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What games can teach enterprise developers


By Alex Handy


 Alex Handy
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January 30, 2012 —  (Page 1 of 3)
FIRST OF TWO PARTS

Got an Android or iPhone? Pull it out right now. Are there more games on it than enterprise business applications? We'd bet that way. And yet both are software, and both are built by developers working in teams with deadlines. What can your developers learn from game developers?

George K. Mathew, president and COO of business intelligence firm Alteryx, said that enterprise applications tend to be stodgy and boring, even though they really don't have to be that way.

“When you look at the enterprise applications that are in market today, they're horrible experiences, both for design time and run time,” he said. “You've got people who are trained on great video games, all the way up through their 20s and beyond, and you enter the workforce, and you have these amazingly horrible experiences in your enterprise applications. I think [Salesforce.com CEO] Marc Benioff deserves credit on this. He said that just like there was an Arab spring, there is going to be a corporate spring where people will just revolt against the applications in their enterprise.

“I think it started with mobile. The applications are better than they were two or three years ago. People want better enterprise experiences.”

The power of easy user interfaces is a big pull for the appeal of video games. The popularity of games with simple interfaces across the history of video gaming is an indication of what people gravitate towards. Tetris, Pac-Man and recent Scrabble clone Words With Friends are all examples of games with very simple interface paradigms and widespread appeal and popularity.

Consider the interface of Pac-Man: a single joystick. Up, down, left and right are the only options available to the player. While gameplay elements such as power pills and ghosts offer dynamic and shifting play experiences, the user is still only presented with a simple, clear interface.

Tetris is another example. The rotate buttons add to the traditional joystick directions, but the gameplay is entirely generated from the complexity of fitting four-square blocks together.

Mining for ideas
Another example of simple interface design winning over players is the popular indie game Minecraft. This blocky 3D game offered players a very simple-to-use interface for building incredible structures. Using the standard interface of first-person shooters (mouse and keyboard), Minecraft players have constructed scale models of the Starship Enterprise, in-game art, and an almost infinite number of castles. Minecraft sold millions of copies online as nothing more than an alpha, and has subsequently reached version 1.0 thanks to millions of dollars in revenues for Swedish startup Mojang.

And in the story of Minecraft, another lesson can be learned by enterprise developers: Talk to your users often. In the case of Minecraft, the game's creator, Markus “Notch” Persson, offered the game to the public as an alpha, and then responded to user demands and criticism with each successive release.

The alpha release of Minecraft also allowed Persson to charge for the game long before it was worth the purchase price. At US$16 initially, the price rose with each passing development phase. So successful was Persson's pricing structure and release cycle that PayPal couldn't keep up with the massive amounts of money his company was raking in every week.

Or course, Minecraft isn't that different from an enterprise application. It is written in Java, and all players contact a central validation server. Additionally, end users can run the Minecraft server and allow external clients to connect remotely.

Without the graphics, you'd think Minecraft was a deployable enterprise service. And yet this alludes to another lesson enterprises can learn, or likely have already learned on their own, from the game world: one incredibly good programmer is worth 100 novices. While Persson has subsequently hired a staff, he wrote Minecraft entirely on his own until just before the beta phase. By that time, the game had sold almost a million copies.


Related Search Term(s): game development

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Comments


02/01/2012 02:01:50 PM EST

comparing apples to oranges. game dev cannot be compared to ent dev.

United Statesron


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