So, with those ideas in mind, I launched and experiment in February 2023 to create and play a game, using LinkedIn as the game platform.

From a recruitment perspective this has obvious advantages, as I was able to use the game platform itself to invite participants, and I did so using a LinkedIn Poll. Many of the people who answered the poll were already 1^st degree connections, but as one of the main mechanisms for running the game was the group chat facility, I then asked those who were not currently connections to connect with me, being careful to stress that disconnection is possible, and that this was not a ’fishing’ exercise.

By the time the game began, three days after the original poll was launched, 25 people were on board and had been added to a group chat, entitled simply ‘The Game’, so as not to give the game away before it started.

The idea behind the game

There were a number of intentions behind the game. The first was to act as an experiment – to see how well this subversion of a non-game platform would work, to get feedback from participants, and to act as a springboard for potential future game / learning applications.

It was also intended to be a learning game, and I spent some time deciding on appropriate learning outcomes. While this is by no means the only option, I eventually decided that an appropriate outcome for this first experiment would be for participants to learn about the platform itself. So the game was designed to  introduce the different ways of posting on LinkedIn and ideas about how to garner engagement.

Using LinkedIn as the platform inevitably meant that there would be a social element to the play. The group chat meant that a group of players was convened, but even if the players had been playing singly in some way, the game was ’about’ using LinkedIn, so another outcome was networking, either through the chat, or by sharing posts, and commenting.

Finally, I decided to get players to reveal something of their own interests, which was achieved through the ‘topics’ of the game, see below, so the hope was that there would also be subsidiary learning around things that members of the group found interesting, but which others might not have come across before.

Mechanisms used in the game

The overarching mechanism of the game was a simple overlay of a narrative ‘alternate reality’. In the group chat a message was sent to all participants to start the game. It informed them that they were part of a Resistance movement, which was opposing the actions of a totalitarian organisation ‘The Council of Erudition Purge’, which was attempting to destroy all repositories of human knowledge, and that LinkedIn posts and articles were under threat.

Inspiration for this idea was taken from such real-life events as The Cultural Revolution in China, and  continuing policies of supressing access to information and opinion, which happen across the world, and from one of my favourite novels ‘Farenheit 451’ by Ray Bradbury.

Farenheit 451 is available on Amazon

They were also told that they had the opportunity to find posts or articles, and to pitch for their preservation. Because the resources of the ‘Purge Resistance’ were limited however, not all items pitched could be ’saved’, so only those which got the most public approval (measured via ‘likes and comments’), would make it into the safety of the Resistance archives at the end of each ‘mission’.

At the start of the game the only facilities available to Resistance members were the group chat, referred to during the game as ‘Resistance HQ’; and the ability to comment on a ‘Mission Post’ (an ordinary post with a single image)  – which you could imagine as being a kind of ‘noticeboard’ where the comments contained the pitches of the Resistance members for the articles and posts each one of them wanted to ’save’.

The initial briefing (posted at ‘HQ’) also hinted that it would be possible to gain more facilities throughout the game. This is actually the fundamental mechanism of ‘progress’ in the learning aspect of the game. In each ‘mission’ a new feature of LinkedIn will be introduced, which players will be encouraged to use to ‘improve’ how they present their pitches, or to attract more engagement.

The first ‘mission’ post asked players to go off and find posts on related to ‘Happiness’ and to pitch them in the comments. After three days the ‘mission debriefing’, containing details of the ‘saved’ posts and anything else of interest that had happened in the first mission was written up in an article, which I intended to add to, after each mission to maintain a full log of missions.

Mission Two – Coolhunting

Mission 2 asked players to go Cool Hunting. They were tasked with going of and finding articles and posts they perceived as ‘Cool’.

A very important part of the second mission post was that it introduced the idea of ‘R&D’ – and that instead of going and finding articles they wanted to save, players could dedicate their time to working towards increasing the capability of the Resistance by ‘inventing’ new ways of using LinkedIn.

This increase in capability had already happened between the first and second missions, without the need for players to do anything, and the ‘new technology’ which had been discovered was images with clickable links. The mission post itself used an image with a clickable link, and the link took players to a YouTube video page explaining how to create a post with an image with a clickable link.

The decision was made to not explicitly mention ‘R & D’ until Mission Two, so that the instructions to play the game were scaffolded in a similar way to the ‘learning content’, only introducing one or two ideas at a time.

So, in the second missions, players could find and pitch ‘cool’ content or spend their time in R&D. In order to take the R&D option, players would post information about the ‘research’ topic in the HQ group chat. In the case of the second mission, R & D were tasked with developing video capability – in other words, finding and sharing info, best practice and ‘how tos’ about using video on LinkedIn. Under game rules it was necessary that three people should do this, so that the development be successful.

Extended capability now meant that players had the choice to pitch as they had done before, using comments in the mission post, or they could use the new technology to create their own posts (complete with clickable image links),and reference those in the mission post comments. It was made clear that if they took this route then ALL engagement (on their own posts and on their comments on the mission) would go towards the adjudication of their success – a good strategy to potentially double their points for the mission.

Once this mission was completed. The mission debrief for mission two (scroll further down in the article) also introduced something new – medals. And the Resistance was able to award medals not only for successfully saving articles and posts, and for contributing to successful R&D development of video capability, but also recruitment! The fact that players would want to / be able to bring others on board after the game had started, was not something I had considered in the game design.

Mission Three – Problem solving

Having developed video capability, the second mission debrief was also delivered as suitably revolutionary address, which I link here for the sake of completeness but with some embarrassment, having made a bit of a hash of it. This, of course also meant that players were now able to deploy video posts as well.

If this had been a full-blown, fully tested, actual implementation of a learning game rather than a somewhat impulsive experiment, it would have run to around 15 missions, allowing time for R & D time to ’discover’ more types of LinkedIn posts and to explore things like searches, profile features and so on. It should be noted that I’m not a LinkedIn ‘expert’, so the intention was never to explore LinkedIn social marketing ‘strategy’ or similar, but simply technical reality.

The experiment needed to end at some point, not least so I could draw some conclusions and write this article. So, I decided to make Mission Three the last mission.

The Resistance were tasked with either pitching posts related to ’Problem Solving’, or working in R&D on Hashtags and Tagging Connections – to discover how those are best used to drive engagement.

What happened

The game was played over three rounds, and lasted just under two weeks.  Those that chose to get involved, got very involved, at least over the first two missions. Of those who were not so actively involved, some were still posting messages of encouragement, or other messages pertinent to the game’s narrative, indicating that they had decided to accept the alternate reality, ’the magic circle’ of the game, but not so much as to join in with active play. Others still chose to ‘lurk’, remaining in the chat, but not messaging or taking part in the missions. Some people left the chat during the game.

Mission three was a ’failure’, in that very little activity took place. But given that Mission Two was very active, I wonder if the announcement of the imminent end of the game went some way to dissuade people from playing further. I hope that sharing this article will encourage further feedback.

Intention vs reality

From the perspective of the game designer and gamemaster (both me), some aspects of the game ran as I had expected and achieved what I wanted them to, and some did not, but that is always to be expected from a very early prototype, which this was.

I expected / wanted there to be more discussion in the ‘HQ’ regarding strategy of play, sharing of existing knowledge of ‘how LI works’ and that ‘R & D’ activity in HQ would spark these kinds of interactions.

I further expected / wanted the outcomes / learning of HQ conversations to be reflected in the way that people addressed the core loop of the game.

This was because these two things represented the core ‘learning’  aspects of the game – peer learning through curation and practice of what has been curated. If this had been designed as a set of learning activities without a game overlay, the fundamental instruction would have been ‘Find out what you can about how LinkedIn features work, share it with a group of people in chat, and then use what you have found to make posts.’

So I believe that the simple action of overlaying a narrative did serve to keep people engaged for longer with this fundamentally not especially interesting instruction.

However, there is a price to pay for overlaying narrative, and that is clarity. To a greater or lesser degree, the narrative obfuscates the simple underlying instructions, and it is certainly true that some participants reported and/or displayed confusion about what they were supposed to be doing. But then again, it is unlikely that without the narrative there would been any engagement with the activities at all – so this needs to be balanced, to achieve clarity while still maintaining the integrity of the magic circle.

Time to Play?

Many participants reported lack of time as a reason for non-participation, or participation dropping off over time. In my mind, the tasks involved were not very time consuming, and were to a certain extent just asking people to do what they were already doing – finding and commenting on posts on LI. However, that is not strictly true. I was asking them to find specific kinds of posts – which would take time. Maybe this could be mitigated, by just asking them to pitch posts they have already found (interesting) recently. This in turn, would mean that there might need to be more attention paid to the narrative for each mission to make them sufficiently different from one another to maintain interest.

It should also be recognised that ‘R & D’ is potentially more time consuming, so maybe the rewards for that should be greater. In this first prototype, Gamification did not feature heavily – beyond the awarding of medals, so that would be something to consider for version 2.

Missions lasted three days in this experiment, mainly because my feeling was that longer timescales would dilute engagement and because one of the major mechanisms was ‘engagement’ which on LI, apparently requires lots of interaction with a post in the first hour, never mind three days. Many people feedback that they would have like longer for each mission. This means that for a game of LinkedIn, in particular,  I would have to think carefully about which ‘algorithmic’ aspects should have an impact and which shouldn’t, and that it would probably only be appropriate to include ‘engagement’, in terms of the viral type algorithmic ‘engine’, if a game were designed to be played and completed over an hour or two, rather than over an extended time, like this one.

Other potential barriers

Although I haven’t received explicit feedback to this effect, there is another potential barrier which has long been on my mind, which may have contributed to the falling off of activity in the game, or people not engaging at all.

Of necessity, ‘playing’ in LinkedIn, means you are playing in a public space, and not just any public space, but one where you may have created a very specific ‘professional’ persona. So there may have been a reluctance, once the reality of the game was revealed, for some people to expose themselves by joining in. I also, personally, have to face the potentially awful possibility, that, given that activity dropped off so markedly after mission two, that it was my disastrous attempt to give a competent video debriefing and /or the fact that I was wearing a revolutionary style red beret and ‘Free Ferris’ badge in said video, that some people found cringeworthy enough to disengage altogether.

Lessons Learned

A (non-exhaustive) list of reflections I will take away with me to consider possible new games in LI and other ‘non-gaming’ platforms will include:

• Complexity of instructions – how to make something ‘gameful’ without too much obfuscation?
• Time available to players – what can I expect and how can I introduce ‘play’ into actions already done – to add no time at all. Maybe in this case that could mean sharing posts they already noticed, or even promoting their own posts?
• Limitations of the platform – e.g. HQ was a great idea, but linear chronological chains of messages are hard to navigate.
• Perceptions of fairness – I bent/waived the rules because they didn’t impact the learning, but some players dislike that.
• Gamification – Rewards for play/learning, and how they can be implemented on the platform.

Do You Want to Try It?

I remain encouraged, despite a drop-off in play. For a first prototype, this game did pretty well. So, what hints do I have for somebody wanting to do the same? Indeed, maybe a more fundamental question is ‘Why would you want to do this?’

The 70:20:10 model (and indeed my own OLCM) tells us that only a fraction of learning goes on in ‘formal’ learning settings. We are learning all the time, from everything we do. If you accept this idea, then it makes sense to apply deliberate design to ‘everyday’ activities to ensure that the learning derived from them is optimised, and indeed that it has desirable learning outcomes.

If you further accept that play and games provide effective pedagogies, as well as a way to engender engagement in activities,* then gameful design is a great approach to choose.

*(you may not accept this, of course, in which case stop reading now. Bit late in the day for this warning, I know,  but you’ve probably saved yourself 40secs or so).

The potential for ’non-gaming’ platforms to have ’gameful design’ applied to them is probably limited by your imagination, but here are a few general principles to get you started.

• Consider the platforms available to you and then think about them in terms of the ‘experiences’ they offer rather than the ‘tasks’ they help people to carry out. For example, LI offers the experiences of ‘gathering together’ in groups and group chat, the experience of ‘social approval’ through likes and comments, and ‘creativity’ through all the different ways you can post.
• What do you want your (learning) outcomes to be? How does a platform potentially allow ‘delivery’ of learning through e.g. peer sharing of knowledge, through activities that could be constructed from the ‘experiences’, content sharing and delivery
• Do your learners already know how to use the platform, or is there an additional learning curve. One compelling reason to widely used platforms and resources to design playful learning, is because your learners DO already know how to use them, and in fact use them all the time – e.g you could use your company email platform to run an ‘alternate reality’ game where scenarios instructions are delivered through emails – with minimal instruction, because everyone already knows how to use the email client.
• Narrative overlay is the easiest place to start. It relatively easy to make something gameful, by a simple reframe. This ’invitation to the magic circle’ can be all that is needed to make an ordinary activity into a compelling game.

Thanks to All Involved

Although I won’t mention you by name here, just in case you don’t want me too, I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to all those who were involved in this little experiment with me. I couldn’t have done it without you. You can ‘out’ yourselves in the comments on LI when I share this article, if you wish.

The post Resisting the Purge – LinkedIn as a Game Platform first appeared on Ludogogy.

I often spend ages tweaking the stats and using them to create a backstory in my imagination of how this character has become who they have, how they have pitched up in the location they are in, what drives them to adventure.

I favour magic users (at least when I am playing Dungeons and Dragons style games), so I will usually find that the stats profile of my characters are quite similar. They are low on Strength and Constitution usually, because all the available points have been allocated heavily towards Intelligence, to ensure a healthy number of spell points. A low-level magic user will need some strong allies who are willing to front the party and shield him or her, to ensure some chance of survival to be a higher-level magic user.

We roleplay in real life

And so it is in real life, we have our strengths and weaknesses, our specific skillsets, allies and competencies, which taken together, paint a picture of someone who is fit (or not so fit) to act in specific roles, or to carry out particular pieces of work. In life, this idea is often expressed as a ‘job description’.

The Job Description is actually a pretty one-dimensional way of describing what somebody is, as it only captures a narrow set of characteristics, which are usually (unless you are very lucky), desired by a third party to execute specific tasks.

As a (whole) person, you have many more characteristics and skills which are not relevant to this ‘job description’. In (the game of) real life you may often play with your ‘Project Manager’ avatar or character, but at other times you play your ‘Parent’ character or your ‘Drummer in a Ska Band’ character. Each of them prioritise different characteristics, skills, allies and activities. And you can ‘grow’ in each of those roles at different rates.

There is often friction because of the demands of the different characters on your time and energy. For example, the ‘Parent’ might not be able to develop as she wishes because the ‘Project Manager’ is impinging on her time.

The featured image of this article shows part of a character sheet from ‘The Game of You’ compiled by a 15 year old. The Character she wants to play is ‘In-demand Babysitter’. She is currently at Level 7 in her progress towards becoming the fully-realised babysitter she wants to become over the summer holidays – Level 20 in this game represents ‘the best you can be’.

It should not be assumed from this that the  ‘Game of You’ is only suitable for young people – just that I tend to use my nearest and dearest for trying out game ideas!!

The different characters which make up ‘You’

In an RPG, a player can have as many characters playing in different games and campaigns as s/he pleases

The ‘Game of You’ encourages you to play a game of personal and professional development, in which you can also play any of the characters that are significant to you, track their progress towards important development goals and (which is not usually a feature of ‘for fun’ RPGs), use what you discover about these ‘characters’ to explore balance and priorities in your life and growth.

The Character Sheet is the basis of ‘The Game of You’, as it allows players to create their own ‘character’ (or set of characters) in the style of an RPG. A pen and paper version is available, and a fully-functioning automatically calculating version will be posted on itch.io soon.

Today, I started to add the functionality of the ‘Quest’ sheet. The idea behind Quests is to reflect on the value of ‘learning’ activities to the development of your characters.

In an RPG we can experience from all sorts of activities, quests, combat, even ‘grinding’. From each of these we will gain experience points (XP), which are recorded for your character, and contribute to their levelling up.

RPGs (objectively) measure experience

In life, we similarly learn from everything we do, each project, each social interaction, every win (or failure) and yes – even the grinding. Learning does not only happen from ‘special purpose’ learning activities. The only difference between real life and an RPG, in this respect, is the enumeration. We do not, usually and habitually, enumerate our learning from experience.

Sometimes however, we are called upon to do so. When applying for a job, one of the purposes of a CV (resume), is to inform others about what we have learned from the experiences we have had, and how it might match to a potential role. Often that is expressed through length of experience, or through qualifications.

Roleplaying your CV

If you’re anything like me, updating your CV can be a bit of a feat of memory, and what you end up with never really describes all the nuances of how you have developed. Also, given that CVs need to be customised to each new opportunity, they are far from representative of your ‘whole self’

If real life were more like an RPG, each new experience would reflect in your ‘stats’, AND you would gather a ’quest log’ along the way, which would be a permanent record of the ‘value’ of any given experience to your permanent and professional development.

Quest Sheet attached to Character Sheet ‘In-demand Babysitter’ – by a 15 year old girlThe ‘Game of You’ Quest sheet links with the Character Sheet and updates your stats on the completion of your quest. It writes the ‘story’ of your quest to a quest log, and then clears itself, so that you can use it to record your next quest.

And because we never only have one quest on the go, or indeed, only have one character’s game underway, you can have multiple quest sheets attached to each ‘character’, and indeed multiple characters in play in the ‘Game of You’.

Your ‘Whole Self’ is more than your CV

But what about your ‘whole self’? In an RPG I can be playing several different characters in different games, and they can all have very different ‘levels’. In life, my experience in my different roles, works in much the same way.  I am a high-level Learning Professional, but a low level (at the moment) Plasterer and Bridge Player. Ongoing house renovation will ensure I level up pretty quickly in plastering (I may take a course to speed up that process), and I am hoping that I will soon get the chance to play at the Bridge club I have joined to polish up skills including ‘bidding’ and ‘finessing’, as well as adding some new allies to my ‘Socialiser’ character sheet.

Just like the variety of CVs you have to produce to satisfy the requirement of different job applications, your different character sheets will reflect ‘how well’ you are doing in developing growing in different important ‘character’ areas of your life.

The Future of the Game of You

The ‘Game of You’ is a work in progress, and is developing as an idea as each new component is added.

At the moment, there is an MVP (minimum viable product) of the Character Sheet. This will soon be joined by an auto-calculating version of the character sheet and linked Quest Sheet and Quest Log.

In time, it is envisaged that the full game will include:

• Spells /power ups – strategies and hacks that may not actually be magic, but feel like they might be as they impact your resilience, productivity and well-being
• Player dashboard – a summary of your characters, which can be used as an overview of balance in different life areas
• Quests which update more than one character
• CV (resume) templates based on character sheets
• Pre-loaded quests – pre-populated quests sheets, that for example, represent the XP and skills value of undertaking an accredited learning programme.
• Aspirational character sheets – representing the ‘gap’ between the ‘stats’ of a person you would like to model, and your own character, so you can work on that gap.

If you would like to get involved in developing this idea, maybe as a resource you could use with Coaching Clients, learning cohorts or for your own personal / professional development-get in touch at sarah@ludogogy.co.uk

The post The Game of You – Quests first appeared on Ludogogy.

In the interests of clarity, I am going to use a single, hopefully, fairly well-known and understood, game in my example of learning using a Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) game.  The game is Pandemic.

Pandemic (all versions) is available on Amazon

Pandemic is a turn-based cooperative boardgame in which players undertake different roles, with different capabilities, to attempt to combat a series of viral outbreaks happening globally. It features hand-management and set collection mechanics, trading and a variety of actions that can be taken each turn.

The remainder of this article focuses on some general, and practical, principles for using a COTS game for learning

Pick a game to suit your learning outcomes

Yes, I know we’ve recently experienced a real pandemic, but you wouldn’t chose Pandemic because you want to meet learning outcomes around medicine, research or even living with a pandemic. That is the game’s theme but Pandemic is not a simulation. Simulations are beyond the scope of this article. So that being the case, what on earth is it that COTS games can help learners with?

Like most Euro games, Pandemic is heavy on strategy, and a lot of the stuff that goes with that – strategic planning and execution, working together / siloing. The uncertainty within the game – there are cards which suddenly increase the spread of diseases, can be leveraged for outcomes around living a VUCA world. The cooperative nature of the game allows exploration of team dynamics, where specialist roles fit in into an overall strategy, and organisational structure etc.

When deciding on a suitable game, look beyond (way, way beyond) the game’s theme and reflect on the experiences that people have when playing. Think about those experiences in conceptual rather than specific terms. For example, rather than thinking that Codenames is about guessing words based on clues, think that it is about effective communication. Rather than categorising Age of Empires as a game of medieval conquest, reflect on it as an experience of resource management.

Set up a learning process

Players will learn when playing, but it will be far more effective if you set up a more formal framework in which learning can be consolidated. This will definitely include some time for individual, and maybe team reflection on what happened when they played.

If it is possible, a facilitator or similar should be able to observe play, and collate facilitative questions to draw out learnings from what has happened. During the process of selecting the game and mapping it to desired learning outcomes, it should have been possible to devise themes that you want drawn out by questions, and the actual substance of these can be finalised by a skilled facilitator while observing.

Kolb’s Learning Cycle provides an excellent starting point for creating a learning process. The gameplay provides the concrete experience. Learners then reflect on that, then conceptualise and experiment with what they could do differently next time – or more likely, in a learning setting, how they could apply their insights from play to a non-play context.

This process will help to ‘draw attention to’ the learning that is occurring, which players might have missed noticing because they are ‘just’ playing a game.

In our example game of Pandemic, the ‘win/loss’ dynamic is absolute. All player either win or they all lose. It would be appropriate therefore to allow time for quiet reflection on what happened individually for each player – in their differing roles, and then to invite the players to reflect on how they performed as a team – using the questions devised during observation as prompts if necessary.

Reflection is thinking and organising thoughts, not talking, so make sure you allow time for that to happen before asking them to draw conclusions (conceptualise) – which is what the questioning is for. Ask them what went well, and what didn’t, where the key turning points (either in the teams of viruses’ favour) occurred, or whether their individual or team strategy was successful, and why.

Lead them into experimentation with questions about how they would apply what they have learnt to another round of play. How might they be more agile knowing that an Epidemic card could turn up at any point? Given what they have learned about movement restrictions, how might they optimise the player positions throughout play?

Find real-world relevance in the game

During the facilitation process it is especially important to draw out the real-world relevance of the game experiences. You might want to refer to another learning theory, Andragogy, to reflect on why that is so necessary when creating learning for adults.

You have already identified which learning outcomes are served by Pandemic, but it will be necessary (more for some players than others) to be explicit about how the game experience relates to their real world life or work experience. They are not medical researchers (most probably), but when have they experienced a similar situation? E.g. Your position on the board meant that you were not able to swap the card with another player which would have meant narrow victory instead of narrow defeat – when in your work setting have you been in a situation where a small adjustment would have made a massive difference in consequences? This is the opposite process that you went through when ‘conceptualising’ the game to pick a suitable game for your outcomes. You are taking the conceptual experiences within the game and mapping them back to reality.

Hack the game and modding

One of the most effective ways of finding relevance, of optimising the learning from experimentation and to allow role models to emerge, is to invite players to ‘hack’ the game. Playing a game is a much more participatory way of learning than say a lecture or reading, but players are still to some extent consuming an experience which has been made for them by someone else.  Astute players/learners will have got to grips with the mechanisms and systemic nature of the game and can be encouraged to think about how they would change those to achieve a better outcome (or even to make it more challenging if they won).

They might for example, come up with a new role, with different capabilities, or change what a specific playing component triggers, or create a new move in the game.

The hacking of the game can, of course, occur before the learners even get to it. Games are systems of rules and mechanics, usually dressed in a theme. Any of these elements can be tweaked, with differing degrees of difficulty, to customise the game to your learning needs.

The theme is usually the easiest aspect to amend. You can make the experience of play more relevant by doing this. For example, one of the central mechanics in Pandemic is the proliferation of coloured cubes in various locations on the board (map). Thematically this represents outbreak of one of four viruses. Without changing the mechanic in any other way this could be re-themed to represent industrial unrest or even, more cheerfully, popularity of your product/idea. Instead of a map your board could represent past, present and future timescales – and so on.

Changing the rules

Rules are the next easiest to modify, although this does mean that you are changing the system of the game, rather than just the clothes it wears, so more care is needed to protect the integrity of the gameplay and experience. Adding ‘house rules’ can alter the experience of a game, to make it easier or harder, or just to add a different characteristic to make the experience more fun or relevant. In Pandemic, you can take up to four actions per turn, so simply changing the permitted number of actions could drastically alter the nature of the game.

Mechanics can be altered / added / removed too, but this probably the most complex option, with the greatest potential to alter the game experience. For example, Pandemic features point to point movement on a map, and where you are on the map further influence character interaction and capabilities. Removal of the movement requirement would make interaction easier, placing further restriction on movement options would put further obstacles in player’s paths. Adding a random element could make the world a whole lot more VUCA – the possibilities are almost endless.

Modding is a term that is usually applied to COTS video games (although the same principles of amending to learning purposes applies to tabletop games). Moddable (video) games come with special editors. Doom was one of the first to do this, allowing players to create their own playable levels. Popular modded/ moddable games today include Fallout: Las Vegas and Mech Warrior, and there are thriving modding communities.

Starting to view games differently

Once you have used games in this way a few times, and particularly if you have indulged in modding, you will start to look differently at the games in your collection, and those you are considering adding to it. Specific types of rules and mechanics will become associated with particular learning outcomes. You will categorise game by the ease with which they can be modded. You will start to recognise games that are different ‘versions’ of other games. You will find yourself creating whole new ‘learning genres’ in your head.

Enjoy!

The post Using Off The Shelf Games for Learning first appeared on Ludogogy.

Sackson was prolific when it came to creating games, as well as being someone who found inspiration everywhere. He was also part of many games design groups. When looking at his legacy, we can also consider the output of those who fell under his influence. In the preface(s) of the 1982 edition of A Gamut of Games, he mentions dozens of people who have helped him with inspiration, playtesting and who have contributed games to his collection, and to the book itself.

A Gamut of Games is available on Amazon

One of the best ways that we, as games designers, can benefit from Sackson’s legacy is through his books. Acquire may have been his most famous commercial produced game, but the many ‘smaller’ games to be found in the pages of his many books, truly reveal how he was ‘intrigued by what makes a game tick’.

Acquire is available on Amazon

The spirit of Sackson’s curiosity, and the ingenuity and invention it spurred is continued today in games systems (link) that provide toys for creating games, such as Pyramid Arcade, and the communities of creators that surround them. But there is no need to move beyond the basic gameplaying components you already have if you want to partake in a Sackson-like game design experiment.

Pyramid Arcade is available on Amazon

The games in A Gamut of Games use playing cards, dice, coins, dominos, checkerboards and pencil and paper. Many of them are tweaks of existing games to provide a new experience or to expand the possibilities or circumstances in which a popular game can be played. For example, a version of Bridge for two, or two-handed Poker which does not require stakes.

Osmosis – a Game for ‘Protean pieces of Pasteboard’

Osmosis is a game created by Sackson, for 2 – 4 players, using a (partial) deck of cards, and is interesting, to me, for two main reasons. First the game itself is hard to tie down, in terms of strategy. What constitutes a good hand or a good play? That, Sackson claims, is more a matter of intuition, than logic.

It’s a game of trades. Each player takes turns offering a trade, from their hand, and the responder can trade ‘up’ – with a same suited card of higher value, ‘low’, by playing the 7 of the suit, or the highest card in a sequence containing the 7, or ‘off’, playing two cards of any value from other suits. The trade is made and players place the cards they have gained on the table in front of them.

In all but their first trade, responders must offer cards from the visible cards on the table, which creates an interesting asymmetry in access to information between asker and responder. It also means that cards in hand are gradually depleted. Once that happens, cards on the table are taken into hand and the process begins again.

The game ends when one player takes up four or fewer cards, or a player takes up eleven or more cards from the table, with the scoring favouring those with more cards in their possession.

The second reason this game is interesting is because of the brief commentary, by Sackson, that precedes it in the book, where he claims that he doesn’t know where his idea for the game came from, that ‘the ideas seemed to flow shapelessly around until, before I realized it, they had taken concrete shape.’

Sackson’s books are full of commentary like this, reflecting, I believe, how he ‘primed’ himself to receive inspiration as an ongoing practice.

Knight’s Chase – a Riff on the Knight’s Move

Osmosis appears in a chapter entitled ’Protean Pieces of Pasteboard’, and Sackson explored the possibilities of playing cards prolifically. Other game components are well represented too. The game ‘Knight Chase’, was contributed to A Gamut of Games by Alex Randolph, the winner of the 1982 Spiel de Jahres for Enchanted Forest, and who worked with Sackson on TwixT.

Twixt (vintage collectible) is available on Amazon

Enchanted Forest is available on Amazon

It uses a chessboard and one knight of each colour. A classic chase, this game reflects the tendency of Sackson, and his associates, of taking some aspects of a game without change, but then adding or adapting others to make a totally new game experience.

In this case, the knight’s move is retained, but also added are markers which block movement to spaces that have already been visited, and those chosen strategically, by players.

Hints to Think and Design like Sackson

Sackson designed 100s of games during his career. Not all of them became massive commercial successes, but some definitely did. Even the one which ‘only’ made it into his own books, though, glitter with innovation and inventiveness, so how can we, as designers, channel some of that great stuff?

1. Just Do it? Much like ‘Writers write’, games designers have to design. Build regular practice into your routine. That doesn’t have to mean that you are always working on a large-scale project. In fact, it may very well be more effective to adopt small exercises but more regularly – every day or every week for example. The really essential thing is to class this practice as SOMETHING IMPORTANT (not to push it aside until everything else is done), and to set aside dedicated time to do it. For ideas of the kinds of practice you could adopt, see below.
2. Play games – lots of them. The more games you play, the more different experiences, mechanics, toys and so you will be exposed to, and any one of these could be the trigger for that killer idea – the one that provides the perfect solution for your latest games-based learning client, or turns into the commercial game that makes your name. Seek out games, genres and mechanics that are new to you to gain maximum benefit from this practice.
3. ‘Reskin’ well-known games. There are good reasons that some games become classics and persist, sometimes for centuries. What can you take from say Chess, Poker or even Snakes and Ladders, that already works well? What can you then add to make the game totally different, playable in a different way or make it applicable to a different setting – games-based learning, for example. This practice could be a full-blown design exercise resulting in an actual game, or equally, it could be a five-minute thought experiment that starts with a simple question, e.g. ‘If I replaced a chess piece with one I created, what would it be called, and how would it move/work?’
4. Consider everything you see / hear /experience as fodder for games. There are lots of ways you could do this. Set a time (alarm on your phone) and when that happens, look around through a playful lens and see what occurs. Alternatively, just go about your day, and when you remember that is what you are doing, reflect on the inspirations surrounding you at that moment. Or, deliberately play a ‘game’ to find inspiration – stick pins in a book, shuffle and select image cards, play The Exquisite Corpse with some colleagues…..

5. Increase your exposure to novel experiences. Alongside playing more games try to introduce more variety generally. Take different routes when you travel, listen to a new podcast. Try a new author or newspaper, new food, a new language, new music – you get the idea.
6. Play with others. Playing more games is obviously one way to bring new people into your life, so why stop at playing. Bounce your ideas off others, do design challenges together. Create a regular playing/designing group meeting. Find time just to talk about games and play – what others have made and played. The alliances that Sackson formed throughout his life inspired everybody involved to better work. Use other people for accountability and make a habit of sending each other snippets of inspiration.
7. Play with toys. Many of the game Sackson created used playing cards and other common components. Take a pack of cards, or dice, or chessboard or whatever, and just start to play. ‘Aimless’ play (just picking things up, moving pieces, dealing cards, balancing objects etc.) can spur all sorts of ideas, but by all means, be more purposeful if you wish. Take components from two or more existing games and reflect for a few minutes on how they could work together and what a new game that uses them might look like.
8. Think about ‘what makes games tick’. I promise that this does not ‘take the fun out’ of playing. Far from it. But when playing, reflect on the mechanics of the game, the experiences they create, which work well, and which don’t. Think about how the mechanics of the game you are playing might look if they were ‘dressed up’ with a different theme. E.g. How might the hidden roles in Secret Hitler work in a game about crime detection?

It is often difficult when working in the ‘serious’ grown-up world of Workplace Learning (even when it is games-based) to find the time, or justify finding the time, to play. That is a shame because play can only improve the quality of the products and services we produce for our clients. The adoption therefore of a small, but regular practice, can help, by exercising play and design muscles, without taking too much time. Please share, in the comments, any of your own practices or tips, which you think could add to the above.

See Titles by Sid Sackson on Amazon

The post Eight Playful Practices to Model Sid Sackson first appeared on Ludogogy.

The recent trend for Co-Creation means that companies can work through the direct participation of users in product design or projects. This is a little different from ‘crowd-sourcing’ which substitutes the company’s manpower with that of the general public. Instead of a monetary benefit to users, co-creation can steer the the characteristics of products or project development in a more beneficial direction for end-users through their participation in the process.

‘Coca-Cola’ and the band ‘Maroon 5’ created the new song, “Is There Anybody Out There?” by gathering user opinion through SNS for 24 hours. The high numbers of downloads of this song led to income for a social welfare business in Africa. This was the case of co-creation between the company and users.
This article describes my previous experience of co-creation within a small group, and relates to editorial design rather than product development.

Co-creation in editorial design between designers and writers

In my previous three years of graphic design experience, I was an editorial designer, involved in publishing newspapers and magazines for several local communities in Toronto and Calgary. I suggest that this type of work is matched with the basic co-creation.

This type of work in printing and publishment is very simple and intuitive. The intention of editors or proprietors determine rhe direction of publications, and the content of articles and columns will fit these. Advertising also has an important role to provide income, but the interests of advertisers are not always the same as those of the publication.

The co-creation of designers and readers in design editing has a long history, and this is a simpler and primitive concept than the more recent co-creation concept of ‘the consumer is the company itself’.
Usually, editorial designers create the layout by considering the focus of the publication, and complete the design by matching content to layout concept. However, the designer rarely creates article or other written content. Except in very special cases, audiences or writers usually write the articles, and the designer adds the design elements to prepare the writing for publication.

Personal Development through Co-creation

In this process, the designer interprets the article in his or her own way and adds an appropriate design. Sometimes, designers can discuss design with writers. Written contents are often created entirely separately, however, and this process is very basic co-creation.

Also, consumers who participate in this co-creation, by creating user-generated content (UGC) derive reputation and self-satisfaction through displaying their identities and interests to other consumers. Design and media companies can expand their consumer base through facilitating publication of UGC. This process can be the basis for the continuous development of publications and other media properties.

Co-creation in design editing consists of multiple contributions by various participants. It can be challenging for designers to have to think of the new designs on an ongoing basis, but that is part of the pleasure in creativity.

The ‘Novel Relay’ Project

The ‘Novel Relay’ project grew out of a conversation with a colleague who also worked in local media, We discussed how to attract participation from the local community to increase profitability, which was decreasing. After serious discussions, we undertook the ‘Novel Relay’ project with participating writers and readers during the specified period. I worked on this project as a guest designer, and we recruited participants in advance, regardless of previous experience.

The project worked like this. Initially, we sent a request to write an article with a designated keyword to a specific participant. In turn, another keyword was selected from this article, and we relayed that to another participant, and so on, for a number of weeks. So, these serial articles took the form of a longer continuous article.

The Challenge of of Writing to Keywords

Normally, prior to this project, writers would send articles with their own choice of topics to the publication, but participants in this project found difficulty in writing articles to fit with the unpredictable topic. For example, writer A who usually wrote poetry about flowers, was given an unfamiliar science and technology topic, and instructed to write in prose story form rather than poetry. Writer B who usually wrote travel stories was given an unfamiliar cultural keyword, with which to write the column-type article rather than a travel story.

The process of making one big story from various serial articles was a very different direction for the writers. Additionally, this direction was not always what we originally wanted. From the designer’s perspective, I wanted to create an editorial design for this project representing a sort of ‘puzzle’ to decompose and assemble the specific theme. However, the unexpected changes of direction in the writing each week was more like a ragged patchwork, rather than a cogent interlocking puzzle.

Capabilities of Writers

From another perspective, this project gave new experience to designers or writers which broke them out of their habitual work. The unexpected co-creation with users and designers, resulted in the making of unstructured ‘raw’ contents.

When started the project as we ignored the level of competence of different participants. There was a capability difference in story development between professional and non-professional writers, so participants often did not make the connection between each story well. This led to a disorganized project process.

Although the larger project suffered from lack of structure, and was without a unified topic or genre, participants did benefit from the new experience of co-creation. Moreover, the interest and participation in media by local community users was high through this project, and one intent of the project – to increase profitability – succeeded to a certain extent.

New Direction

For designers, the ‘Relay novel’ project offered another opportunity to try different ideas beyond stereotypical designs.

In review, the results of this project didn’t meet our original objectives. Project progress which was forecast by myself and the publication, did not match closely the way that the real participants actually worked. In particular, cooperation to deliver the keyword among users did not work well. Nevertheless, I think that this primitive and unstructured co-creation has more positive points than negative ones. So, for better co-creation, I suggest the following.

1. Designers and participants should define project objectives clearly: My colleague and I didn’t clearly define the objectives of the ‘Relay novel’ project.
2. The right users should be identified for process participation: For example, if the writers were writing in genres and topics they were comfortable with, in the ‘Relay novel’ project, we could have made much better designs.
3. We should identify Customers’ (participants’) needs around the project or product. Unfortunately, we didn’t correctly identify the work trend and characteristics of writers.

Co-creation of the Learner’s Perspective

We need to look at co-creation as a new experience beyond the habitual work. Writers participating in the project were accustomed to working with one genre and subject. From the perspectives of writers A and B, dealing with ‘science technology’ and ‘culture’ requires learning something new. The process of learning new things can be more effectively achieved in cooperation and team building situations – benefitting from social learning approaches.

How could a beginner approach the ’Relay Novel’? If organisers fixed the previously mentioned shortcomings, they couse use this approach well in an organization or education environment. In particular, creative projects could facilitate intrinsic motivation and cooperation among participants. It’s like a game.

Let’s take an RPG (Role-Playing Game) example for structuring the organization of the project. In an RPG, there are various classes of players who participate as fighter, magic user, healer, etc. Members of the party share information about their characteristics and skills, and they set the party’s objective such as retrieving a precious item through cooperation or killing monsters.

Facilitation of Co-creation through Gamification

Setting the priority to be meaningful and measuring it (leaderboard, milestones etc.) is important, if the objectives of party members (in terms of the publication, completed contents) is not to be wasted. They should more specific than simply setting objectives like ‘just participating in’ or ‘playing my part well’. By understanding the classes and skills of members and cooperating, they can defeat strong ‘monsters’. This shows just one example of how gamification can facilitate co-creation efforts.

This approach alters the relationship between educator and learner, and moves beyond motivation by reward or punishment. If co-creation works like a game, people can share their knowledge and learning methods and voluntarily cooperate. And like online RPGs, it’s likely that experienced players will mentor beginners.

In the case of this particular project, this process couldn’t continue because of short-term objectives (deadlines). However, in long-term projects including education or training, continuous co-creation can facilitate mutual supportive learning. Moreover, if we accept and learn from the above mistakes and failures, and carefully design the motivational aspects of participation and cooperation, it is likely that the prospect of participation will be very attractive.

Looking back to this project from the perspective of the business, our co-creation results are just ‘raw’ ones, but the designers, writers, and users used the experience to learn, expanding their own areas of expertise. If the ‘Relay novel’ project had continued for a longer period, knowledge about each other’s areas of practice, and the process of cooperation itself, would surely have developed. If we had had time to level up the process, the publication could by now contain more fresh content. Through this process, unstructured though it was, the writers’ capabilities were increased, and greater user participation was attracted.

The post A Co-Creation Experience in Editorial Design first appeared on Ludogogy.

If you would like to play / adapt this game for yourself, please feel free to download it.

The post Spiel Educators’ Day 2020 – Meta Game first appeared on Ludogogy.