Why Every Company Needs a Chief Gaming Officer

Over the past several years I’ve been producing Innovation Games® events to help my friends in the Intellectual Property industry define the role of the Chief Intellectual Property Officer (CIPO)¹. As I’ve started to prepare for another round of games on this topic, I’ve come to believe that every company needs a CGO – a Chief Gaming Officer. This post is the start of a global conversation on the role of the CGO. If you care about the power of serious games to create amazing, transformative results for companies, I invite you to join me in this conversation and in defining this role.

Wikipedia is Wrong

If you search on the internet, you’ll find that several gaming companies have CGOs. Indeed, Wikipedia defines a CGO as follows:

A chief gaming officer (abbreviated as CGO) is an executive position whose holder is focused on research and technical issues within a computer game company.

The problem with this definition is that it is tragically limited along a number of dimensions.

• The primary focus of the CGO should be on developing a comprehensive set of programs that leverage serious games for the benefit of the organization. Research and technical issues, for most organizations, won’t ever be a consideration.
• Every significant organization requires a CGO, not just computer game companies.

Before we can replace this definition with a better one, we need to review a few things, like traditional executive titles and how we interpret these titles.

Traditional Executive Titles

Any title prefixed with “Chief” is important. Consider your thoughts are you consider titles like:

• Chief Executive Officer
• Chief Financial Officer
• Chief Operations Officer
• Chief Marketing Officer
• Chief Technology Officer
• … and so on

As you consider these titles, you can’t help but associate these roles with a set of attributes that are reflective of the notion that people with these titles are the highest/most powerful positions within a company.  Their span of control is large, and while they are the leader of their functional unit, they are required to collaborate with others to accomplish their goals and the goals of the company. Their scope is strategic, which means that they have a longer time horizon that others with more tactical roles. They have larger budgets and far greater discretionary authority with which to carry out their actions.

I’ll bet, though, that one of the stumbling blocks as you consider a “Chief Gaming Officer” title, is that we haven’t even defined the role. The challenge here is based on many things, including the lack of a standard definition of a game and the misunderstood use of games within a company.

Let’s Define a Game

While there are lots of definitions of a game, I’ve found the following quite useful.

• In his book GameChangers, Mike Bonifer defines a game as group activities undertaken for the purpose of achieving an objective.
• In their book Gamestorming, Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, and James Macunafo define a game similarly to Mike’s definition, albeit with a greater clarity about such things as rules and operating contexts.
• In my own book Innovation Games, I define an Innovation Game as a fun way to collaborate with customers to better understand their needs. Of course, since the book was written, we’ve greatly expanded the use of the games).
• TJ Keitt and Paul Jackson from Forrester defines a serious gaming as The use of games or gaming dynamics not simply to entertain the player, but rather to inspire a particular action, effect some type of attitudinal/behavioral change, or instill a particular lesson in the service of an organizational goal.²
• In his book Finite and Infinite Games, the philosopher James Carse provides an important distinction in the structure and meaning of games: An Infinite game, like marriage, or parenthood, or, staying in business as a company, is a game in which the primary goal of play is to continue play. A finite game, on the other hand, is a game that has a defined objective, winners, losers, rules, and field of play. From this perspective, the serious games that we play at work are finite games that are played within the context of the infinite game.

These are some pretty broad and expansive definitions. And even if you don’t agree with them, let’s suppose that they’ve caused you to challenge your assumptions about what a “game” is, what it could be, and what it might do. That’s good, because once we agree on the definition of a game we can start to define the role of the CGO.

The Responsibilities of the Chief Gaming Officer

The key responsibility of the Chief Gaming Officer is as follows:

Ensure that the organization’s use of serious games is aligned to the strategic interests of the organization and executed within the tactical context of the organization.

In pursuit of this of this responsibility, the CGO must:

• Participate in the development of organizational strategy;
• Educate the organization on the purpose, value, and use of serious games;
• Assist organizational units in creating programs that leverage serious games pursuant to their objectives (e.g., helping sales leverage serious games to more efficienctly allocate sales resources, helping marketing design more engaging Customer Advisory Board meetings, and so forth);
• Assist organizational units in producing serious games designed to realize the goals identified in the programs;
• Manage the software infrastructure that the organization uses to play games.

As a senior executive, the CGO must have more than an internal focus. The CGO must also:

• Ensure that programs include the collaboration of key partners, suppliers, and vendors; and, as necessary, include them in the production (and playing) of games;
• Directly manage the specific partners and vendors that the corporation uses in producing games;
• Represent the corporation’s interests in the ongoing evolution of the serious games industry.

Key Attributes of a Chief Gaming Officer

I’d like to say that all a CGO needs is a playful approach to business, but it is clear that for the CGO to become a recognized executive position the CGO must have a multi-disciplinary background. This means that the CGO is likely to be strongest in one area, perhaps the area of their greatest work experience, while being able to operate well in several others. The analogy of a product manager works well, for effective product managers are inherently multi-disciplinary people.

Here are some key attributes of a CGO. Not surprisingly, this list correlates to their key responsibilities. So, if you adjust their responsibilities, you’ll need to adjust this list:

• Has the proven experience of using serious games to solve complex problems;
• Has a background in either cognitive psychology and organizational behavior, and is able to leverage this in developing programs and producing games;
• Is a skilled educator who can clearly frame the hard ROI and soft benefits from serious games;
• Is highly effective at managing the internal and external relationships that are critical to the success of the organization.

Examples of a Chief Gaming Officer in Action

I’ve tried hard to find examples of a Chief Gaming Officer as I’ve described them above. Once I exclude gaming companies, consulting firms, and pundits, I can’t seem to find any. That’s a shame, and one that I hope to help correct. The first step is this post. The second will be a work in progress that we’ll be working to define with the

Next Steps

I don’t think of this post as done. Indeed, I think of it as a start. I invite you to join this conversation and to define what I suspect that many of you would like as your actual job.

Footnotes

¹An excellent description of the role of the Chief Intellectual Property Officer is provided by Rob Sterne and Ron Laurie here.
²It’s Time to Take Games Seriously, Forrester Research, Aug 19, 2008