting how bad at video games. I regret my lack of expertise.<\/p>\n
I talked\u00a0about it with co-worker Steve, who hosts his own streaming channel<\/a>\u00a0devoted to video games.\u00a0I asked “Since you’ve been playing these games so long, don’t you want to get involved in making them?”<\/p>\n He said no. But since I asked, he told me the three considerations for judging a game. It has to have a good story–naturally the part that fascinated me. It has to have good graphics. I argued that point, for a bit. Wouldn’t a good story override the quality of the graphics?<\/p>\n Then he dropped a Z-axis into my roadmap:<\/p>\n There has to be good gamesmanship.<\/p>\n What is THAT?<\/p>\n This is a whole new way of looking at the world.<\/p>\n Coincidentally, this weekend was spent reading The Hunger Games<\/em> trilogy. These books are not great works of prose. And yet I could not put them down.<\/p>\n Because of the game. I know exactly what the author was doing. She told the game, and like all the audience in the fictional story, I was riveted. I had to find out what would happen next.<\/p>\n Unlike Steve, I found myself wondering if could concoct a game story like Collins. I want to get behind and make the thing I love–stories.<\/p>\n The ancient Greeks–no strangers to the excitement of games! –had two kinds of drama stories. They divided it up into Comedy and Tragedy.<\/p>\n Tragedy ended in death and Comedy ended in a marriage. Those were the rules.<\/p>\n Every game has rules.<\/p>\n I wonder. Maybe all the stories are telling how the game was played. All the little puzzles, the obstacles that must be overcome and resolved, this is gamesmanship.<\/p>\n So perhaps all the world’s a game. And we are merely players.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 17 years of my life I spent as a videoconference professional. Back when I started it was a bigger deal than now. Now, decent quality video conferencing is available on your phone. Among us professionals, it was a widely acknowledged … Continue reading