Skip to main content

I asked for Super-Man

and they gave me an office person! said the little one.

He was playing Scribblenauts Remix on the iPad. If you have an iPad please download Scribblenauts Remix and read the rest of the post.

If not read it anyway. The game has a simple premise. You are given a situation to solve – pretty simple ones – like giving someone a haircut or painting a car. And how do you solve it? By asking for tools that help you resolve the issue at hand. How do you ask for tools? You spell it out and the game provides it. That’s it.

Simple as the premise is, the little one (and his dad) has gone crazy over playing it and in the process both his spellings and his imagination have gone up. Take a scenario – where the character of the game has to reach something in the sky. You could ask for a hot-air balloon, a winged horse, a magic carpet or an aeroplane! If he is hungry, you can ask for a idli, a burger or anything. We once asked for a nuclear bomb and as you might imagine, it killed everyone in the level – pretty neat way to learn, I suppose. You can pretty much ask for anything that’s in the dictionary and your imagination! And that what makes it so lovely.

Few rules, lots of fun and learning is imbibed. Wow. Whatay combination.

And it does not allow for the player for copyrighted names and trademarks, hence no Superman when the little one decided to invoke him in a game. And as you can see by the response on top, he was quite disappointed by the response. Be that as it may, it gave us a few laughs at the way he said, “office person” (someone wearing a suit or dressed formally, I presume). Yay, son, your dad is no superman either, he is, indeed, an office-person.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The man who saved Pumpelsdrop

This was a story we had in college if I am not mistaken. Perhaps it was in school, but a delightful story it was. The story goes somewhat like this ( reproduced from here ), but the college version we had was slightly different from this.  I t was a dull, gloomy and a depressing morning in a town named Pumpelsdrop in northern England. The Great Depression had brought all the businesses to a standstill. The bored automobile dealer was spending time alone, as usual. But, this seems to be an unusual morning as an odd entity (customer) appeared on the horizon. A man in a bright suit walks up to the dealer and says, "I need to buy a Rolls Royce Phantom II. We have a business conference coming up and I need to impress my customers". Then proceeds to pay 10% of the deal with a single check for 2000 pounds. The rest he says will pay when he takes the delivery.   The auto dealer was stunned. He was delighted to hear that someone is holding a business conference of some kind and

The Mintzberg triangle

At a recent training, someone spoke about the Mintzberg triangle. I located it here . Image from that page reproduced here. The page linked above has a better explanation of diagram above, but what intrigued me was that the triangle exists for practically anything. The facilitator referred to this in the context of facilitation. Of how facilitation has science, craft and art to it. That is so true,  I thought. Worth a thought! Need to read of Mintzberg though...

Waigaya and Sangen Shugi - Honda

Two big takeaways from Driving Honda were Waigaya and Sangen Shugi. A few days ago, we were working on a strategy module for a company. As we leafed through old and new theories and books around the same - one comment which caught my eye was Henry Mintzbergs comment where he says "Strategy is like weeds, it has to grow all around your company" A lot of times organisations dip into their pool of employees (and sometimes customers) and solicit ideas from them. This happens either at an offsite or a meeting or some quarterly review and the ideas pile up. Most companies today have an innovation program that encourages bottom up ideation. Many of these ideas are future strategy - provided someone is listening. Sometimes these ideas are not immediately implementable - but if one keeps looking, there might be valuable stuff in there. And if (post such programs) ideas die very often, the motivation of someone to keep doing it will also diminish. Waigaya is what Honda call