Amy Jo Kim at Game Thinking Live.
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Game Thinking book trains product designers to think like game developers

In her first career, Amy Jo Kim made hit games like The Sims, Ultima Online, Rock Band, and Covet Fashion. And in her second career, she has coached startups and product teams at major companies like Netflix, The New York Times, and Shiseido to think smarter and innovate faster using techniques from game design.

She has now captured those techniques in a new book, Game Thinking, published this week as a paperback and ebook from Amazon. It’s all about taking what she has learned from making games and applying it beyond what was superficially once known as “gamification.”

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.