At this stage in my life i lived in Hamburg and worked in Hannover. So I bought myself a Bahncard 100 which allows you to take free trains in all of Germany. This made it possible to go between Hamburg and Hannover pretty much everyday.
So i had 2 hours to Hannover and 2 hours back to Hamburg everyday. I could work in the train so this time was not lost but most of the time on the way back I was already in "Feierabend".
I could watch movies but this got boring after some time ... so I started writing a book. How hard can it be? ;) I thought maybe a month and in the end in took me rather 3-4 months to get it done. Still it was fun and I decided to write down all the stuff I talk about when I am drunk in a bar. And some more.
Game of Life – What if game designers ruled the world? This book looks at 10 problems the (western) world is currently facing – from the financial crisis to the educational system – and discusses how the experience and mindset of a video game designer would tackle these problems. The basic assumption is that game designers have two big advantages: Firstly, they have a much more realistic view of how people really behave because they are constantly measuring and analyzing millions of people playing their games and do not rely on theories like the homo oeconomicus. Secondly, game designers are much more used to optimizing and creating environments which certain incentives set in place: While they create a new game every year or so, states are normally only founded every 100 years. It’s obviously easier to iterate in a game than in a state to drive a certain behavior. The book discusses each of the real world problems thoroughly and then tries to adopt key learnings from the gaming world to these issues in the real world. It wants to encourage collaboration between the gaming world and politics/economics to improve the (real) game of life.
Turns out these days everybody can self-publish a book. Amazon prints it on demand when you order! Cool :)
