What's in My backpack

The business innovator: Gabriel McIntyre

Gabriel McIntyre

CEO and founder of ‘the game beyond’

Some notes of the lecture:

• Microsoft had a problem with the new way of working, a new office space was made next to Schiphol designed for 300 employees but there were 1000 employees. How to solve this?
• Alternate reality game, a game which makes you question whether it’s a game or not. The real world is used as platform for the game. Some of these alternate reality games were created to solve real-life time problems
• ‘the community of silverline’, people of this community still help each other out. They recognise each other by e.g. a small sticker of the logo of the community on a bag or laptop.
• Mr. McIntyre’s past: worked with Coca Cola, BMW, Ben&Jerry. Through these collaborations he met a lot of ‘valuable’ people; inventor of video games, inventor of wikipedia and the inventor of Facebook etc. He’s now even good friends with some of them.
• For Ben&Jerry he made a game for the launch of their new flavour and it ended up to be B&J’s most successful launch.
• The game fold-it; is a game where the solution for aids was found.
• Nolan Bushnell; father of video games as Mr. McIntyer describes him. He was the founder of Atari, Kee games, Oomba etc.
• Mr. McIntyre says that video games keep us in game flow, Tetris effect; a form of habit.
• He says: the why’s in life will come, be open for them.

Gabriel McIntyre was an excellent speaker. He, as every guest speaker, told me to never give up. Life will come and throw all sorts of negativity on you, that’s how life works. You need to find a way to deal with it, to solve it, or to avoid it. But whatever you do never give up. Go and explore, see new things, dare to do new things, go on an adventure. Mr. McIntyre looks like an ordinary guy, laid back, open. But when he told us his journey I gained a lot of respect for him. He wasn’t the typical speaker who says do good in school and you will end well. Of course he told us to do good in school but most important was to do good within ourselves. Explore as I already mentioned. He did the same, he has done the most extravagant things like going to burning man the festival. He told us about his drug use and his partying but also about his serious things like working for big and small companies. His connections in the business world and he ended up being friends with them. Meeting their families, letting one of them sleep on his couch. Amazing stories to hear and amazing to see where he is now and how he still has the same mind set years later.

Gabriel McIntyre taught me to do things my way, and if it doesn’t feel right move on because there are millions of opportunities ahead of me that I don’t know of. A lot of why’s still coming my way and I will be open for them as I will never give up.