COLUMN: Challenges, games, and what we can learn from them
CEO Jussi “dev0” Kallioniemi wanted to write a few words about his personal experiences in relation to ROUNDS.
[Finnish tabloid] Ilta-Sanomat recently wrote about me and Katujahti (linked below), a personal project that grew into something bigger than I first expected.
I have never been especially motivated by exercise itself. I like clear goals and challenges. That is the idea behind Katujahti. It turns walking into a game with one simple goal: walk every street.
Screenshots from the Katujahti application. The goal is to “claim” real-world streets by walking on them with GPS on.
Games as a laboratory
At ROUNDS, we play to win. That means learning from mistakes and improving all the time.
Fast, strategic, and tactical games like Counter-Strike 2 give us a laboratory. Teamplay matters, decisions happen quickly, and a lot of what happens can be measured. In addition to individual performance, we can look at decision making, communication, and team dynamics. We can also test technology and new ideas in a real environment, and measure the results.
More than competition
ROUNDS is about playing and competing. At the same time, and in my opinion because of that, research, experimentation, and development are becoming a much more central part of what we do.
We want to understand what games can teach us, what we can build around them, and where those lessons can be useful outside of gaming too.
Read the Ilta-Sanomat article (in Finnish): https://www.is.fi/esports/art-2000012273483.html
Written by:
Jussi – dev0
CEO, ROUNDS
Edited by:
Lari – finkka
ROUNDS