The fun is dead, long live the fun!

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Are you happy on Monday morning? What about Friday evening? We all know how office workers are waiting for the Friday evenings… Because work is hard. Because there is no more joy. Really? How people who are not feeling good about their work can produce something great?

If you ask any of your colleague when they felt joy at work they probably tell you about some challenge they faced and successfully solved or brainstorming, where their team produced a great idea. Also they can point out the time when they worked with a great passionate team of developers. Even if they were creating “one more social network”.

Continue reading The fun is dead, long live the fun!

Fun and passion – PM, don’t kill motivation

Creating good software is all about passion. No matter how good you are, how good you team members are – if they get up every morning and hardly can convey themselves go to the office – you product will be dead. Or may be it is dead already, so you observe only the post-mortem reflex movements of the dead body…

Who can be happier than the PM, who sees the passion in the eyes of the team members? I think, no one) As a real hedonist I try to find ways to help my teams keep that passion. So, let me present my modest observations results.

Continue reading Fun and passion – PM, don’t kill motivation

Anatomy of fun

“Fun is all about our brains feeling good”

Raph Koster, The theory of fun for game design

We all talk a lot about fun at work, fun in life and different activities. But what it is? Identifying it and understanding it will help a lot for those managers, who want not to vanish fun in the working process.

I want to start with a bit of theory.game designers have spent much time on creating their theories of fun. Let’s look at several of them:

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