Fast Company -- Jazzed About Work
If people are going to use computer technologies to augment their interactions, those technologies need to have the directness and spontaneity of a phone call, the visual immediacy of a fax, the asynchrony of email, and the privacy of a closed-door meeting. All of this started to crystallize for me one night, when I came home and found my son playing a modified capture-the-flag version of Quake. He and his friends had actually designed their own virtual environment: They could look up, look down, look left, look right. They could jump up and grab the flag. They could even talk to other team members. I sat there and watched him for a while, and then it hit me that this was his way of communicating. He was socializing with other people by playing this game on the Net. And I realized that those of us in business -- who have so much to gain through effective communication -- were using lame, document-oriented tools. Our own kids were using technology far more effectively than we were! They were operating in an environment where small groups of people can self-organize and interact. And they made me think that I should be able to use technology in the same way.