Interesting Day at the European Commission to talk about games and collaborative working environments

Yesterday, I spent a day at the office of the Directorate Generale of the Information Society and Media of the EC (sounds pretty awesome hey ;) Specialist from different backgrounds; games, organisation management, interactive storytelling and crossmedia where invited to discuss the use of game structures for achieving collaborative working environments. Making work more like play seems to me as beneficial for most humans. The main conclusion was that for the Long Term the EC needs to invest in the development and research of applications and environments that enable: To empower people with building components to design and author their own collaborative working environments What can we learn from games, what makes them so engaging that we can learn from and use in collaborative working environments? A lot is the conclusion, although be aware not to copy paste games on working environments and to look at a game success does not mean it will be a success in a working environments. The co-creation element that is getting ever more important in games and crossmedia communication plays an even larger role when you look at working environments I think. People need authoring tools that are richer then e-mail, weblogs and chat. But just the success of these lies in the ability to co-create with these means in an easy way. Rich authoring tools that are extremely easy to use, intelligence that is unobtrusively helping you to design and author your own collaborative working environment. The characteristics of crossmedia communication may even apply more direct to the collaborative working environment then games. In a crossmedia environment as in the real world you need to interact in virtual environments, media channels and in the real world, the same applies to collaborative working environments being a mixture of real and virtual environments.