Today my schedule took me, and with me GameTime 24x7, all over the city to meet with a variety of game-loving people.  First thing this morning, I had the privilege of sharing breakfast with Mary Couzin, founder of the Chicago Toy and Game Fair, Carina of Casa De Carina, and Carina's cousin Danny Lewis of the DLRP Marketing Company.  We are developing a collaborative effort to market an incredible game system to the Latino community - LOTERIA MIX™.  You'll be hearing more about this over the next few days.

I also had the opportunity to speak with Michael Harper of TalentGenesis.  We're going to meet in a couple weeks, when he returns to Chicago, to discuss games and professional development.  In the mean time, he suggested that I get a copy of The Kids are Alright: How the Gamer Generation is Changing the Workplace.  I found a copy on sale cheap at Amazon.com, so I should have it shortly to review.  I'll share what I learn about the gamer culture and its impact on the business world via this blog.

At lunch, my friend and business associate Brian Blankstein met up with me and we got together with Yan Pritzker, CEO of Planypus, a website designed to support impromptu get-togethers among friends.  We may find ourselves collaborating soon on a special project - stay tuned.

In the evening, I returned to my favorite Argo Tea over at 16 W. Randolph for this Wednesday's GameTime Afterhours.  Brian and I helped introduce a few newbies to Settlers of Catan and then we settled in for some team-based party games, beginning with a rousing game of Cranium and wrapping up with a marathon session of Taboo.  We almost ran through every single one of the pink-colored cards.  My most intriguing observation of the experience was how radically differently every player approached the challenge of providing clues without using the restricted words.  Players provided hints ranging from very literal word associations to vague implications and from terse terms or expressions to very verbose, rapid-fire commentary.  From this observation, I discovered that there is a value to collaborating with someone who has a complementary communication style OR one who has a style that can adapt to complement yours.  When you discount the challenge of avoiding the restriction words, performance between pairs or teams varied wildly from -2 points at the minimum to 7 points at the maximum in a single round.  I'm very eager to learn more about how Taboo could be used to evaluate communications styles and enable teams to more effectively communicate.