I was in New York most of the week, first on a panel at the Serious Issues, Serious Games conference -- which I'll write about soon -- and then hanging out with my friend Britt Blaser, the Dean campaign technology adviser who was instrumental in making the Howard Dean for Iowa Game happen. Britt and I spent a lot of time thinking, talking, and doodling about games and game-like visualizations for some new projects he's working on.

Back in the late '90s I remember hearing about Fortune 1000 companies commissioning "digital dashboards" for their executives to get real-time snapshots of the health of the organization. Thanks to Matteo (Pure genius!), I've found a great example of how visualization can renew and reinvent otherwise prosaic, tedious processes. More fun than Bloomberg terminals but deadly useful, a new serivce called VisitorVille combines a live data service with a Windows desktop client to offer a SimCity-like visual metaphor for understanding website traffic. Houses are pages, people are visitors, cabs and buses are referrers, and user-specified VIPs arrive in limos and helicopters. Population density represents popularity, and buildings gone dark show exit paths.

VisitorVille is one of the best examples of complex visualization I think I've ever seen. It costs US$30 per month and up, depending on how much traffic you have, but I may have a go at it -- inspiration is worth at least that much, plus maybe I'd get a better view of my web traffic. And a practical complex visualization too, not just pretty pictures that graphicize arbitrary flows and processes. And it's lead me to a set of broader observations about the role of games in retooling business.

Britt's been a GUI-guy from day one, and I'm not just saying that; he was the angel investor behind the Dynamac, the first authorized Mac portable. This week, Britt started talking about a new revolution in graphical user interfaces built around dynamic visualization strategies like the one VisitorVille enacts. Games provide important insight into how to create efficient, dynamic visual metaphors. Back during the internet bubble, first we thought of utility in terms of applications -- writing code and building integrations. That placed all the emphasis on the system and very little on the user. Most companies spent a lot of money on design, but few invested in user experience. Then Macromedia had a go at what they called Rich Internet Applications. Based on the near-ubiquitous Flash platform, RIA's seemed like a great way to bridge the chasm. But Macromedia too made terrible mistakes, first using the platform just to recast the form of static content in the medium of Flash, and then to place some awful limits on its ability to couple to other systems (Web Services in Flash MX Pro can't make calls outside the movie's subdomain!).

Earlier this week, I wrote about my dissatisfaction with the mobile carrier market. When my flight from La Guardia arrived 45 minutes late yesterday, the flight attendant reasoned in her landing announcement, "we apologize for the lateness, but at least we got you here." Today, Newsweek published an interview with Claes Fornell, author of the quarterly American Customer Satisfaction Index. The worst two industries reported were wireless and airlines. Fornell's perspective on why this has happened is instructive:

Games and game-like visualizations finally do something that eBusiness has not done -- they force authors, users, and viewers to understand business processes as processes, as customer flows through businesses. Chris Crawford's most important game design principle is that design is about verbs, not nouns. Business interactions, personal interactions, social interactions, political interactions -- are these are verbs too, not nouns, but we have for so long been treated as nouns, as the results of algebraic queries across database tables. Should it be any surprise that games could lead us out of these chains?

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