Earlier this month, MediaMiser hosted a full day of planning on its research and development roadmap. It was an opportunity to plan for changes to our big data platform, our public APIs, and the future of our key components such as monitoring, contact manager and briefings.
During our lunch break, we also had the privilege of playing the game Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes before its official release.
Even if it’s still under development, this game was a highly playable and polished gem that gave us a solid two hours of fun and team stress-testing.
But enough about R&D testing — I’d like to talk about this video game.
Two of the founders behind Ottawa-based startup Steel Crate Games — Brian Fetter and Ben Kane — recently showed us their virtual reality, puzzle-solving game that relies heavily on teamwork and the capacity of people to communicate clearly.
The idea is simple: one player is immersed in a virtual room and has to diffuse a bomb. To do so, the player must work with two teammates that were given a precious instruction manual in the real world. Communication must go back and forth between the two worlds in order to identify the right puzzles, find clues on how to solve them, and follow precise instructions to defuse the munitions in question.
Needless to say, we unfortunately detonated one bomb after another for the first hour until a few team members developed enough skills to finally diffuse our first bomb.
This game highlights how a lack of critical communication skills or details can lead to confusion, derail projects and potentially create explosions!
Kudos to the Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes team, and big thanks for the insightful time they provided.
