Winning often coincides with a conclusion to a game, with the winner therefore being the person who has reached the highest number of points ‘when the music stops’. Sometimes the winning condition itself is what triggers the end of the game. Therefore, it is common that people often talk about ‘sandbox’ games, such as Minecraft, or narrative-based games and RPGs, like Dungeons and Dragons as not having a win state. But viewed from this position of the allocation of points, we can see that this is not necessarily true. RPGs allow the player to achieve many ‘wins’, even though there may be no ‘winner’.  All this actually tells us about such games is that they are not competitive (generally), and that there is no set conclusion condition, not that you cannot ‘win’ at them.

Winning in RPGS and Sandbox Games

Examples of points-based wins in RPGs include character stats, and their improvement throughout the game, payment for quests, and so on. In Minecraft, crafting of ever better materials and objects, utilising a Technology Tree represents a series of wins that could be described in terms of the increasing value of the objects to the player.

Given that all win states can be described mathematically, the actual perceived differences in win states between different games are more a matter for Aesthetics, Narrative and Theme than anything else. But of course, it is these elements of the design of a game which are most closely associated with the Player Experience. They are what makes the difference, for example, between a person simply pressing buttons in a pre-ordained sequence, in the manner of a pigeon in a Skinner Box, and a ‘player’ successfully getting his dragon to glide to the platform where the last few gems in the game are hidden.

The first of these looks a lot like ‘work’, and menial, tedious work at that, while the latter represents an achievement which leads to an experience of Fiero.

Winning Conditions

So, what kinds of different winning conditions can we create for the player. Here is a list of some commonly used ones – definitely not exhaustive.

• Victory Points – points accrued during the game as a result of player actions are totted up with the winner being the one with the most. This might also be implemented as money gained, number of skyscrapers built, or any other thing that can be simply ‘counted’
• Area control – the winner is the one who has control of the largest area of the game-playing surface.
• Race – the winner has reached some position, either figurative (a stated narratively described goal), or literal (a physical position on the playing surface) before all other players
• Target completion – the winner is the player who achieves some goal or set of goals before all other players. In turn the options for the targets are themselves almost limitless. It could be collecting sets of items, achieving a certain points score, or indeed any of the winning conditions listed here. It is worth remembered that win conditions can themselves be ‘chained’ or ‘grouped’ to provide larger ‘endgame’ win conditions.
• Last One Standing – Players are successively eliminated according to some criteria, until only one player – the winner – remains
• Codebreaking / Deduction – the winner is the one who arrives at some answer before all other players

Combining Mathematics with Aesthetics

And another list showing how these simple conditions can be combined with imaginative aesthetics, and some thematically appropriate mechanics, to create some of my favourite winning conditions in some of my favourite tabletop and party games.

• Victory Points – A combination of a playing surface that is created anew with each game, and the judicious placement of limited numbers or workers gives victory to the player who can complete the most cities, sequester the best grazing near to the cities, set up religious communities in well-tended land, and build the longest roads. All of which means that no two games of Carcassonne are ever the same.
• Area control – For fairly obvious thematic reasons many wargames have area control as a win condition. Good examples include Risk, and my particular favourite in this genre, Kingmaker. This condition is also often found in non-thematic, abstract ‘wargames’ – of which Go is the outstanding example. Many games also have area control as a central mechanic while the actual win condition is something else, like Victory Points – Carcassone, or the granddaddy of all area control games, El Grande.
• Race – Civilization (The board game not the Sid Meier epic – which is also awesome) is a pretty heavyweight game, which can take up to eight hours to play. Nevertheless, the win condition is simple – be the first to reach the end of a 17 space track. Thematically, you achieve that end through, variously, area control and advancing through a Technology Tree, representing the ever-advancing progress of your nation.
• Target completion – Games in which more than one target needs to be achieved in order to win, can make for experiences that are very strategic in nature, especially where targets interact with and modify each other. Fluxx uses this concept to make for a very dynamic play experience – with constantly changing goals and rules which modify each other.
• Last One Standing – Love Letter remains not only one of my favourite ‘last one standing’ games, but one of my favourite games ever. Thematically it reflects the intrigue of a medieval court, with hidden information as well as a kind of ‘Hot Potato’ mechanic, because while holding the princess at the end will win you the round, you also risk being forced to discard her (and therefore instantly losing) by the political machinations of your opponents.
• Codebreaking/ Deduction – The mainstay of many ‘detective’ games, which also understandably involve mechanics of hidden information. The ‘chase’ involved in Scotland Yard while trying to discover the location of the criminal ‘Mr X’, make sure this game immerses players well in the theme. It also arguably promotes the environmentally friendly use of public transport by public sector employees in the pursuit of their work.

Mapping Winning Conditions to Learning Outcomes

The flexibility in design afforded by this combination of simple mathematical calculation and aesthetics is another characteristic of games that make them suitable for creating learning experiences. When designing learning, with or without a game element, professionals must create objectives. In order to evaluate whether these objectives have been met, and measure the success of the learning intervention, they must also create some kind of measurement criteria.  In an ideal world, these criteria should be objective (the clue is in the name) and therefore will themselves follow the same kind of ‘points’ structure that we have already discussed with reference to ‘winning’ a game – in that they should be measurable.

The potential for closely aligning the learning objectives, and evaluation criteria, with the game winning conditions, either mathematically, thematically, or both, gives learning game designers a head start over other learning professionals when devising ways to facilitate and assess learning.

One must also be careful not to create misalignment of these in the name of ‘fun’ (or anything else). For example, while a ‘fastest player wins’ condition might make for an exciting and energy-filled experience, if the learning outcomes relate to a workplace skill where careful reflection and consideration are more appropriate, use of the game may hinder, gather than aid learning outcomes.

A final visit, therefore, to the win conditions listed above, with suggestions for how they could be used in a learning setting.

• Victory Points – In Carcassonne you gather victory points from many different sources, which opens the way for differing strategies to achieve the same end. This approach can be useful for learning outcomes where there should be no ‘one true answer’, but the potential for learners to take an approach relevant and tailored to their own particular contexts and learning needs.
• Area control – The analogies for ‘area control’ in a workplace learning setting might cover such learning outcomes as ‘spheres of influence’ or ‘networking’, and more literally could be used in simulations for such applications as disaster recovery or training for humanitarian aid first response teams.
• Race – There are many ways in which organisations are involved in races – against each other, in order to be prepared before a new piece of legislation comes in, and so on. Think how this might be used in learning programmes about dealing with competition, or industry disruption, or even innovation programmes. A Race winning condition also works well in process improvement training, where repeated playing of a game should show improvement over previous instances
• Target completion – Fluxx is the card game equivalent of all those ‘Living in a VUCA world’ trainings we’ve all been on – because life is complex, and the goalposts keep shifting. Project Management training games should include multiple targets to complete – because, well, that’s how projects work.
• Last One Standing win conditions might seem a little harsh in a workplace learning setting. For many folk, workplaces already seem a little bit too much like a Battle Royale game without bringing it into the training room. However, if it is not people who are being eliminated, it can be well used, for example, for brainstorming and workshopping ideas and solutions. May the Odds be Ever in your Favour.
• Codebreaking/ Deduction works really well in teamworking and communication learning experiences, because they are an ideal way to get people together to share individual knowledge and synthesize it as a team – or to work to reach a shared understanding which is the eventual answer they need to solve the game. Other applications include learning around siloed teams, organisational culture and multicultural empathy.

Winning Condition Takeaways

While all the above is underpinned by counting up ‘points’ the potential for creating variety in the experience of ‘winning’ for your learners goes way beyond simply coming up with a numeric score and declaring one of the teams in the room the ‘winner’.  In workplace settings, it is unlikely that employees’ day to day experience of workplace will include them being ‘scored’, so why would we, as learning designers, create workplace learning experience with scores as an output. Most of the feedback they get from decisions and actions at work will be in the form of sensory and emotional experience – so shouldn’t their learning feedback work in the same way? Judicious use of theme, aesthetics and well-chosen mechanics will result in win conditions with greater relevance and applicability to the skills they have come along to learn.

The post Focus on… winning conditions first appeared on Ludogogy.

Arguably, nearly every game, even if it is not specifically about money, or economics, has some element of economics embedded in it, because there is nearly always a return of ‘value’ from the play decisions that players make. This article, however, looks at in-game economies in a more literal sense, focusing on the creation and destruction of value you will commonly see in games where there is money, or other items with material value, or in gamification applications with collectable and exchangeable points, for example.

Sources and Sinks

Currency, or points, or whatever the unit of value you have created for your game or gamification design, must come from somewhere. These are your ‘Sources’, and you often see them implemented in games through quests (for which you get rewarded for completion), looting, (either by ‘finding’ in a landscape or stealing from the corpses of vanquished foes), or maybe through minigames. Although you often hear these referred to as ‘gold sources’ or ‘gold taps’, they don’t necessarily refer to currency, both usually to anything which has value within the game, and so could include things which could not necessarily be exchangeable for currency (real or in the game world), such as life points.

The places in your game or gamification application where the value created by sources is destroyed, are called ‘Sinks’. In the game, quite often this is not a literal destruction, but a transfer of value from one form to another, because the most common sink in most MMORPGs is the shop, where you can swap your hard-earned gold for a kick-ass sword, or contrarywise, trade in the leather armour you looted from a low-grade enemy for a few coppers.

The dangers of a poorly balanced economy

 It can be tricky to get right, but balancing your sources and sinks is essential if you want a compelling game experience, and even more important if you have an exchange between the ‘soft’ (in-game) currencies and ‘hard’ (real world cash) currency as part of the way you monetise the game.

If your sources are too productive, or you do not have enough sinks to destroy the value that has been created, you will get inflation.  Whatever it is, gold or other resources, that is too available, will effectively lose value. The game becomes too easy to progress through, and if you have real-world monetisation connection, you will find that demand for real world transactions will plummet.

If the opposite is true, and your sinks outstrip your sources you will end up with deflation, and in extreme cases, such as the situation found with the New World in-game economy, players have started to hoard (game) cash, and are instead bartering for items, which they would ordinarily buy with that cash, but are now unable to do so.

Interestingly, inflation can also have benefits. In games with a fixed end point, allowing players to find more and more efficient ways to farm gold as they level up, gives them a great sense of progression but can be balanced by the increasing prices of high-level items, the sinks.  Inflation also helps to tackle the ‘latecomer disadvantage’ when someone comes late to a game, maybe attracted by a new expansion, but could be discouraged by the amount of effort required to reach this point in the game. Controlled inflation makes more currency available to players early in the game, making it easier for them to progress and keeping them engaged.

There are multiple mechanisms to control the flow of value in the game including:

• Incremental mechanics – where sources and sinks increase proportionally as the game progresses
• Resets – Starting everybody back at zero from time to time will obviously combat inflation, but can be controversial – as many players will resent losing what they have worked hard for
• Gambling – If the mechanics of gambling in the game are designed as they are in casinos – the house always wins’ – then this is an effective way of removing value from the game
• Mega high cost sinks – Much like the real world, items can be made very attractive merely by their unattainability, and having a few items which have very high costs will drive players to want them and thus remove high quantities of value from the game in single transactions
• Taxation – where the game itself takes a small cut for transactions that happen in the game – for example, a ‘gaming house’ takes a small fee if two players want to wager against each other, or the mages guild charges a fee to bring a dead warrior back to life

Given the complexity of designing an in-game economy and the constant need to balance it throughout the life of a game, it is small wonder that there is an actual job, which deals with this and nothing else – The Game Economy Designer

How in-game economies foster engagement

This is not however, just a matter of making the numbers work, or in the case of a monetised game, ensuring a stable revenue.  These mechanisms are also all about creating a great play experience

Having multiple sources and sinks give variety to your game/gamification, and opens up possibilities for players to make meaningful choices

Multiple sources usually also means that you will have multiple types of ‘currency’ which can be used in many different ways, reflecting different paths to ‘progress’.  For example, you might have ‘gold’ or a similar resource representing money.  This tends (like in real life) to be the most widely transferable currency, and can be swapped for goods, services, and even other forms of ‘currency’, e.g. if you could ‘buy’ extra lives.

Another form of ‘currency’ could include lives, which you ‘spend’ in order to continue playing and whose ‘sinks’ would be strong(er) enemies, disease, poison, even extreme exhaustion or old age. Yet another is the staple of many business learning games, ‘effort’ – often implemented as actual people in worker placement games.

Ultimately, all of these things are actually ‘points’. Points in games are usually of two kinds, cumulative, non-exchangeable points – for example, experience points (XP) which allow you to level up in an RPG, or exchangeable points which you can spend to get other stuff you need to move on in the game. In Settlers of Catan, for example, you spend wood, grain, wool and brick to build roads and settlements, or you can swap two of one resource for one of another

Exchangeable points

In fact, exchangeable points are pretty much the bread and butter of games, and money is not really a special case; it’s just an example of widely-applicable exchangeable points.

What the exchangeable points are actually called is usually a function of the theme and aesthetics of the game, as is what the sources and sinks themselves are called. The wool, wood etc of Catan (which is about building settlements) function extremely similarly to, for example, spell points for a Mage in an RPG, but only at the point of use, where they are both swapped for something else that creates ‘progress’ for the player. In Catan it is the building of a road, in the RPG it is a kick-ass Fireball which vapourises a group of enemies. The sources and sinks differ considerably, though. In Catan the resources are ‘harvested’, generating resources using a combination of the mechanisms of terrain control and random number generation. In the RPG the spell points are a function of aspects of a character (level, and stats such as ‘wisdom’ or ‘magic’). As far as the sinks go, in Catan, the sink creates a permanent (at least in the original game) terrain control, which itself helps to generate more resources in the future. In the RPG, the fireball solves an immediate problem, but does not otherwise impact the game further.

For each of the aspects of a game economy you therefore have design choices about how a particular resource is created, including what the source is called, or represents, narratively, how it functions (in terms of a single or group of connected game mechanism – with an effectively unlimited number of combinations possible), and how that source responds e.g. in its rate of production in the context of a game situation or character/player trait. You have an almost infinite number of choices of what to call the resource and what it represents in the game. Finally, in terms of the sink(s), you have the same kind of freedom you have in designing the sources.

This gives considerable scope for creating narrative and supporting a game theme, and facilitating meaningful player decisions and gameplay.

Given the almost infinite possibilities, it would be impossible to list all of them, but here are a few possibilities you could implement in your game design using exchangeable points.

Key takeaways on in-game economies

• Even games which, on the surface, do not appear to be about money or Economics, usually have some underlying system for creation, exchange and destruction of value.
• Value is created by ‘Sources’ and destroyed or exchanged by ‘Sinks’.
• Poor balanced in-game economies can cause inflation and deflation and adversely affect engagement.
• Design of in-game economies also provides opportunities to create strong narratives and themes, and foster player engagement by allowing players to exercise autonomy and make meaningful choices.
• The combination of design choices for sources, sinks and the resource created by them is effectively unlimited and gives the game designer massive scope for originality and creativity.

The post Focus on… In-game Economies first appeared on Ludogogy.

I am immensely gratefully to all the wonderful contributors to Ludogogy who participated in this tie-in event and gave generously of their time, expertise and playfulness to make it such a great event, and a useful resource into the future.

I hope you enjoy what you see below, and that you will take the time to connect with these game creators and find out more about what they do.

The panel disscussion on 14th September saw great tips and insights from (L to R, top to bottom) Andy Yeoman, Sarah Le-Fevre, Joe Slack, Laxman Murugappan, Mohsin Memon, Mihaela Danciu, Erik Agudelo, and Andrew Lau.

On the 19th September we were lucky enough to run two game demo sessions, The first was with Mohsin Memon, who took us through a thrilling round of Evivve, the Leadership Game. Did the team win or lose? You’ll have to watch and see. You can also read Mohsin’s other articles.

The second session had the players/learners running a farm in a round of So Farm So Good. This was run by one of the game’s creators, Abhilash Purohit. If you want to know more about how this game was created, read this article from Abhilash.

On 21st September, we got the opportunity to learn about creating our own worlds, courtesy of Eduardo Nunes and Bruno Gavaia. In a fascinating session we looked at  a number of free resources which can be used to generate maps, narrative, player characters and even currency. We learnt how learning outcomes can combined with narrative to create compelling quests, with which learners will eagerly engage.  Make sure you get time to read Eduardo’s other articles, about his game ‘Liber Domus’.

The 22nd September saw two appearances in one day by long-time friend of Ludogogy, Terry Pearce. First of all, he took us through his latest project, a set of practical and beautiful cards which help learning professsionals put more play into their learning designs. You can read Ludogogy’s review of these cards here.

… and then a couple of hours later he was back, along with Matt Stevens, Ben Stevens and Jessica Roberts of Lessons Learned Simulations and Training, to playtest the Humanitarian Crisis Game. If you like the idea of a game which has a mechanic based on Maslow’s pyramid, then this is one for you. You can read Terry’s articles for Ludogogy here.

Erik Agudelo is soon to launch his innovative learning design tool, Toolbox 4 Creativity (TB4C) on Kickstarter.  But he stopped preparing that for just long enough on the 23rd of September, to host a session showing how the principles behind that idea work.  If you want to find out how the affordances of game design can be used to create a deep learning experience for learners in any topic, then this session is for you.

On Friday 24th September, we experienced two very different games, with very different approaches to equally serious issues. Andy Chong Brought us Fishy Business, a game where your team can learn about running a sustainable business by harvesting the bounty of the ocean. Massive Kudos, too, to Andy for creating a beautiful rendition of his game in Miro, which as anyone who has attempted this will know is, as Andy put it ‘A Boss Level Challenge’

Richard Schreiber of Unite2Games has an important mission – preparing young people to be the leaders of tomorrow.  His Ubuntu Game strives to tackle issues of Diversity and Inclusion by prompting teens to engae with each other through a series of questions and quests – each of which has the potential to be a deep conversation-starter.

Our final day of live sessions for the Make & Break event kicked off with a very innovative application for a game – the conversations we all need to have when onboarding a customer and getting to the bottom of what it is they want to achieve through working with us. Laxman Murrugappan, Mihaela Danciu and Alejandro allowed us in at a very early stage in the development of their game – which seeks to build this important realtionship between supplier and client, by having them prepare a delicious feast together.

And last but by no means least, Antonis Triantafyllakis brought us Nutstarter, a pun-fuelled quest to guide a colony of squirrels through the process of raising funds (acorns) from their community to build a Nutapult (or Trenutchet (like I said – puns) in order to defeat a marauding dragon who wants to steal their winter stash of nuts. If the crowdfunding sounds familiar, so it should. This is a learning game about running a Kickstarter campaign.

The post Focus on… Make & Break Live Events first appeared on Ludogogy.

Feedback is an important part of the learning process. Feedback is also really important for games to be engaging and fun.

Feedback in education is based on providing the student with tangible information that they can use to improve their learning, knowledge grasp, or retention.

Feedback in a game is provided to the player in order to viscerally show them the impact of their actions.

The two can be combined in order to both meet learners’ outcomes as well as provide some interesting and engaging feedback in a games-based learning environment.

Type of Feedback

There are two main types of feedback: positive feedback loops and negative feedback loops. Each one can be used to elicit a certain response from our students and players. Both can be used in balance to shape their experience and steer them towards the learning outcomes and experiences we’ve designed for them.

Positive Feedback

You can think of positive feedback as a reinforcing relationship. In this relationship, we’ve given the student or player something of value.  That item of value can change based on the venue where the feedback is provided.

If it’s a game then we can provide an award for earning a high score. That reward can be some sort of power up that allows the player to achieve an even higher score on the next level. That new high score would allow them to earn a new item etc… This feedback loop continues to reinforce itself.

This is particularly important for learners when it comes to scaffolding. We teach students to create knowledge or master a specific skill or ability. Ideally, we then have them use that knowledge, skill, or ability to tackle an appropriate challenge. That challenge can then be used as a new opportunity to introduce the next skill or ability they will need to know in order to keep progressing.

Whether it’s a class or a game, the properties of positive feedback loops are the same:

Positive feedback loops:

• Destabilize the game by providing players with an “edge”
• This edge allows players to get ahead
• When players get ahead, they cause the game to cycle faster

In a competitive game, this is often what you want. Though, in a classroom it can be difficult to mitigate.  Teachers can often recall that some students will get ahead of the average pace of the class and others students will lag behind. These positive feedback loops are reinforcing of behavior but also promote inequity in a group learning process.

This inequity is demonstrated in competitive real time strategy games like Starcraft where players follow the “4x” style feedback loop of explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate. Here, players explore the map with their starting resources; they expand to attain more resources; they exploit their competitive position against their opponents; and then they move to exterminate them with more powerful units gained from more resources.

The inequity we see embraced in this real-time strategy game can be mitigated through learning. One key to addressing this is to treat learning as a cooperative game: where multiple students can achieve the “win state” simultaneously.

This can be reinforced through feedback when the instructor provides some minimally meaningful information at an assessment stage in the process. I’ve done this before when I taught public speaking by presenting speakers with a visual reminder of where they are on time and pacing. This small, but significant form of feedback, gave those students real time insight on the speed of their speech. They learned to control how fast they were speaking and time their content accordingly.  Other students cooperated by providing them visual feedback on when they’ve made appropriate eye contact with members of the audience.

Negative Feedback

Understandably, negative feedback loops are the opposite of positive loops.  Though in games, we see them as balancing the relationship between the players and the game state.

That balance comes from the game ensuring that the action that a player took to trigger that negative feedback makes it harder for that action to occur again.

That’s just a long way of explaining something that has been included in many popular games: the catch up mechanic.

The catch up mechanic is a negative feedback loop that makes it easier for players who are not in the lead to catch up to the leader. That can be via points, position, or resources.

We’ve seen this in games like Mario Kart where that infamous Blue Shell gets rocketed towards the lead player to unseat them.  When growing up, I learned to race near the middle of the pack where you weren’t such a big target.

This negative feedback loop brought equilibrium to the game by incentivizing players to avoid the extremes of the pack: not in the very front and not at the very end.

We see negative feedback loops like this in the classroom with practices like grading on a curve. When grading on a curve, you’re looking for a normalized distribution of grades. So the majority of grades will be the average number for the class with a few grades as outliers: from exemplary to failing.  Because of this system, students aren’t necessarily working to master the material or the information.  Instead, they are incentivized to pursue a relatively better position than their peers to earn a passing grade.

Whether it’s a class or a game, the properties of negative feedback loops are the same:

Negative feedback loops:

• Stabilize the environment
• Cause players and students to move towards the “average”

Using feedback in your practice

Consider how your use of feedback will impact your players or students before using it in your practice.

Scaffolded feedback is important for the classroom.  Highly technical feedback about forms and concepts not yet covered by a student would just confuse and hinder them. By targeting feedback that addresses your current learning outcomes, you can better setup your students for success.

Be aware of the kind of perception built on your feedback loop. Ask yourself: “Would this feel “good” or “bad” by my players / students?”  Are they being rewarded for exploring the game in the way you designed? Are they meeting their learning outcomes? How can you structure your feedback loop in order to prioritize those player experiences?

How observable is your feedback by others players and students? Can others adjust their actions based on the performance of their peers? Is the feedback public? Or is it highly specific to individual players and students?

What is the volume of the feedback that you are providing? Too much feedback can be counterproductive. Instead, focusing on just one or two key elements can be more successful than focusing on the student’s entire performance at once.

This is similar to board games called “point salads” where players earn points for all sorts of different actions. Well balanced games allow players to pursue different, asymmetric strategies, in order for them to compete fairly against one another.

Closing thoughts

As with all games and instructional material: it’s best to test them with your demographic of choice before pursuing a full roll out.

Remember to think about the experience from the users’ perspective by sitting in their seat. What is it like to receive this type of feedback? What can they do now that is actionable? How can they improve their performance? What can they do to play the game better?

This article covered the feedback loops in games-based learning. To learn more about feedback loops in gamification, check out the free course on Gamification Explained.

If you have enjoyed this article – consider getting yourself lifetime access to his Games-Based Learning Digital Library containing all of the content from the past two Games-Based Learning Virtual Conferences; past webinars and courses he’s created; as well as his complete back catalog of articles; podcast episodes; and videos. And more content is being added all the time.

Readers of Ludogogy can get a $50 discount on this valuable resource by using this link.

The post Focus on… Feedback Loops in Games Based Learning first appeared on Ludogogy.

Theory of Change (TOC) was developed as a tool to address these missing elements in the design of change, and provide a framework to document, clearly, the path from the current situation to the desired goals.

As a visible reference of the design of the change, TOC can fulfil a variety of functions.

1. It provides a visible map to the change initiative, including milestones.
2. It creates a testable hypothesis for how the change will happen.
3. It provides a design for evaluation at the same time as it maps the steps to the change.
4. It communicates clearly the complexity of the process, and provides a document to which all stakeholders can give agreement.

The first step in creating a TOC is to work backwards from the desired endpoint and map outcomes that will logically lead to that goal, also drawing in the connections between these. Once that set of outcomes are decided, move backwards again mapping the outcomes that logically lead to those, and so on, until you have reached the current state. Outcomes will be added, deleted and amended many times, potentially, in this mapping process, and the discussions that stakeholders have while mapping are an extremely valuable part of the TOC process.

The next step is Developing Indicators. This is where the existing outcomes are ‘fleshed out’ with details which will be measurable. Each indicator seeks to answer the questions; Who will change? What proportion do we require to achieve for this to be a success? What is the measurement of success? When does this have to happen by?

The next step is to identify any assumptions that are inherent in the steps already covered. For example, if one of the identified outcomes is ‘Course graduates are ready to step into leadership roles’, it is possible that there is an assumption that leadership roles exist to be ‘stepped into’.

In a preceding step, outcomes were identified and connected with lines to show their causal relationship. In this stage these causal relationships are further examined. If an outcome can be connected to a later outcome (or end goal) with a solid line it means that one logically leads to the other without further need for intervention, for example, ‘learners attend course’ might logically lead to ‘learners gain attendance certificate’ but not necessarily to ‘learners gain qualification’. Such a connection would be connected with a dotted line to indicate that some intervention or evaluation needed to take place at this point to create a complete map of the change and how it will be achieved.

Theory of Change is just as valid a tool in the design of learning as it is in any other kind of proposed change, and can act as a very useful addition to the OOO (Objectives, Outcomes, Outputs) approach to learning design. There is a danger that many assumptions will creep into the OOO approach. One that is particularly problematic is the assumption that the achievement of individual learning outcomes will necessarily aggregate into the achievement of collective (organisational) objectives, without considering aspects which traditionally fall outside the remit of ‘learning professionals’. For example, these aspects might include, the agency (or lack thereof) of learners to implement new skills learned, the support, or not, of line management for new behaviours, lack of opportunity to engage in changed practices, and so on.

Using Theory of Change alongside OOO can alert learning designers and other stakeholders to these assumptions and other gaps in the chain of causality, allow appropriate additional measures to be put in place and thus give the learning initiative the best possible chance to appropriately contribute to the desired changes in an organisation.

As a design tool for learning, TOC can also obviously be a valuable aid when taking learning design into learning game design allowing us to map the complete and logical map of learning change onto the experiences we design into the games and gamification which support it.

The post Focus on… Theory of Change first appeared on Ludogogy.

What’s in a word?

Writers and other creatives have had a fascination with both ideally good and ideally bad places for as long as human creativity has existed. The archetypes of ‘Heaven’ and ‘Hell’ exist in many religions and philosophies, and those two locations have been joined by many man-made utopias and dystopias down the years.

Plato’s ‘Republic’ (c. 375 BC) is often cited as being the first Utopian novel, although of course, the truth is much complex than that. It does however contain a description of an imaginary city, the Kallipolis, so it is as well to include in this review.  When viewed as a description of a ‘ideal’ city, The Republic has attracted much criticism due to the totalitarian nature of the government of Kallipolis.

Nowhere is a Utopia

The first person to write about a ‘Utopia’ was Sir Thomas More.  It is, rather satisfyingly, a pun, based on a Greek word meaning ‘Nowhere’, but which sounded like a similar Greek word meaning ‘Good Place’ (And if there was ever a utopia that suddenly revealed itself to be exactly the opposite, ‘The Good Place’ (2016 – 2020) is most definitely it). His ‘Utopia’ (1516), described a perfect island state, and contrasted it with the ‘real’ world of crime, poverty and discord.  Aspects of More’s Utopia include communal property, which each person can draw upon according to their need, a welfare state and free hospitals, and extreme religious tolerance. However premarital sex is punishable by a lifetime of enforced celibacy, and slavery is a prominent feature of the society, which should remind us forcibly and importantly, that one person’s Utopia is another’s Dystopia.

Imaginary Worlds

Dystopias (at least in terms of the word itself) came along some centuries later. John Stuart Mill, inspired by More’s work, added the Latin prefix ‘dys’, meaning ‘bad’ to the front of utopia, to create the idea of a perfect world gone bad. He first used the word in 1868, while criticising the British government’s Irish Land policy.

The ‘Nowhere’ meaning was adopted in both Utopian and Dystopian writing which followed. William Morris wrote ‘News from Nowhere’ (1890), which described a state of perfect socialism. The protagonist of this work of speculative fiction falls asleep after attending a meeting of the Socialist League and wakes in a perfect agrarian future where people take pleasure in both nature and in their work. In ‘Erewhon’ (1872) (Nowhere, nearly, spelt backwards), by Samuel Butler, a society which at first seems Utopian is revealed to be far from it. In this satire of Victorian England, disease is seen as a crime and the sick are imprisoned, whereas criminality is seen as a sickness and criminals are hospitalised.

Social Dystopias

This foreshadowing of the demonisation and criminalisation of gay men (and other queer people), largely because of HIV/AIDS, in the 1980’s, culminating in the abhorrent Section 28, is something that later readers could certainly take from this text, as well as the racist attacks on Asian Americans in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Also, eerily prescient of today’s concerns, machines have been outlawed, as being dangerous competitors of humans in the race for survival.

Although not all Utopian or Dystopian stories are set in fictional futures, even those that are not, are often discovered to contain more or less accurate predictions of things to come, some time after they are written.  Because these works are by nature speculative the authors are often conjecturing what may come next, based on what they already see in front of them.

Technological Utopias

Two authors who can definitely been seen as promoting the idea of a technology-driven future Utopia, are H.G.Wells and Jules Verne.  Indeed, Wells called himself a ‘utopiographer’ and firmly believed that scientific and technological advancement would necessarily lead to a better future. His novels and stories including often describe futures where technology has taken much of the misery and labour out of human life. In ‘A Modern Utopia’ (1905), Wells attempts to explain the difference between the ‘static’ utopias that had gone before (where an ideal state had been reached and human happiness only required that that state be maintained) and his vision of a ‘kinetic’ utopia where a benevolent ruling class of ‘samurai’ would enable progress alongside political stability.

Verne, whose future visions have foreshadowed so many of the inventions we take for granted today, wrote of one we could certainly wish we had today. In the ‘Begum’s Fortune’ (1879), he writes about houses constructed out of a material which allows optimum air flow and which are heated by stoves, topped by an apparatus which scrubs the smoke completely clean of carbon particles before discharging the cleaned air into the atmosphere.

Through a glass darkly

Once Utopias and Dystopias were able to leap off the page and onto the big (and small) screen, we entered a new golden age of speculative creativity – a Utopia for fans of imaginary worlds, and much has been written about whether the mood of a particular age or decade can be gauged by whether its films are largely optimistic or pessimistic.

Political dystopias abound in the early 20^th century, and many of these made their way onto cellulose. George Orwell’s allegory about the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the subsequent Stalinist era, Animal Farm (1945), was re-imagined as an animated film in 1954 and as a live action movie in 1999. Both versions sanitised the book somewhat, and the book itself has been the subject of several bans in the US, Russia, China and the UAE down the years.

Dystopias in Film

Orwell’s other most famous dystopic work, ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (1949), foreshadows the hyper-surveilled world that many of us now live in, along with a totalitarian state. John Hurt took the part of Winston Smith in the film. But for most people in the country of Orwell’s birth, the Phrase ‘Big Brother’ now brings to mind a houseful of vacuous self-publicists, willing to sacrifice every last shred of dignity in order to become ‘celebrities’…

…An idea which in itself is dealt with, in ‘Dead Set’ (2008), a five episode miniseries by Black Mirror (2011 – ) writer, Charlie Brooker, in which zombies invade the Big Brother house. Black Mirror itself is named for the black screen of our most constant companion, the mobile phone, and takes the diametrically opposite view of technology as that taken by Verne and Wells, focusing almost entirely on the unintended (and undesirable) consequences of our use and increasing reliance on technology.

A Mirror of our Hopes and Fears

Dystopias and Utopias are truly mirrors, of our most urgent concerns at any given time. The feminist dystopia,‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ (1985) grew out the rise of the religious right in the US in the 1980s, under a Reagan administration. Margaret Atwood’s mentee, Naomi Alderman wrote ‘The Power’ (2016) as the result of her attending a religiously orthodox primary school where each morning the boys would give thanks to God for not having been born women.

Concerns about overpopulation, and the prospect of feeding an ever growing population, in a world irrevocably damaged by climate catastrophe, led to ‘Soylent Green’ (1973), where the elderly and poor are encouraged to accept euthanasia, and are then made into the titular foodstuff, which feeds those who remain. Loosely based on Harry Harrison’s ‘Make Room, Make Room’ (1966), the film is set in 2022.

Human rights under a number of dystopian regimes and circumstance provide a rich seam of inspiration, particularly those which many of us now take for granted such as the right to have children. For dystopias with a focus on the regulation of fertility and genetic ‘fitness’, see ‘Gattaca’ (1997), ‘Brave New World’ (1932) and ‘The Wanting Seed’ (1962) by Anthony Burgess.

Like Animal Farm, many books / films make use of other species, alien or terrestrial, or artificial lifeforms to ask big questions about what it is to be human, and about many of the indignities and outrages we visit on other members of our species. Spielberg’s ‘AI’ (2001), Garland’s ‘Ex Machina’ (2014), Asimov’s ‘I Robot’ (1950) and many others ask us about the criteria for personhood and present dystopias where humans have gained yet another class of being which they can treat less well than they should.

What Fiver and Hazel taught us

Rabbits might seem unlikely candidates to teach us about where we are going wrong, but ‘Watership Down’ (1972) remains one of the most harrowing dystopian visions of human impacts on the natural world. More recently, Jasper Fforde’s ‘The Constant Rabbit’ (2020) presents a fictional United Kingdom where an ‘Anthropomorphic Event’ has resulted in a species of sentient human-sized rabbits (and some other animals). In a vision that could quite obviously ‘never happen here’ (ahem) the government have implemented systemic anti-rabbit policies and mis-information about their inherent criminality and their intent to ‘take over’ (aided by their superior fertility and propensity to breed like.. well.. you know..) abound. The human protagonist (secretly) holds liberal views towards rabbits, but still holds down a job in the anti-rabbit state apparatus.

So, are all the most notable stories dystopian? Well, maybe. But even dystopias can give us hope. With my love of books, ‘Farenheit 451’ (1953) is one of the worst possible dystopias I can imagine, but the ending strikes such a note of hope, that even in the worst possible situations, that if people are prepared to do what is necessary – in this case, learn a book by heart, and ‘become’ the living embodiment of that book – better times will prevail.

Optimistic Literature

But the news is not all bleak. There is now a whole literary genre (and wider cultural and practical movement) dedicated to speculative futures where humanity has already done ‘what is necessary’. Solarpunk is environmentally-focused and optimistic, showing us what may be to come, if only we get together and get our act together. Notable examples include ‘Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind’ (1985), a manga, and later, brilliant anime from the Ghilbli stable, by Hayao Miyazaki and ‘Ecotopia’ (1975) by Ernest Callenbach.  For recent anthologies see ‘Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers’ (2018) and ‘Sunvault’ (2017).

Dystopian and Utopian play

Dystopian games are often adaptations of literature and films, sometimes directly, such as ‘1984:Animal Farm’ (2012), a board game which draws upon both of Orwell’s works, but more often by drawing on well-known themes. If you like the Noir-ish flavour of ‘Blade Runner’ (1982) then try ‘Android’ (2008) and its many subsequent incarnations and expansions.

If ‘Death Race 2000’ (1975) or the ‘Mad Max’ (1979 – 2015) franchise get your motor running then you could enjoy unboxing ‘Car Wars’ (1981) or ‘Road Kill Rally’ (2010).

‘Junta!’ (1978) and ‘Guillotine’ (1998) give us a glimpse into historical dystopias. And no (even brief) look at dystopian games would be complete without a mention of ‘Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia’ (2013), a worker placement game where you must build (and maintain) the perfect golden city you have built amid a post-apocalyptic wasteland – but at the expense of individual freedoms and all knowledge of the past.

If you want a game where dystopia is your win state, you could do worse than picking up Gloom (2005), which thanks to its many imaginative expansions you can also play in space or in fairyland, among many other settings.

A search for ‘Dystopian games’ on Google returns far more than ‘Utopian games’ (much like the books and films), but there are a few notable examples.

‘Utopia Engine’ (2010) is a free print and play dice game where you attempt to avert Doomsday by constructing artifacts.

‘Utopoly’ (2017) is hack of Monopoly (1933), billed both as a game and ‘a tool for utopian practice’ it draws on Robert Jungk’s Future Workshop methodology.

There is even a game called ‘Thomas More’s Utopia’ (2018) in which players cooperate (of course) to maintain a perfect society measured on four parameters; population, happiness, culture and faith. This game is also interesting in that it has different board areas (which rotate among the players) which all have different game mechanics.

Natural World Utopias

It is noticeable that many games which could be described as utopian, do not include human protagonists at all (which should tell us something). Everdell (2018) is a beautiful game where forest animals live in harmony with their surroundings and build thriving cultures. Ecosystem (2019), Photosynthesis (2017) and Wingspan (2019) are also games where the optimum conditions for surviving and thriving are the focus of the game, but where humans do not feature.

(1) There is absolutely no evidence that the Milton/Mother-in-Law thing is true, as far as I can see, but if you want to be misogynistic and simultaneously boast a classical education, it’s a definite step-up from ‘Take my mother-in-law. Please.’

The post Focus on… Utopias and Dystopias first appeared on Ludogogy.

One of my current favourites, ‘Wingspan’, contains components which represent eggs, a bird box from which food can be gained, dice showing different types of bird food, and of course several hundred (if you have the expansions) beautifully drawn cards representing a dazzling diversity of bird species.

It would be difficult to imagine that one could use these components to do anything other than play the game of Wingspan as it was designed, given their specificity. Fortunately, it is unlikely one would want to, given that it is such a well-designed and enjoyable experience.

Infinite Possibilities for Play

There is however another class of ‘games’, made up of components and concepts that are much more generic, and which therefore allow an almost infinite number of possibilities in play.  These are not games in their own right, so much as games systems which have spawned many games, and which continue to do so. They often also inspire the creation of other unrelated games and games systems.  Have you noticed, for example, how many card games, even if their theme has been radically changed, still contain 52 cards, or are differentiated into ‘suits’? (Although this may partially be to do with economics, as games components manufacturers tend to offer these ‘standard’ print specifications more cheaply).

Physical components

Among the oldest and most widely used games systems are playing cards. And in that category, I also include related card-based based systems such as the Tarot, and conceptually similar components made from different materials e.g. Mah Jong tiles.

Conceptual analysis of games systems allow us to get to the underlying mechanisms which make them so versatile in play, and provides excellent inspiration for game design. We can, from this basis, not only imagine new ideas for play using these specific objects, but also imagine how the same play experiences can be realised using different objects which have the same characteristics. A few of these concepts are:

• Magnitude – cards have values which can be compared with each other (Snap), used in arithmetic (Blackjack), sequenced (Whist), matched (Go Fish), grouped (Rummy), form complex combinations, or combinations of combinations (Mah Jong)
• Suits – categories can facilitate grouping (Solitaire), Evaluation (Poker), powers (trump cards)
• Attribution – values or suits can be attributed special characteristics (wild cards), or actions (Crazy Eights)
• Narrative – more explicit in Tarot cards, but even ordinary playing cards can have meanings attached (dead man’s hand, cartomancy, ace of spades as bad luck)
• Etc.

Their design as physical objects affords several ways of using them

• Revealed or hidden information – the two-sided design of cards means that their characteristics can be at any point in the game shown to or hidden from players, and furthermore that disclosure can apply to some players and not others
• Inclusion or exclusion – certain values or suits can be excluded from play, or play can be limited to small subset of cards (one’s hand)
• Randomisation – cards and tiles can be shuffled
• Etc.

In turn, the above characteristics make it easy to create specific kinds of play experience

• Competitive (Bezique) or Cooperative (Bridge)
• Chance (Beggar my Neighbour) vs Skill (Gin Rummy)
• Gambling
• Bluffing
• Etc.

Games design challenges

• Take a standard pack of cards, and a theme (e.g. building a railroad, learning to be a wizard, ballroom dancing, whatever). For the first set of bullet points list as many ways as you can think of that those concepts could support your theme. E.g. The suits of cards could represent different schools of magic, the values could represent different levels of skill in specific dance steps.
• Randomly choose three of four of the bullet points above (or concept within, if they have more than one example) and design a game which show those characteristics but uses playing pieces other than playing cards

Dice as Games Systems

Older even than playing cards are dice, which date to a time before recorded history, and which were probably derived from the knucklebones of animals.  Often seen these days as a component in games which also contain many other types of components, especially where random number generation is required, there are nevertheless many hundreds of games which can be played with dice alone.

At first sight these are less complex systems than playing cards, and the overriding characteristic of dice is their ability to randomly generate numbers, however we could also think about them in this way (with some modern additions that sheep’s knuckles would not have had), and we then discover that many of the same characteristic and modes of play can apply to dice

• See Magnitude above – as objects which display different values, dice can be conceptually similar to cards in this sense. Additionally, polyhedral dice allow the generation of a wider range of numbers (e.g. RPG dice typically comprise the five Platonic solids and also a ten-sided die)
• Suits – plastics and other materials allow us to create dice which can be different from other dice (or similar). For example, see the used of coloured dice in ‘Waggle Dance’.
• Attribution and narrative can also work in a similar way for dice as they can for cards. For example, throwing a six in many games activates a second roll, or throwing a double even sends you to jail if you do it too often (Monopoly)

Unlike cards, dice are 3D objects and although this may not be a commonly-used attribute in play, this can facilitate

• Building structures, including balancing
• Using them to represent in-game objects or characters (Dragon Dice)
• Arranging them as a numbered playing surface
• Etc.

Games design challenges

• Take an existing card game that you know well, and then work through how it (or something very similar) could be played using dice instead of cards. What elements could remain the same, and which would need to be adapted?  How would you cope with, for example, the probability that throwing dice produces duplicate values whereas a pack of cards contains 52 unique entities? Go with the flow and see where this thought experiment takes you in creating a familiar yet brand-new game.
• Look at an existing board game you own or have played, which contains physical components. Either work out a way to use one of the components in an unusual way, within the existing game (e.g. use the number on scrabble tiles to create numeric values instead of words), or create a whole new game around your new way of using the playing pieces

Looney Pyramids

A more recent, and very successful game system is Looney Pyramids (also known as Icehouse Pyramids).  These are colourful Perspex pyramids which have a number of attributes (I’m sure you are getting used to this idea now, and can imagine the kinds of play this might allow)

• Value – indicated by size – there are large, medium and small pyramids, and relative value is also indicated by 1, 2 or 3 pips moulded into the surface of the pyramid
• Colour – a ‘suit’ of kinds
• Stackability – smaller pyramids can perch on top of larger ones and larger ones can cover smaller pyramids (or other small objects)
• Opacity or transparency – some pyramids can be seen through while others can completely obscure things underneath them.

Rather than set you a Looney Pyramids challenge, I invite you to explore the thriving Looney Pyramids community who between them have created 100s of games.  Notable examples include Zendo and Zarcana (which also uses Tarot cards as a playing surface). Visit the unaffiliated fan site to find many other player created games

Other Games Systems

Other physical game pieces you may want to play with in similar way in your game design experiments:

• Counters or tiddlywinks
• Dominoes
• Chess or draughts (chequers) pieces
• Playing surfaces, e.g. boards
• Etc.

This only scratches the surface of the physical games systems that are available, or that have inspired games designers down the years.  Consider for example, the many games that use recognisable components from existing games and create entirely new experiences. Dozens of games use an eight by eight chequerboard, and, for example, you use all the components of Chess (along with some move-busting cards) in the wonderfully bonkers experience that is Knightmare Chess.

And the above doesn’t even consider the conceptual systems such as Dungeons and Dragons (D20), GURPS, Unisystem, Advanced Fighting Fantasy (designed to help players create their own games similar to Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s books) and similar, which provide frameworks for character and narrative creation, which, combined with a gamemaker’s imagination can provide a limitless source of different story/play experiences.

But these will have to be the topic of other articles, along with other game design challenges – where we can look more closely at how these kinds of experiences might be adapted to create learning experiences.

The post Focus on… Games Systems for Games Design first appeared on Ludogogy.

Now it’s all well and good to sing the praises of these games but we need to first understand what Wargaming is all about before we dive into who uses them and why they’re popular with different audiences.

What is Wargaming and where did it come from?

One of the simplest descriptions of Wargames comes from Decision Games; which says “a wargame is a model of a military situation which players can control” (Decision Games, 2020). Expanding on this further, it has the players of the game take on a commanding role within a military scenario and has to plan their strategies and make decisions based on their current circumstances within the given scenario in order to achieve victory against their opponent.

Humans have been playing games that simulate the idea of military strategy with game pieces representing their forces for a very long time, with games such as Go and Chess being usually the first games that spring to mind when someone typically thinks about strategy games.

However, according to the Historical Miniatures Gaming Society (HMGS), we know that most of the Wargames that would see use within a military setting evolved from these aforementioned games. The first attempt of a militarised Wargame being introduced in 1811 by the Prussian Baron von Reisswitz which used a table set to a specific scale, filled with sculpting sand, modular tiles, rulers and dividers to regulate movement and porcelain unit blocks.

Although it was well received by the Prussian and Russian aristocracy, Peterson(2012) highlights that military officers didn’t adopt it as a strategic tool due to the original version of the game presented to the royal family was far too expensive to reproduce commercially and due to the Baron being preoccupied with the ongoing Napoleonic wars, the rules and mechanics of the game weren’t refined to function in a reliable manner that best represented the situations that could be found within military skirmishes.

Further Developments in Wargaming

This was up until 1824 where his son George Heinrich Rudolf Johan von Reisswitz took it upon himself to develop the game further into a more reliable and structured game that would better simulate the experience of leading an army.

He would reintroduce this game as Anleitung zur Darstelling militarische manuver mit dem apparat des Kriegsspiels (Instructions for the Representation of Tactical Maneuvers under the Guise of a Wargame). Along with this new name, there were some major changes that would help to improve the structure of the game as well as better quantify the circumstances that may occur during military skirmishes.

These changes included; the introduction of game pieces that represented units of troops which could take a set amount of damage, their actions are represented by dice rolls and can’t be moved by the players themselves, Topologic maps that featured real locations and more natural terrain and finally the introduction of an umpire, an impartial and experienced military officer who interprets and carries out the orders of the players by carrying out the dice rolls and managing the positions of the players troops. (Von Reisswitz, 1824)

After introducing this revised version of his father’s game to the King and Generals, it was very well received, especially from General Von Müffling who declared “this is no ordinary sort of game, this is schooling for war. I must and will recommend It most warmly to the army”. As a result, the king ordered this game to be mass produced and distributed to every regiment in the army. (2012)

This fun little relic of a game is still being used today, thanks to the translation work of Bill Leeson, so definitely look into him if you’re interested in how this game is being used today.

Kriegspiel – translated by Bill Leeson is available from Amazon

Why is it used by the military?

Now that the history lesson is out of the way, there are many reasons that military personnel would make use of wargames in the midst of training. Here are just a few that spring to mind;

• By far the most obvious and important reasons to utilise Wargames during military training would be that they are cheap to purchase or develop when compared to purchasing the necessary training equipment and hiring training staff to carry out in person training exercises.
• Depending on the game, sessions can be very time efficient, especially when you need to restart or create a new scenario. This allows for more time for training when compared to having to restart a live action training session where you have to manage multiple people and reset or replace pieces of equipment after each session which can be time consuming and more difficult to manage than pieces of a game (much less irritative too which is a plus).
• Having the capability to be easily customise the scenarios that are presented to your players is a boon, especially if you want to test how someone handles situations within certain parameters (Having multiple players serving as allies or enemies, having fewer resources or troops than usual, introducing a time limit, etc.).
• Having a specified set of rules and objectives that the players have to follow makes it easy for supervisors and trainers to keep track of any analytics based on their performance and choices as they play, especially when combined with the customisable parameters from the previous point.
• Finally, conducting training through the use of Wargames offers a safe and controlled environment where mistakes can be made without fear of injury of anyone involved. (This is especially true when it compares to the risks posed to trainees during live fire exercises)

What’s the civilian appeal?

Although most Wargames are made with the intent of being used to assist with training military personnel, there is a huge market within the civilian market for these types of games. Being a professional civilian and having grown up playing a wide array of games, I can definitely think of some reasons for why these games would be appealing to the average joe.
Firstly, depending on the game’s historical setting, they can offer the players the opportunity to learn more about the history behind the events that are being represented within the game. This leads to the next point which is these games allow the opportunity to roleplay as a commanding officer within the game world, especially if the setting is a favourite of the players. Another reason could be that the players enjoy the intellectual stimulation that these games can offer. The last appealing aspect of these games is the chance to engage in some friendly competition with friends and family, especially if the setting is a one that the players are familiar with.

How can businesses benefit from these games?

If utilised correctly, Wargaming could be beneficial to be used with the training of teams within the business world. Aside from points that are fairly similar to why these games are popular with the civilian audience (Teambuilding exercises, friendly competition etc.), the main thing that must be considered when utilising these games would be the type of training you wish to support and choosing the right type of games to support that kind of experience you wish to provide to your employees.

The diagram below does show that Wargaming does support the training of decision-making skills, it is important to note that there are many different forms of decision making skills, with the main split being between improving the ability to make more informed decisions based on the knowledge and education of your workforce or improving the capacity to make choices based on analysed data gathered through research.

Although it is rather complicated at a glance, this diagram is just a quick glimpse into the potential training possibilities that can be offered to businesses if they implement them in a sensible way that benefits their work force.

To wrap everything up, Wargaming is a very unique beast within the gaming world that is enjoyed for reasons that change depending on the audience that plays them, be it a tool for training the commanding skills of military personnel, a potential means of testing and training the decision making capabilities of the workforce of commercial businesses, or as an intellectually entertaining way to kill some time with friends and family.

For lack of a better phrase, there’s something here for everyone!

The post Focus on… Wargaming and Wargames first appeared on Ludogogy.

This model itself grew out of an earlier model – Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics (MDA). Both of these models focus on the relationship between the game designer and the player, and the game characteristics and behaviours which emerge from that relationship.

It can be seen that the MDA model relates to the Gameplay layer of the MDE model, but that the word ‘Aesthetics’ has been replaced by ‘Affect’. This was at least partly in response to the confusion caused by the use of the word ‘Aesthetics’ which many people assumed to be to do with the appearance of the game.

In reality, the word refers to the emotional response of the player to the gameplay, and is firmly in the domain of the player. The designer cannot directly design this characteristic of the game. Neither can they directly design the Dynamics of the game. The Dynamics describe the behaviours of players when they interact with the Mechanics of the game. As such, Dynamics can be influenced by, for example, a player’s past experiences, strategic choices they make during play and higher level characteristics such as preferred way of playing (e.g. Player Type).

In using this model, the designer accepts that the only aspects of the game that can be directly designed are the Mechanics. So when we talk about ‘designing a game experience’, we are really talking about creating mechanisms, rules, toys and infrastructure with which the player can interact, and using our knowledge of the probable interaction of the player with our artifacts to predict the likely experience they will have. In effect we are designing a framework, but the experience can only be created through collaboration with our silent partner, the player.

Aesthetics is a blanket term which covers a myriad of responses that may be elicited from players. Theorists have sought to describe these in greater detail. For example, Hunicke, LeBlanc and Zubek, created the following non-exhaustive list of eight in their paper, MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research. This list seeks to formalise what it is about a game that is ‘fun’.

1. Sensation (Game as sense-pleasure). The response to the visual and audio aspects of the game, or even taste, touch and smell if the game incorporates those.
2. Fantasy (Game as make-believe). Response to the imaginary world of the game.
3. Narrative (Game as drama). A story hook that drives the player to find out ‘what happens next’.
4. Challenge (Game as obstacle course). The satisfaction of mastery which will drive return visits until a challenge is overcome.
5. Fellowship (Game as social framework). The response to social a community aspects of the game.
6. Discovery (Game as uncharted territory). The drive to explore the game world to find what it has to offer
7. Expression (Game as self-discovery). Discovering and exercising one’s own creativity.
8. Submission (Game as pastime). Response to the game as a pleasant activity one is willing to give oneself over to.

The post Focus on… Game Design Aesthetics first appeared on Ludogogy.

One of the greatest skills we can bring to bear on this task is Empathy. Here are a few things to think about.

How to Get Empathy

Roman Krznaric’s book, ‘Empathy: Why it matters and how to get it’, argues that empathy can be a force for major social change, as well as enhancing our personal relationships and our creativity. The heart of the book, is his laying out the six habits of highly empathic people.

Empathy: Why it Matters and How to Get It by Roman Krznaric is available on Amazon

Habit 1: Cultivate curiosity about strangers – Take the opportunity to talk to people who you do not usually come across. You’ll need to move beyond the usual conversational gambits about the weather to really start to understand other worldviews, though.

Habit 2: Challenge prejudices and discover commonalities – Are you taking a stereotypical view when you first meet or think about another person? Try to think about someone as a individual rather than member of a group or a ‘label’ such as ‘single parent’ or ‘economic migrant’.

Habit 3: Try another person’s life – Ludogogy is obviously a big believer in the power of experiential learning. While you might not want to go to the extreme of being down and out in Paris and London like George Orwell, you can find opportunities to ‘swap’ lives with others for a while. Why not try a ‘sleep out’ for a homeless charity or find volunteering opportunities which give you an experience of other lives.

Habit 4: Listen hard—and open up – Empathy in conversation is a two-way street. We must master the art or ‘radical listening’, being really present for the other person, rather than waiting for them to finish speaking to we can have our say. Also we must make ourselves vulnerable in the conversation, not hiding our feelings, and revealing ourselves fully to the other person to better form an empathic bond.

Habit 5: Inspire mass action and social change – Alongside education of the young in how to be empathic, social media perhaps offers the best opportunity for us to harness the power of empathy for large-scale change. However, given his organisation of a campaign against it, it is safe to say that Krznaric did not think the Facebook’s ‘Empathy Button’ was the correct way for this to play out.

Habit 6: Develop an ambitious imagination – Hard though it can be, one of the most important groups of people whom we can practise empathy, are those we dislike, and whose views we find the most unacceptable. Regular practice of this will make us more empathic and better able to utilise the ideas that arise from our empathy.

Types of Empathy

So what exactly is empathy, and is there more than one kind? Empathy as a concept is quite new, and over the 100 years or so it has been a thing, there have been a multitude of different definitions, but a quite useful to approach is to think of it as the human capacity for putting yourself into the place of another in order to better understand their lived experience. But even within that definition, there are considered to be three different types of empathy.

Cognitive – This is the empathy of the mind, not the heart. Sometimes called ‘perspective taking’ this  is about an intellectual understanding of someone else rather than a felt one. Doctors and those who need to operate with professional detachment may need to cultivate this find of empathy

Emotional – This is the empathy where you literally feel along with the other person, as if their emotions were contagious. Some people are pre-disposed to this kind of empathy and it can be very overwhelming for them.

Compassionate – Potentially the most useful kind of  empathy, this is not only the ‘middle ground’ between the two types of empathy above, but is also completed by action. Once the person who uses this kind of empathy has understood intellectually and emotionally, they are also spontaneously motivated to do something about it.

The Empathy Museum (and Library)

Krznaric’s Habit 3 may well have been one of his inspirations for founding The Empathy Museum. A roaming installation of empathy exhibits, the museum has been touring the world since 2015, literally giving its visitors a chance to walk in another person’s shoes. After being fitted with another person’s shoes by an assistant, the visitor dons some headphones and spends a few minutes listening to the story of someone totally unlike themselves, a refugee, a sex worker, a surgeon, while walking around in their shoes.

Other exhibits have included the human library – the opportunity to talk to someone about their life, a meal in a totally darkened room, to step into the experience of a blind person, and a chance to work on a cellphone assembly line.

Krzranic characterises the museum as

 “a playful, experiential adventure space for stepping into the shoes of other people and looking at the world through their eyes.”

The Empathy Library (https://empathylibrary.com/ ) is an online resource full of recommendations and reviews of books and films which will deepen your empathy.

What can Jesse Schell tell us?

A large proportion of Chapter 18 of Jesse Schell’s Book of Lenses could be considered to concern the topic of Empathy. The Chapter is entitled ‘Worlds Contain Characters’. One interesting exercise he carries out is to compare the great characters from books, film and games in three lists. He points out that while book characters often reveal their thoughts to us verbally, film characters do so largely through observed actions, and some game characters have very few thoughts at all – largely because we do all their thinking for them.

The Avatar is a special class of game character, and like the film of the same name, it allows us to project ourselves into the world of the character, from within the character itself. Sometimes the feeling of identification can be so strong that players wince when their avatar is injured.

In games which are specifically designed to enhance this empathic effect, maybe to prepare us for potential real world empathy, designers should therefore pay attention to design techniques which can make this effect as strong as possible.

There are two forms of Avatar which Schell explores as being ideal for player projection – The Ideal Form, archetypes which we may have dreamt of being and The Blank Slate, a character with little detail which gives the player the maximum opportunity to make it their own.

Lens #75 is The Lens of the Avatar. Schell recommends that the designer asks these questions:

• Is my avatar an ideal form likely to appeal to my players?
• Does my avatar have iconic qualities that let a player project themselves into the character?

If we are designing a game to provide experiential learning about real-world empathy we could add a third question?

• Will this avatar give the player an experience of inhabiting ‘the other’ which they can learn from?

An excellent example of a game designed to provide an empathic experience of ‘the other’ is ‘Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice’. Senua is a classic Ideal Form – a Pict warrior with formidable fighting skills. Where she varies is that the experience of playing Senua has been designed with the help of neuroscientists, mental health specialists, and people with lived experience of the symptoms of psychosis. The voices in her (your) head never stop while you are playing, and she is constantly stalked by a sinister entity she knows as ‘The Darkness’.

Tend and Befriend Games

In contrast with the hack and slash of Hellblade, here are some games designed to instil empathy in an altogether gentler way, or just allow you to ‘tend and befriend’ with other players.

Kind Words – a game in which players can share their challenges and/or respond to others with comforting messages. All the content is created by real players, apart from those in the brief tutorial

Animal Crossing – life simulation, the latest version of which allows you to raise your community of cute animals along with up to seven other online players.

Please Knock on my Door – invites you to play as a person suffering from stress and depression, as you help them through work and trying to reach out to friends.

Bury Me My Love – interactive fiction designed for handheld devices which tells the story of Syrian refugee Nour and her husband Majd as Nour undertakes a perilous journey to safety.

While many computer games are designed to exploit the ‘fight or flight’ stress response. Tend and befriend can also be a response to stress but instead of adrenaline, it produces oxytocin, inspiring one to tend for the vulnerable (usually offspring) and befriend, reaching out for social support.

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