Business - Written Monday, March 8, 2010 by Jeff DeChambeau - 2 Comments

Games, user experience, and retroactive Continuity–All enabled by platforms

As I may have mentioned before, Valve Software’s Portal is a favorite game of mine. At our December 2009 Insight conference I profiled it as an example of a game that does an excellent job of making players feel at ease in a system that is governed by alien rules, while teaching players how to think in a new and different way–valuable lessons for enterprises that wish to help their new hires hit the ground running when dealing with specific and well-established processes.

There is more to the game than a comprehensive tutorial, there’s also a sharp story, and perhaps more significantly, a robust content delivery and data-mining platform that Valve uses to update and monitor the usage of their products. Valve’s content distribution platform, Steam, allows the company to apply bug-fixes and updates to games, as well as learn about how users go about playing through the games, including but not limited to the furthest level of completion, and whereabouts in the game players are most likely to meet their end. Continue…