Enterprise Games and the Massively Multiplayer Workforce

You don't need virtual worlds when you game reality. The "serious game" designers at Natron Baxter explore the psychology and application of sponsored enterprise games, and propose a path toward total employee engagement: the very real human traits of curiosity, collaboration, and competition.

Nathan is defining the user experience of applied gaming.

Nathan is a User Experience Consultant who has worked in the web industry as a strategist, interaction designer, user researcher and developer since, well, the disciplines existed. He brings his business consulting, interaction design, technical and usability experience to the Baxters, as well as his ability to reignite that playful spirit that at some point we were told to put away. Nathan once posed as a roving reporter in order to gain all access status to a central Illinois pumpkin tossing competition.

Nathan's work at IFTF included interaction design and development of the brainstorming game Signtific Lab, which was launched at Webstock 2009, showcased at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference and featured on the popular internet blog BoingBoing. Nathan developed an application for Anheuser-Busch which allowed the brewing giant unprecedented navigation of comparitive performance measures. In less than a minute, managers could navigate >300,000 slices of business, drilling from overall corporate health to an individual convenience store.

Natron Baxter Applied Gaming increases engagement, loyalty, and morale through the thoughtful application of gameplay. As experience designers, usability experts and serious game developers, we tap into the human spirit of curiosity, collaboration, and competition.

More specifically, we employ cultural studies and social technologies to create game-inspired software to solve the very real problems of large organizations. Our software executes our core belief that "fun is not the enemy of work."

Natron Baxter responds to organizations' need for employee engagement, the large population of game players within the workforce, and the desire within all of us for organized play and more rewarding work.

Our game development experience includes Signtific Labs (on behalf of the Institute For The Future), Coral Cross (on behalf of the Hawaii Department of Health and the CDC), as well as games currently under development for other private brands.

Matthew minds the balance of work and play.

He is a cross-discipline creative with the utmost faith in a digital tomorrow. His efforts as a creative director, interactive lead, and experience designer have spanned Crate Amplifiers, Ernst & Young, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Aon, Dreyer's Ice Cream, Sears, the St. Louis Rams, and WebMD / Emdeon. Matthew is obsessed with new ideas, yet wears argyle socks every day.

At the behest of a collective of hardware developers, application designers, and wifi wonks, Matthew (with Nathan and others) once developed a comprehensive visual narrative showcasing potential applications of consumer-grade augmented reality technologies in 2022. The various scenes depicted work, play, romance, and bloody panic through augmented and unaugmented eyes. Another time, he shook up Honolulu's Chinatown with a guerrilla "pre-enactment" of the aftermath of an avian flu pandemic, trampled N95 masks and all. Media called it "a movie set of sorts, approaching the level of production design that goes into films like Children of Men."

Natron Baxter Applied Gaming increases engagement, loyalty, and morale through the thoughtful application of gameplay. As experience designers, usability experts and serious game developers, we tap into the human spirit of curiosity, collaboration, and competition.

More specifically, we employ cultural studies and social technologies to create game-inspired software to solve the very real problems of large organizations. Our software executes our core belief that "fun is not the enemy of work."

Natron Baxter responds to organizations' need for employee engagement, the large population of game players within the workforce, and the desire within all of us for organized play and more rewarding work.

Our game development experience includes Signtific Labs (on behalf of the Institute For The Future), Coral Cross (on behalf of the Hawaii Department of Health and the CDC), as well as games currently under development for other private brands.