Skip to main content

Subway Surfers

Most of us who have smart phones would know of a game known as 'Subway Surfers'. And most of us would agree that it is a practically useless game.

There is a random person running along the railway tracks collecting random stuff and paraphernalia. And to help the addiction thing continue, they helpfully change the 'city' and some associated graphics and 'stuff' and 'characters' every few weeks - just so. And that was my thought as well.

Until I heard this conversation between the kids.

"Don't waste money" said one to the other.
My ears perked - did they figure out how to buy an app? Did they crack my password? And then I figured that they were talking about how to use the gold coins that they had collected in the game.
"Dont buy the skateboard now. It is a waste of your money. Use a skateboard when you get the skateboard free. Use the coins for other things that will help you more."

The conversation continued until one convinced the other about the need to use their resources smartly.

And that brought to me this thought - that many of these games while they learn about defeating enemies, building cities, logic - they also learn the importance of using resources smartly - and in a 'osmosis' kind of way.

So, Subway Surfers is not that useless a game - it teaches resource allocation. Hah, let them play.

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