And so, the story goes like this: “No one likes to be told they have an ugly baby”. Heavens knows, us game designers regard our games (even very early prototypes) as our babies. Naturally we don’t want anyone saying anything bad about them. And that’s a mistake.

In spite of how compelling this analogy sounds – comparing physical babies [flesh and bone ones] to games we create [brain children] – it falls a bit short. For instance, with flesh and bone babies we cannot take them apart when they don’t perform as expected. We cannot remove features, improve some others and create new versions – someone please explain this to my father. He now has 7 kids and they, us, are not really getting any prettier with each iteration (I don’t have daddy issues… alas, I do).

Something else we are meant to the prototypes of our games that we cannot do to our flesh and bone children is: dress them up in their best clothes, take them to competitions, line them up and let complete strangers judge them and pick a winner, the prettiest.

Oh wait. We do do this. We do have baby beauty pageants. But I’m not ready to open that ugly can of worms at this time.

It would appear that we then need a better analogy. Else, a better explanation as to why we resist, sometimes despise, prototyping our games with strangers.

The reasons we as individuals make decisions and perform activities are complex. These reasons change constantly. Multiple forces simultaneously influence these reasons.

More importantly, these reasons are formed in the unconscious mind. Asking a game designer why they are not playtesting their prototypes is the best way to get the wrong answer.

But look at populations, groups of people, and Eureka. Those elusive reasons turn into patterns. Some of these patterns are easily explained through biases and heuristics.

Ideas are sticky. Whatever thought, conscious or unconscious, we believe is the result of our own making, we will defend viciously. And this is a bias. A very dangerous one for that matter.

A simple explanation about the danger of this bias is that these “original” ideas can be easily implanted in our heads. You, me, all of us can be easily primed to arrive at our unique and expected conclusion. Social media does a great job at amplifying this condition of the human behaviour. But that’s another can of ugly worms to be opened at another time.

Your games. Our games. They all start as ideas. You then invest a lot to take this idea and turn them into physical projects (yes, even digital games). These physical products are now much bigger ideas.

Trends in human behaviour show us that we do not like having our ideas being challenged. We have visceral reactions when we are told point blank “your game sucks”.

Yet, these are biases and we need to find ways to ensure our game is seen and used by other people. We need to seek feedback, collect this data and build it into the design of our games.

In summary, we need to play-test our games multiple times. We need to do this in spite of how loud that little monkey inside our heads screams at us “Your game is perfect as it is”.

Check out Erik’s archive of Ludogogy articles

The post Playtesting and the Ugly Baby Complex first appeared on Ludogogy.

You may have emotions attached to this phrase; either in a positive way – you wrote it on a social media post and you got lots of likes, or in a negative way – a person you do not trust all that much over uses it. Those emotions will most certainly dictate how you interpret the rest of this article, or if you indeed continue reading pass this point.

In a very over-simplified way, change, organisational change, has the same effect on us. Based on the emotions we attach to organisational change, which, in turn, are heavily influenced by our past experiences with this kind of activity, our behaviour will be heavily biased in favour of, or against the recently announced organisational change initiative at our place of work.

And guess what – between 50 to 80 percent of all transformation efforts fail. So in this game of probabilities and behaviours the numbers are heavily stacked against change.

Alright, organisational transformation fails and that makes us biased against that very specific type of change. But what relationship does this boring business topic have with games? Can games possibly change our perception about organisational transformation and change? That sure sounds like something taken from the SCI-FI movie Ender’s Game[1].

The reasons change efforts fail in job-related settings and corporate transformation, are many. Each self-proclaimed guru in this field has their own list. Nonetheless, about 80% of the items from all these lists overlap.

I also happen to have my list of reasons why transformation fail. Humour me for a few more minutes – if you made it this far into the article you may as well read the remaining paragraphs. In my experience and academic research, broadly speaking, the reasons organisational transformation efforts can be grouped in two categories:

1. We don’t know what we are doing most of the time
2. Even when we are given a list of tasks to follow so we ensure the change effort is successful, we don’t follow or complete all the tasks.

Training is a fundamental activity in all successful organisational transformations. Yet, training is, at best, under budget, understaffed, poorly planned and horrendously executed.

When properly planned and executed, the organisational effort should use games as part of the set of resources available to train existing and new employees during the highly volatile period of change.

I know you believe in the power of games – you are reading this article and you follow this online magazine. But unfortunately, for many people, people in high-up decision-making positions in corporations, using games to improve training and development is merely SCI-FI. Never mind talking about using games to support the transformation, that sort of claim belongs to the occult.

The use of games in learning and development, and training and development is supported by SCI-FACTS. My own personal journey with the use of serious games started when I came across this podcast, based on a study of risk and human behaviour in the aviation industry[2]

Through my journey in this new and exciting field I’ve developed games that have been used to teach subjects such as Industry 4.0, project management and organisational behaviour.

One of my latest projects is a learning solution called ToolBox 4 Creativity (TB4C). This solution maximises the affordances of game development in order to improve workshops, training, and classroom lectures.

TB4C can be used to ensure participants are fully immersed in the training activities as they focus on building prototypes of games that externalise their tacit knowledge and unconscious concerns.

What’s learned in a well-designed training sessions that used TB4C can hardly be learned in any other training*. What’s more, and this is as powerful as improving the quality of the training itself, data can be collected from the workshop participants .

* A training that uses the same amount of training resources, costs the same and takes the same amount of time.

TB4C is a learning solution that stands on its own two legs. Nonetheless, this is just one of the learning solutions that are part of the Play Learn Develop (PLD) family -research name: Human Centred Organisational Transformation (HCOT).

TB4C will launch on Kickstarter in September 2021. The Human Centred Organisational Transformation model is waiting for EU funding in order to research and develop the Artificial Intelligence and data science elements of the framework.

The main focus of PLD/HCOT is to improve the probability of success of organisational transformation. Remember that this has a failure rate of between 50 to 80 per cent? Right? I believe we can do better. I believe games have an important role to play in this improvement journey.

I hope you enjoyed this article. If you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to reach out through any of my social media channels listed below.

The post Change: a Game of Probabilities and Behaviours first appeared on Ludogogy.

When I read this in the book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy by James Gee, I must have had an expression on my face similar to all the characters in the books written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle when Sherlock explains how he solved a crime ‘it just makes sense’ I thought.

Yet, in both cases, to solve those complex fictional crimes that took place in  England between 1880 and 1914, and to understand that “all well-designed games are learning games” requires first that we are aware of the existence of the many parts that make up the systems. Second, we require a good understanding of how these parts work. And finally, we need a solid understanding of how these parts interact with and influence one another.

If we assume that “well-designed games as learning games” is itself a system, its constituent parts can roughly be listed as: a) games; b) how people learn; and c) how the education system works. And this system goes by many names:

1. Game based learning
2. Serious games
3. Project based learning
4. Active learning; and
5. Gamified learning -among many others.

It’s no wonder that we feel overpowered by complex systems. There seems to be too much to be learned and our contribution may not even amount to much in the end. But it doesn’t have to be this way. And games can help us realise this.

Imagine creating a society from scratch; watching your decisions about law, the economy and politics shape society. How about creating basic organisms and watch them interact with the environment? All of this, and more, is possible through games that enable the player to manipulate many of the parts that make up the system. And by doing so, gain a much deeper understanding of the parts that make up a complex system.

Going one step further, and one step sideways, I decided to test this theory with university students. Instead of simply playing games, I designed a learning solution (a physical game, an evaluation and development framework, and a series of YouTube-style classes) that allowed students to create their own games. This is what I mean by ‘one step further’.

And when I said ‘one step sideways’ what I mean is that the games the students create are tabletop games (as opposed to digital games. There’s already extensive research on this area, including that done by Mitchel Resnick and his team).

In this experiment the students of The University of Economics Krakow were instructed and coached on the creation of games that would help to teach learning outcomes related to organisational behaviour. In the first round of prototypes, over 95% of the teams decided to teach and measure knowledge through the use of questions on cards*.

While a small number of teams changed, and improved, the way of coaching players on the learning outcome they worked with in their games, a large majority remained using questions on cards all the way to the last iteration.

One of the premises of this experiment is that by exposing students, in a controlled way, to the complex system of game development ** they work harder to master the learning outcome they chose to work with. You can see more about this research on this the TEDx talk.

To understand a topic well, to understand the parts that make it up and how these relate to one another, students need to go beyond abstract learning. We need to see how these parts work in the real world, James Gee calls this “situated learning”. But of course, in most cases this is not an option. And here is where games and simulations support education.

Games and simulations can provide learners an opportunity to immerse themselves in the topic they are studying. Games in education afford learners the opportunity to learn about the many parts that make up complex system.

* Preliminary data analysis.

** Product development and Agile techniques. Design Thinking. Communications and collaboration.

The post What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning first appeared on Ludogogy.

Reality Is Broken is available on Amazon

The post Review – Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal first appeared on Ludogogy.

R.E.S.P.E.C.T. is not enough.

If you are not making an effort to ensure your team is inclusive and diverse, you’re costing your company money. Simple.

Games and simulations are a great way to achieve diversity & inclusion (D&I) in corporations. And to increase ROI along the way.

Is respect enough? Recently I was confronted with that question, and I could not (did not want to) answer it on the stop -partially due to the fact that I was on my third glass of wine. But also, just like the pigs, in the pigs and chicken fable, I’m too committed to this subject to argue it rationally with someone who was just involved.

I appreciate that without background that questions doesn’t really say much, so let me put it this way: “Is respect for members of minorities enough to ensure multicultural and diverse teams deliver kick-ass products and solutions?”

My gut instinct told me no. respect is simply not enough. And so I did some research: Diverse and inclusive (D&I) companies (made of D&I leaders and teams), outperform their non-D&I counterparts by 25% according to McKinsey; and by 24% according to PMI. In other words, D&I has a high ROI.

Although, as I’m sure you have experienced yourself, achieving and sustaining D&I is not a task for the faint-hearted. As a matter of fact, according to the two organisations mentioned above, to become a D&I organisation requires bold actions.

And what can be bolder than building D&I right at the core of your company’s learning and development strategy and delivering this via games and simulations? For instance, at Play Learn Develop we created a framework that turns leadership training into role playing simulations.

Biases affect us all, they highly influence our decision making. Yet, we all believe this is not happening to us (one of such biases). Working with your teams, providing them with a safe environment where mistakes equal learning opportunities, showing them how biases affect their decision making, sharing best practices, and having a debriefing and retrospective session, are some of the key elements of this framework.

Games and simulations can influence leaders’ and decision-makers’ minds. This in turn translates into D&I policies and strategies that shape teams’ performance and increase the company’s ROI. But we all deserve good games. In the Learning and Development Transformation Ecosystem, games and simulations (Active Learning) are also implemented in a bottom-up fashion.

The Toolbox 4 Creativity guides participants of the training to create their own games. The learning outcome vary depending on the ‘burning’ business-issue the organisation is dealing with at the time of implementation. Yet, game-design, and diversity are constant themes of this learning activity. Let me try to explain this further with a quote I find extremely inspirational:

“… a child who can consider the perspective of someone with a disability or someone with non-binary gender identity may be able to innovate new products, approaches and services that are more inclusive of all segments of society” (WEF).

Now imagine this. Your leadership team takes various training and development courses and games on the subject of D&I. This impacts policy, strategy and hiring practices. Team leaders and managers also take these courses and learn how to maximise the potential of their newly diverse and inclusive teams. These teams now create products with features and characteristics that up until now had been ignored. These products can be sold to larger demographics and geographies. Revenue increases. All thanks to well-designed D&I Games.

Going back to the tough question at the start of this article, is respect enough? Now I have to reconsider my answer. If we are talking about respect (with small ‘r’), the answer is still no. People who consider that simply not insulting a member of a minority is enough will not become productive members of a multicultural team -at best they will complete the tasks they are assigned to and pray for 5pm. But even for people who think this way, games and D&I training can help. The following quote from Rainia L. Washington (vice president of Global Diversity & Inclusion at Lockheed Martin) summarises my point:

“We’re not trying to change people’s beliefs—but we are trying to change behavior, so that when they walk through the doors our people know how we expect them to behave.”

On the other hand, if we are talking about Respect (with capital ‘R’), then I believe we are on the ideal track to ensuring your organisation is made of kick-ass, multicultural and diverse teams, that will deliver innovative products that will help your organisation survive, and thrive in, the uncertain future.

I’ll leave you with one more quote by Rainia L. Washington:

“Our values to do what’s right, respect others, and perform with excellence guide everything we do. Respecting others means creating an environment where our employees feel welcomed and encouraged to bring their whole selves to work.”

Thanks for reading. And don’t forget, let’s game our way to a better, more diverse & inclusive future.

The post R.E.S.P.E.C.T. Let’s game the way to more diverse, inclusive and productive teams first appeared on Ludogogy.

In 2019 I had the exiting opportunity to be part of UEK’s programme The Future of GBS (Global Business Services). Students who signed for, and completed this specialisation, had the chance to learn from industry professionals. Myself and five other professionals from Krakow were trusted with teaching project management.

We were all excited and ready to start cooperating with the minds of the future. We were fortunate in many respects, one of such lucky situations was the ability to create the curricula for this course from scratch. I felt so strongly about this activity that I volunteered to teach four subjects. One more aspect of this collaboration that was particularly exciting, and unexpected for me, was the opportunity to teach my subjects via serious games. I designed, developed and played four games – one for each subject I taught. All the games were simulations of real world scenarios where the students had to form teams and collaborate in order to solve a problem. When explaining these games to the lead lecturer of project management at UEK I referred to these activities as RPS (role playing simulations).

Perhaps now is a good time for me to explain why I believe that games are an excellent teaching resource. Long story short, I profoundly dislike ‘traditional’ formal-education. The reasons for this will become clear the more you read my articles, or watch my YouTube videos, but for now it suffices to say that learning disabilities, mixed with an standardise and inflexible education system, cooked at 250 degrees in a third-world oven, is not the ideal recipe for creativity and development. Jim Gee summarises some of my feelings about traditional formal-education when he said “in traditional formal-education settings, collaboration is called cheating. And in the real world, trying to solve complex problems by yourself is not a desirable skill”.

Through studying serious games and game design at EdX’s MIT courses I had a priceless opportunity to learn about the history and psychology of education, and the many challenges faced by those who throughout recent history have tried to change this system. And now I had a chance to use my own serious games to join the fight. I set out to find out, first hand, if students learned more in an active learning setting than simply by passively listening to the teacher talk, memorising facts and answers to existing problems, and then doing the best they could to regurgitate all these data over a standardise test.

One of the classes I taught was Communicating Across Multicultural and Diverse Teams. For this I designed a scenario with low-tech game elements in which the students were randomly assigned to four different teams that represented separate branches of a service centre spread across the globe.

The teams had to hold a project status meeting via a conference call. Online meeting technology and/or etiquette was not one of the main learning outcomes, but I guess we all agreed it should have been. Perhaps from the Time of Corona onwards, Zoom and Microsoft Teams’ technology will be included in all project management training courses -I know, I just couldn’t finish this article without mentioning the “C” word.

The game went on and the players, the students, covered the three scenarios prepared for them. The teams also had some predefined scripts that guided their position in the meeting. For instance, the IT team was sharp, on time and only focused on data numeric figures. The Finance team was bored with the meeting and just wanted to get back to their daily tasks. The HR team joined the meeting slightly late, but they were understanding of both sides of the situation and did the best they could to avoid unnecessary arguments over the conf-call – I know, I was playing with stereotypes, something perhaps a little dangerous, but the rationale for this will be explained in later paragraphs of this article.

The online meeting was interrupted at various stages by background noises such as a dog barking, a doorbell ringing, one team getting disconnected (then trying to reconnect: ‘can you her us? Hello, is the line working now?’ ), and a toilet flushing (the project manager was working from home and forgot to put the telephone on mute while going to the loo). The students laugh at some of the situations and some became slightly uncomfortable with the loo sound.

The core part of the learning activity, as I designed it, was the reflection, or retrospective,  part. Here students were given the opportunity to discuss the characteristics (stereotypes) of the teams in the game, the role of culture in communications, country vs organisation culture, the role of the project manager, among other learning outcomes. I must say, it wasn’t easy getting feedback from the students. Of course, there is the language issue, these young Polish women and men were taking this specialisation, learning material, and playing games in English. Yet, in my opinion the use of English language wasn’t the main issue. The main issue has been documented in academic research on the use of games for teaching. In some cases, students themselves reject games as they want to be told (in written or oral form) what they need to memorise in order to pass the test. And this was one of the questions the students asked me at the end of the retrospective session ‘will it be on the exam?’

I was slightly disappointed. Not at the students, but at the education system. Alas, it’s slightly changing every day a little more. Proof? I’m using my games to teach university students. I’m also learning while teaching and running my games. For instance, one thing that stuck with me after this particular game session was the students’ belief that corporations possessed, and utilise on daily basis, advance technologies to complete each and every job task. ‘For sure these problems do not happen in real conf-calls’ I was told during the retrospective.

Collaboration and teamwork are essential 21st Century skills. And Serious Games and simulations are an excellent way to teach students (at all levels of their education journey) these skills. In the book chapter Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming Jane McGonigal meticulously describes how large and distributed teams can tackle gigantic and unprecedented problems. “No one knows everything, everyone knows something” (p. 201). This line stuck with me forever after reading her text.

Jim Gee discusses this concept a step in his chapter entitled Distributed Intelligence and Cross-Functional Teams. People can become smarter when distributing knowledge not only across team members, the author argues, but across technology and humans (p. 32). Workplace researchers are investing time and effort to identify the many ways in which groups that maximise distributed intelligence produce better results than individuals working separately. This intersection between human and technology collaboration has been defined as the socio-technical-system in the M.Sc. In Managing Risk and System Change delivered online by Trinity College Dublin.

All the serious games I have so far designed, developed and facilitated use team work as a guiding game mechanic. I encourage game developers to keep up this principle when designing games for learning and development. Equally so, I push myself, and encourage others, to always keep an eye on what’s to come. Designing games that exploit the benefits of human-machine cooperation could very well be the next big thing.

The post The next big thing: paper planes and bits first appeared on Ludogogy.