Game Thinking

Innovate Smarter & Drive Deep Engagement with Design Techniques from Hit Games

By: Amy Jo Kim PhD

Narrated by: Amy Jo Kim

How are market-leading products born?

Successful innovations may end up reaching a mainstream audience, but they never start off that way. That’s the paradox of innovation most entrepreneurs fail to embrace - the typical people in your market are not the ones you need to woo when bringing your idea to life.

Instead, find the “superfans” hidden in your audience: those willing to take risk and put up with a messy or incomplete prototype in order to start solving the problem your product will eliminate. Show your idea to these people. What do they love about it? Where does it seem to go in the wrong direction? Allowing these early fans to “play” with your idea gives you fast, accurate answers to your most pressing questions long before your product is built.

Game thinking supercharges your progress.

That’s where Game Thinking comes in. In this groundbreaking audiobook, Amy Jo Kim lays out a step-by-step system for crafting products that people love...and keep loving. The secret? Develop “impossible to put down” products by using techniques that the fast-moving games industry employs when making games that glue millions of players to their screens.

During her time working on genre-defining games like The Sims, Rock Band, and Ultima Online, Amy Jo learned that customers stick with products that help them get better at something they care about, like playing an instrument or leading a team. Amy Jo has used her insights from gaming to help hundreds of companies like Netflix, Disney, The New York Times, Ubisoft, and Happify innovate faster and smarter and drive long-term engagement.

Build successful products like a (game) master.

Building on the principles of Lean/Agile design and design thinking, Game Thinking covers five powerful strategies you can use to create your next hit product:

• Accelerate innovation by testing your highest risk assumptions first
• Use insights from superfans to build a product that fits how people really behave
• Keep customers engaged with a coherent and compelling customer journey
• Improve your product concept by rapidly testing and tuning the core experience
• Plot your development path with the game thinking road map

Get your hands on Game Thinking and start innovating smarter today.

©2018 Amy Jo Kim (P)2019 Amy Jo Kim

Pretty good insights, a bit too rebranded

This is a pretty good book that goes over topics like iterative design development, design thinking, lean start up, and other agile type methods that allow entrepreneurs to fail fasting right quickly. These topics are also true for game development. The author does a good job of pulling these together into a cohesive message, but she uses some re-branding to meet her own brand that I don’t think is necessary. Still if you can get past that, this book has some good introductory information on design thinking, iterative development, etc. my favorite theme in the book is the focus on the end-user. There’s also a great interview with a design thinker who discusses product market fit. He says that companies should not be satisfied with one product market fit, but instead be thinking of their product pipeline also focusing on the second product’s fit so that they have a series of product fitness. That was pretty insightful. Her narration is good, but she gets a bit preachy at times. Still the overall audio experience was good.

Good

The spotlight features in the book were good. Some interesting sections with game psychology... but not enough for me if I'm honest. Without offending the author, I found the narration very distracting at times. The enthusiasm was good though. This is a good book for entry level entrepreneurs, which I think is the point.

the author should have applied her own techniques

this book is okay. it struggles to find purpose, often vacillating between game design and lean agile, which are not the same topic at all. tangentially related, but this was two small books crammed together to make one saleable product.

A wonderful compliment to The Lean Startup

After reading the lean startup I wanted something to expand on that. This book was what I was looking for.

I found particular value in approaches that differed from traditional design thinking taught in colleges such as replacing “user stories” with job stories.

Also, I thought the book was a perfect length.

Thorough and informative.

The book was very informative in regards to the thought process and design involved from start to finish and beyond for a product. It wasn't exactly what I was expecting when I grabbed it and may have been a bit above my level of understanding regarding the more technical aspects of things, but still worth the read.

Great book of you've been in the industry

in my opinion, great book for devs with experience, but it's a little overwhelming for someone new to the field.

Great!

A great book that will change the way you think about human systems and learning.

Entrepreneurs & Game Devs READ THIS!!!

Learning about game design in the context of product and business creation is so insightful! Kim does a great job of laying out step by step a system for using these systems and insights to make your product happen for the right audience.

Amalgamation of past and future processes

Amy offers a compelling amalgamation of past and future thinking processes. She presents ideas that have bits of agile, scrum, design thinking, systems thinking, jobs to be done theory and a whole lot more. She does not drag things out but provides a quick tool kit to use and implement immediately.

Fascinating book!

I got so many ideas for how to test hypothesis and marry the research I'm doing with the product I am creating. I learned a lot reading this book.