Member-only story
Entrepreneurship and Innovation: Our Responsibility
An open discussion about taking responsibility with specific case in gaming industry.
There are plenty of articles here about start-ups, innovation, marketing, investing etc. I would like to start a different discussion — a discussion about taking responsibility and the why of things.
While I believe knowledge is everything, recently I started seeing way too many examples where knowledge was used in the worst ways possible. At the end of the day, it is just another tool and what we make of it is completely our responsibility. As we use our intelligence, insight, knowledge (call it what you will) to create new things, are we really using that creative power responsibly? Moreover, do we take ownership of our thoughts, words and actions? They all carry weight.
As we know, a company is a group of people working together on a common goal of providing goods and/or services to somebody. Companies successfully fulfill someone else’s needs or solve problems or create new needs to fulfill. At what point do we decide that the problems we are trying to solve are more important than the ones we are creating? Do we even consider the consequences or we just hide behind the nonsense like “we are creating more jobs, feeding the families…”?
This applies to literally every industry but it is particularly important in food, chemical, health, arms and IT industries…simply because of the extreme and direct impact they can have on human lives.
I prefer talking about something I know more about, though. Here I will talk specifically about the video games industry.
I have been a gamer for 30 years now. I earned my living playing some games 10 hours per day, others I just enjoyed. Sometimes I was a tester, sometimes a high level competitor, sometimes a hobbyist; I studied game design theory, designed mods for some existing games and finally founded a board game design, development and publishing company a few years ago.
Disclaimer: I still enjoy video games, specifically Civilization and Heroes 3. Also, even though I almost never have any time to play, I follow very closely video game development and I test plenty of new games out of curiosity. I believe…
