We’re not Christian, of course. Yet it feels somehow right to borrow what we appreciate from the cultural environment we live in.  As my Rabbi points out, Jews have done that for thousands of years — the tzitzit or fringes on our prayer shawls were appropriated from Egyptian royalty.  The key, I think, is to borrow in a way that celebrates the best of both traditions. For most Americans, Christmas seems to be less about Jesus than shopping, but we can all agree on this as a time for family togetherness, as the year draws to a close.

Now we’ll see how the stuffed cabbage comes out….

What we’ve learned over the past two decades is that the digital communications revolution — the most empowering, democratizing technological change since the printing press — can enable a well-organized and well-funded minority with compelling (if dangerous) ideas to hijack a country. We all laughed at Gingrich’s cassette tapes and conservative talk radio until the 1994 Congressional elections, and the country has only tilted further since then. It’s the same with guns. Groups like the NRA succeed because they can talk to their supporters without the rest of us hearing. They don’t need to be a majority; they just need the majority to be silent.

The genius of Obama’s campaign was its ability to activate the silent majority. That’s harder to do, because majorities in large diverse countries are complex and factionalized. You can still reach them with the shotgun blasts of old media, but that approach is what has become increasingly ineffective. As the Obama campaign showed, with a lot of passion and software and hacking, you can talk to a coalition at lower volume, sotto voce.

Which brings us to Sandy Hook. Most Americans don’t want assault weapons, and they don’t want their neighbors to have them.  Not to mention a variety of other common-sense limitations guns.  But it has been easier for the determined minority to organize and win the political battles.  A pro-gun control President like Obama didn’t have a good way to talk to us — not to the country, but to us.  And equally important, we had less than no way to talk to him.

So can I indulge in a bit of audacious hope in wondering if something like the overwhelmingly popular We the People  petition on gun control, and the White House responding by returning to campaign mode, could be the early stirrings of a new kind of politics?  I know, I know.  We the People is a broken platform, the Obama Administration has failed to live up to its promises of transparency, and the campaign’s technology advantage was relentlessly harnessed to fund-raising.  Just let me dream a little.  After something as horrific as the Sandy Hook massacre, I need to.

One of those trends, starting a few years ago, has been the growing significance of digital games.  From playing World of Warcraft, I’ve come to appreciate the incredible richness of experiences these games can produce.  There are fascinating connections between video games and law, sociology, psychology, and technology, not to mention major impacts on culture.  But what got me really excited was when, more recently, I started to see deep connections forming between games and business.  Not the business of selling games (though that’s huge): using insights from the world of games to tackle challenges in the world of business.   There are several names for this phenomenon. The most common is gamification, but a more accurate term is game thinking.

With Dan Hunter, a colleague formerly at Wharton and now at New York Law School, I started to dig into this emerging trend.  We organized the first gamification symposium and the first gamification class, both at Wharton. I was invited to do one of Penn’s first offerings through the Coursera massively open online course (MOOC) platform, and chose gamification as the topic, without know how much interest there would be. It had over 81,000 registered students and the best engagement rates of any course on the platform.  Along the way, Dan and I have been developing case studies, studying the relevant academic literature, and speaking with practitioners.

Gamification is now widely labeled as a “hot business trend.” That has resulted in hype that gives the concept the bad name.   Based on our deep understanding of gamification’s potential and its limits, Dan and I decided to write an accessible business book that provided a clear, well-grounded explanation of gamification and how to employ it effectively.

I’m thrilled that our book, For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business, was officially published today by Wharton Digital Press.  It’s available in paperback from online retailers and in all the major ebook formats worldwide.  If you’re interested in finding out what gamification is, or how to apply game design techniques in any organization, please take a look.  Using a digital-first distributor allowed us to get the book into circulation more quickly and at a lower price point than through traditional publishers.

I plan to post more about the book and gamification here on my blog, as well as on gamifyforthewin.com, a site we set up for the original gamification symposium.