But there is hope.

In a recent survey, play was named as a high potential tool to engage employees in sustainability.

Sustainability is key to future business success

Businesses get it.

94% of CEOs say sustainability issues are important to the future success of their business[1]

The sustainability message has been heard, loud and clear, at the top level of big corporates. CEOs are beginning to see the importance of working towards running their businesses in ways that:

• meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs
• balance the pillars of Planet, People and Profit
• contribute to a common goal of a better tomorrow

But sustainability is not a destination; it is a journey. Every company is at a different stage on their sustainability journey, they will be following different paths, have different priorities and use different language… Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Corporate Social Innovation, Sustainability, Purpose….  and that’s ok.

The challenge is no longer “why” sustainability. The challenge is now “how” to implement sustainability in an impactful way.

Sustainability touches all areas of business and operations, from product level to company level, from employees to customers and from local to global issues.

Every company is unique and the context in which they operate affects the sustainability challenges they face – CO², waste management, gender equality, plastic use, energy consumption, human rights issues in supply chain, biodiversity …the list goes on.

One thing is common though…wherever companies are on their journeys they will advance more quickly by getting employees from across their business engaged and on-board early on.

The challenges of engaging employees in sustainability

So if the key to creating a successful sustainable company is to get all employees – from top management to shop floor workers – personally engaged in the company’s sustainability goals. Why isn’t this happening?

We conducted a survey to find out more.

Whilst sustainability may now be seen as important, 50 % of respondents stated that sustainability isn’t well integrated in the companies they work for and that companies lack solutions to make sustainability more accessible and relevant to employees.[2]

It is also difficult to break silos and make sustainability a priority for all employees regardless of their roles and responsibilities. Only 15% of respondents told us their companies had identified ways to make sustainability part of every employee’s role.[3]

We learnt that the top three challenges companies face in engaging employees in sustainability are time, knowledge and complexity.[4]

1: Employees don’t have enough time
Projects, meetings, calls, reports, presentations, more meetings. We are all getting busier and busier, always connected, available at any time of day, with deliverables that were due yesterday. Employees may feel they don’t have time to do their own job, let alone reading their company’s latest content heavy, complex and lengthy sustainability report.

2: Employees don’t have sufficient knowledge
Sustainability is still seen as a specialist topic. Whilst the key principles are common to most businesses, many aspects are very industry specific – a shipping company will have very different sustainability focus than a fashion company or a medical devices company. It is important that there is a common understanding that the goal of engaging employees is notfor them to become sustainability experts. The goal is to increase general awareness of sustainability, how it relates to the company they work for and how they can take action for sustainability within their own roles.

3: Employees find sustainability complex
Sustainability brings a whole new level of jargon, with its three pillars Economy, Environment and Society (or alternatively Planet, People and Profit). Then there is the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals, 169 targets and 231 indicators. Climate change, carbon footprints, CO² emissions, carbon sinks, causes and effects …. Layer that with the company’s approach, language and priorities, and no wonder sustainability seems overly complex and off-putting.

In a world where sustainability is seen as complex, where employees are disengaged, where the need for change is urgent, doing the same as we’ve done before simply doesn’t work. As Einstein once said “insanity is doing the same over and over again”.

Could play be new way to engage employees in sustainability?

Games are structured forms of play and well-developed immersive games are a perfect starting point for experience and enquiry driven learning about sustainability.

Harnessing play for sustainability can help companies to overcome the challenges of time, knowledge and complexity through providing a fun and engaging environment along with games that can captivate, excite and motivate players whilst instinctively conveying meaningful content in a time-condensed and simplified way.

Two sustainability games that illustrate this new way of engaging employees are:

The SDG 2030 game a thought-provoking facilitated multi-player card-based game developed that simulates what the world could look like in 2030. The game engages participants in exploring how we can achieve a more balanced world and the consequences of our actions. Playing the game and reflecting on it afterwards, participants realise that everything is interconnected, that we can change the world when we work together and that even seemingly small actions can have a big impact. Players leave with an understanding of the importance of the Sustainable Development Goals and that we all have a role to play.

In the Loop is a serious game that helps players take the first step in identifying what it means to move towards a more circular economy. The board-based game simulates complex, global resource supply chains and triggers players to find solutions in a fun and engaging way. Players take on the role of a manufacturing company and collect resources and build products, but we live in an unpredictable world and players face difficult strategic decisions about collaboration, investments and business models as they navigate the game.

Why is play so powerful?

Freedom of play – When we play, as adult or children, we step into a new world, a world of opportunities with no boundaries to our creativity. There is no right or wrong and risks are minimised. Play allows us to explore, experiment and question different approaches and ideas and learn from this experience.

Create an experience – As we say, if a picture is worth a thousand words, an experience is worth a thousand pictures. Games are memorable shared experiences that can bring people together, change perspectives, shifting behaviours and inspire action.

Bring people together – In every play situation, there is an element of competition as well as a shared experience. When applying play to sustainability, people get together around a common goal, which is very powerful.

Change perspectives – Play helps all of us to look at the world from a different perspective and sustainability themed games can spark real aha moments that demonstrate to players that alternative approaches are required and that even small actions can have an important impact on the big picture.

Action beyond play – Awareness without action is pointless. Powerful sustainability games spark individual and collective reflection and inspire participants to co-create solutions and take action.

Play is a key enabler for sustainability

For companies who want to bring their sustainability goals to life and embed sustainability across their organisation, play has the potential to be a truly transformative tool to engage employees in sustainability.[5]

Let’s get more people playing with purpose at work, then the ripple effect of that play will create positive impact for both planet and people as well as for business.

The post #Play4Sustainability: Engaging employees in sustainability through play first appeared on Ludogogy.

This idea can be extended in a number of ways. One method would be the ‘rewind’, which is popular in the kind of learning games where there is a ‘right answer’ or at least a limited number of preferred routes through the game.  For example, let’s say we have created a game which is designed to reduce siloing within a business.  The learning designers have identified communication issues as a problem within the business, and the game aims to illustrate this.  Players comes to understand this idea – through one or more rounds of the game which have had disastrous results.

Rewinding the game

Each time the game is ‘rewound’ to a starting position, usually along with some teaching in between each round, to introduce a better tool or technique, or behaviour.  The results of each round thus get progressively better, until by the end of the training, each team achieves some measure of success, and the learning about the improved approach is hopefully embedded.

Even games which are not ‘rewound’ within each play, will be ‘rewound’ between one instance of play and the next. A team may play several rounds of the same game, with each round building on the results from the last.  But the next time the game is played anew, with new teams, it will start from the same position it always has.

You may think that this is self-evident. This is the way games, serious or otherwise, have always worked. Each time you get ‘Monopoly’ out of the box, everyone will start from the same position and you have a new opportunity to win, even if you lost last time.

Legacy games

But then came ‘Legacy’ games, and these games, I would argue, are particularly appropriate for learning about environmental sustainability.

The basic idea of a legacy game is that the game itself evolves over time, as a result of the decisions made by players within play.  There is no possibility of ‘rewind’. The game world is irrevocably changed by each and every play that is made.  In tabletop games, this manifests, for example through the use of stickers which are added to the board, permanently changing it, or through the permanent destruction of game pieces, or by the opening of previously sealed game elements.

Rather appropriately for the times we are now living through, one of the first legacy board games was ‘Pandemic Legacy’ in 2015.  This was created by Matt Leacock (original creator of Pandemic) and Rob Daviau (the originator of the Legacy mechanic). Like a lot of legacy games, this is designed to be played as a ‘campaign’, over multiple play sessions and with an unfolding storyline. Because the rules and game elements are changed by the legacy mechanic through play, the experience of playing the game will be near to unique for each group of people who play it.

Planetary Boundaries and Tipping Points

When I first learned about legacy games, I was working delivering learning in Environmental Sustainabilty to corporate employees. It immediately struck me that this was exactly what we needed to do with learning games in this field.  The mechanic is particularly appropriate for learning about the concepts of Planetary Boundaries and Tipping Points.

According to the Stockholm Resilience Centre, there are nine planetary boundaries, including Climate Change and Biosphere Integrity.  The current state of each of these aspects of the planetary system can be represented diagrammatically, so that we can see whether we are currently operating within safe limits or not.

The green part of the diagram represents the zone of operation within which sustainable growth can occur. So long as human actions do not move the planetary system beyond the green zone, then we are ‘safe’.  Once the metric for any boundary moves beyond the green zone, we are operating in increased risk. As the metric moves into the areas of increased and critical risk, boundaries representing stable regimes are breached. That aspect of the planetary system then moves into a new stable regime. This is the concept of ‘Tipping Points’. Once we have passed a tipping point there is no returning. A good way to visualise this is as a ball bearing moving on an undulating track (but with a general ‘downhill’ trend).  Once the bearing reaches a peak, it will ‘tip’ into the next valley.  It would then need to go uphill to return to the previous valley, which it cannot do.

Legacy games provide an excellent way of doing several things in this context:

1. Demonstrating the ‘one-way’ trend of planetary boundaries and tipping points
2. Creating long-term learning experiences which can be returned to over time (campaign games), and which represent irrevocable changes over that period of time
3. Allowing changes ‘outside of play’ to be made by designers in response to changes discovered by e.g. scientific research, real-world events
4. The legacy mechanic itself is a powerful analogy demonstrating that our actions and decisions have far-reaching and irreversible consequences
5. Demonstrating the importance of each decision. Although this is still a game, and therefore ‘safe’ in that your decision is not actually impacting the ‘real world’ , in a campaign  you will have to ‘live with’ that decision and its consequences in the long term.

In commercial ‘for fun’ games, Legacy is an endlessly fascinating mechanic. In the hands of a skilled learning designer it can be a tool which can drive a whole new generation of games for deep and lasting learning in some of our most complex and biggest challenges.

The post Legacy Games and Tipping Points first appeared on Ludogogy.

The very first such analysis I attempted was of a learning programme that I had not designed, but was heavily involved in delivering.  This article is a description of that experience. It is not intended to be an in-depth explanation of Octalysis – it is best to go straight to source for that. The Octalysis Group provide some outstanding learning. Nor is it intended to be an in-depth analysis of the learning programme I evaluated.  It is a description of an experience, along with some commentary about what I discovered about how to use Octalysis, and the Player Type Hexad (not part of the Octalysis framework). I hope it will be useful if you are planning to use the same tools, or if you need to undertake a similar analysis.

A brief overview

Some small explanation is however necessary before continuing, specifically about the eight ‘core drives’ (CDs), and two ways of categorising those drives:

CD1 Epic Meaning & Calling – The motivational drive whereby participants feel called to become involved in something greater than themselves.  This is the drive which is in play when people become involved in a cause.

CD2 Development & Achievement – The motivational drive whereby participants are driven by a desire to make progress or to achieve something.

CD3 Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback – The motivational drive whereby participants feel more drawn to complete an activity if they have autonomy to approach it creatively, by, for example, trying a new approach.

CD4 Ownership & Possession – The motivational drive whereby participants are driven by a desire to acquire something, to possess it, or even to improve things they already possess.

CD5 Social Influence & Relatedness – The motivational drive to be connected to others, to gain status and recognition or approval, or to help others

CD6 Scarcity & Impatience – The drive which makes you want something simply because you cannot currently have it, or because it has rarity value.

CD7 Uncertainty & Curiosity – The drive to explore and find out.  The pleasure of surprise.

CD8 Avoidance & Loss – The drive where participants will do something simply because the they fear the consequences of not doing it.

Black Hat / White Hat – A way of viewing the eight drives as being either empowering (white hat) or manipulative (black hat).  1,2 and 3 are seen as WH and 6,7, and 8 as BH.  The remaining two drives could be either depending on specific outcomes or implementation.

Left Brain /Right Brain – A way of viewing the eight drives as being either extrinsic (Left) or intrinsic (Right).  2, 4 and 6 are seen as LB and 3, 5 and 7 as RB. The remaining two drives could be either depending on specific outcomes or implementation.

The deliverables of the process

Octalysis offers up to five levels of analysis, but I believe that for most people’s purposes, it is sufficient to undertake just the first three levels.  These will give you, by the end of your analysis process:

1. An overview of how well your analysed experienced satisfies each of eight core motivational drives.
2. That same experience split into four stages, reflecting the different motivational requirements of an experience as it passes from beginning to maturity
3. Those four stages further subdivided by six different personality types (because of the player type model I have chosen – others are available), giving a matrix of 24 smaller experiences

The outputs from this process therefore give you some very granular feedback on how likely people are to want to take part in your experience, which is an excellent basis to start thinking about how that experience might be amended to make it more compelling, enjoyable and thus to maintain participation.

Throughout the analysis one needs to make judgments on how well your experience meets particular criteria.  The ideal situation would be that you have hard data on which to make those judgments, but that is not always possible.  My experience was a corporate sustainability learning programme and I had post programme evaluation forms and the results of a participant survey, taken six months after the programme. I also used discussions with colleagues and my own experience of the programme in my evaluation.

Based on these judgments, one assigns a value of between 0 and 10 to each of the drives. For example, in the diagram below, I assigned a value of 7 to Epic Meaning and Calling (Core Drive 1) and 3 to Unpredictability and Curiosity (CD7)

This is what I found, in general terms, as it would not be appropriate to reveal  the details of the programme itself.  This article is more about the experience of using the tool than the result of my analysis.

Level I analysis (115)

The Octalysis score, in this case, 115, is derived from the sum of the squares of the values assigned to each of the drives.  It provides a gross summary of the ‘strength’ of the experience, but cannot really provide any insight beyond that. It is much more revealing to look at the balance between Black vs White Hat drives (the top three CDs vs bottom three in the diagram), and Left vs Right Brain (three leftmost vs three rightmost), as well as getting a picture of which drives are particularly well or badly served by a particular product or experience.

Looked at in this way, it seems to be a reasonably strong experience, but there is some imbalance.  It is skewed both towards White Hat and Right Brain drives, meaning that it shoud be an intrinsically rewarding experience, and also empowering, participation in which will make people generally feel good.

However, the lack of Left Brain drives may make the experience less appealing to those who are driven by Achievement (CD2) and Ownership(CD4) , for example, or require other ‘logical’ justification to attend.  It fails to answer the question ‘What’s in it for me?’  (WIIFM). Likewise, the emphasis on White Hat drives means that participants will derive feelings of wellbeing and satisfaction from their participation, but may lack a sense of urgency to carry out any of the desired actions.  Bluntly put, although they may know that they are taking part in a meaningful activity CD1), if they get a better offer on a day when they are due to do so, or something is seen as a barrier (inconvenience (CD8), lack of time (CD6)), they may well decide to miss the action.  There are no negative consequences to NOT acting.

Imagine an individual who needs to complete a self-assessment tax return.  She knows that it is a good idea to complete the task, and that she will get a feeling of accomplishment and relief when the troublesome task is out of the way.  Ultimately though, it is the prospect of a £100 late payment penalty and the unwelcome attention of HMRC which motivates her to submit her return, the day before the deadline.  Deadlines are a very  good example of Black Hat motivation CD8 – Loss and Avoidance.

The programme instils a sense of purpose and agency (to a certain extent), but does not sufficiently push people towards exercising that agency to reach that purpose.

Level II

Discovery (61)

During the Discovery phase you must convince people WHY they want to participate in what you have to offer.  Whether they reach the end of this stage and sign up to your product or experience will depend on how well they feel their own particular drives are satisfied during this awareness raising phase.

In the Discovery phase, thought must be given to how you can market your experience to emphasise  Curiosity and Unpredictability (CD7), so that people will feel driven to find out more, Epic Meaning & Calling (CD1), so that people feel that they will be becoming involved in something worthwhile, and perhaps Social Influence & Relatedness (CD5) if you people to virally spread awareness of your product or experience.

The experience is notably weaker in its Discovery phase than when viewed as a whole.  It is particularly noteworthy that it is very heavily skewed towards Right Brain drives.  While it could be considered ‘better’ to design an experience which is intrinsically motivating, extrinsic motivation can be very motivating for those looking for a ‘convincer’ (again – WIIFM?).

There is also an emphasis on White Hat Drives, just as there was in the overall Level I diagram.  This indicates that while the Discovery phase is rich in meaning and conveys a feeling of something that it ‘worth doing’, it may lack the appropriate Black Hat ‘call to action’ that will actually make people sign up to attend the training experience.

Onboarding (151)

Once the participant has signed up to your experience, you must teach them how to interact with it; how it works, and the tools they will need to navigate through it. This stage ends once these basic skills are in place and participants have reached the early win-states.

Within this programme, this stage is largely covered by face-to-face learning days, but will continue into their first uses of a website, and their first ‘solo’ actions, following the activities they have been trained to carry out (if either of these things even occur). Not all participants will undertake all of the elements offered, as some may drop out after training, or more rarely, may not turn up for training at all.

Onboarding appears to be a relatively strong experience, compared to Discovery (and as we shall see, Scaffolding and the Endgame) and this bears out our observations of running the programme.  We get very positive feedback from people who attend the face-to-face learning days.  People feel they have learned a lot (CD2); they feel positively motivated to make lifestyle changes (CD1, CD3) and they find the active learning component engaging and thought provoking (CD1).  However, we do seem to face challenges in funnelling people through to this stage, with many days having to be cancelled because of poor recruitment.  Although there is still an emphasis on Right Brain drives, this is less pronounced than previously, and the scores on all drives are better than before.

We are also seeing for the first time in the journey, an opportunity for those who focus on achievement to satisfy some of their needs.  There are many and various things to do and learn during the training, giving numerous opportunities for participants to feel that they have gained knowledge or skills, or have reached new insights (CD2).  It is also a social experience, and this can be very motivating (CD5).  CD1 is particularly strong during the face-to-face experience, as people learn about specific complex challenges, and also how they can become part of the solution.

Scaffolding (107)

Once participants have the basic skills to interact with your experience and they have reached the first major win-state, they enter the Scaffolding phase.

This is where they carry out the normal activities which make up your experience.  It is ‘Business as Usual’. One aspect of this which can therefore be problematic is that you may be asking people to carry out the same actions repeatedly, and you must ask the question ” Why would our participants keep coming back to do this?”

In the programme, this is the crucial time when we leave participants to their own devices.  They will be using the techniques which we taught them on the training day, but on their own in their own time.  We hope they will be spreading the word about what they have learned, encouraging their colleagues to attend, and telling their friends and families about relevant issues, as well as encouraging behaviour change.  We want them to participate in the learning community via the website.  We send them information now and again to keep them up to date with what is going on.

Again, we find ourselves a bit thin on Black Hat drives.  The feeling of wanting to do good persists (CD1), but where is the ‘prod’ to make sure that happens.  Our surveys have shown that a key motivation in those who continue to participate in this stage is the fact that the activities can be social (CD5), and those who receive regular feedback from their organisational rep (CD5, CD7)  also remain more engaged for longer.  But for many, their action becomes a solitary activity, once they are out of the Onboarding phase, meaning that this drive has less influence.

There are ways of achieving (CD2), gaining more knowledge, completing learning modules and so on, but many respondents report that they have never visited the learning materials on the website or do not know where they are.  Again, although the White Hat drives have potential, the signposting and the Black Hat ‘prod’ to get participants to engage with the activities which satisfy these drives is lacking.

End Game (38)

Once people feel that they have done everything your experience has to offer at least once, they need to be convinced to continue interacting with your experience – well at least if you have a need for long-term enagagement.  Never forget that by this time, newer alternatives for other experiences will have been dangled in front of them.  You need to ask why they would not leave your experience to pursue these instead.

If you do want long-term you need to design in ‘evergreen’ activities which keep your participants for the foreseeable future.

In the Endgame, we see a drastic falling away of the satisfaction of nearly all the drives.  There is nothing new in this stage, just a continuation of the activities which the participants have carried out in the Scaffolding stage.  This is therefore by far the weakest point in the journey.  Participants can continue to act and use the website, but they have exhausted many of the ‘finite’ aspects of the programme.  They have probably ‘converted’ all the friends and family they can.  If they have engaged with the website, they have probably exhausted the material there or ceased to engage if they did not find it compelling.  Even CD1 will become less motivating over time, unless the participants receive regular feedback which shows them the impact of their activities.  And we know from feedback that this is potentially a problematic area, with many people unsure about why they are performing certain actions or what impact they are having.

In short, the Level II analysis shows us an experience which is strong in the face to face component but which struggles for initial sign up and maintaining long term engagement.

Level III

Level III Octalysis takes the four stages of level II and further subdivides them by overlaying player types, because the player type framework I have chosen consists of six player types, in a full analysis this level would consist of 24 separate diagrams with analysis, but I will just show a representative example from each stage in this article. This required the use of a third party player type model as Octalysis did not have its own player type framework at the time I did this analysis.

The diagrams below show the ‘shape’ of the experiences at that stage, for that specific player type.

Octalysis analysis for player types

I have chosen to use Andrzej Marczewski’s six player types, as these are considered more suitable for gamification in the workplace than Richard Bartle’s four player types (upon which Andrzej’s work is based).

Disruptor

Disruptors are motivated by Change. They want to effect (hopefully) positive change, but possibly negative change by interacting with your experience.

There are 4 sub types in Andrzej’s model.  We do not want Griefers or Destroyers in our system.  We must either convert them to the two more positive types, or get rid of them as their influence is wholly negative and destructive.  Therefore the below diagrams consider only the drives which appeal to the subtypes Improver and Influencer.  These two player types favour

• Improver – they like to explore a system and find ways to make it better. They are disruptive problem solvers
• Influencer – they like to changes things by using their influence over others.

Disruptors are largely driven by CD2 and CD4, but also CD3, CD5, and to a lesser extent by CD8.

Discovery – for a Disruptor (29)

For Disruptors, the Discovery Phase of the programme is not a strong experience.  There is really nothing for them currently in their key drives around Accomplishment (CD2) and Ownership (CD4).  They may see opportunities to increase their influence through CD5, but only in a specific set of circumstances where there is strong line manger pressure / support to attend, or where they are a team leader.  CD1 and CD8 may well appeal, but in this case would be reliant on feeling of agency that they can enact change, as well as a prior interest in enacting change of the kind offered by this learning programme, which may not be their area of interest.

Philanthropist

Philanthropists are motivated by Purpose and Meaning. They want to ‘do good’ and do not expect rewards for doing so.  They are most driven by CD1, but to a lesser extent by CD2, CD3 and CD5.

Onboarding – for a Philanthropist(196)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Philanthropists have the strongest experience of all the player types, and it seems markedly more balanced than the experiences of other player types in terms of Left/Right and Black/White.  CD1 still tops the list of their drives for participating, but the other drives support their purpose strongly too. CD3, Empowerment of Creativity and feedback is one of the weaker drives across the board, as there few ways to express creativity during the training.  Although CD3 is something which Philanthropists would like in an experience, its lack is more than made up for by the strong reinforcement that participation will help.  It is only later on in the experience where the lack of options to do so creatively may become something that causes even Philanthropists to disengage.

Free Spirit

Free Spirits want autonomy to create and explore.  Self-expression is also important to them.  CD3 and CD7 will drive them most strongly, but also CD2 and CD6 to a certain extent.

Scaffolding – for a Free Spirit (63)

Given the ’finite’ nature of the activities offered in the Scaffolding stage, many Free Spirits may fall away once they have explored the website a bit, or maybe posted one or two blogs.  The activities may engage initially as they will be keen to explore (CD7) options to use the activities in their local environment, but if the experience does not change from one visit to the next, they may lose interest, and find reasons to cease participating, especially given the lack of other Black Hat drives which might give them the impetus to carry on.

Socialiser

Socialisers want to interact with other people and make connections. Mainly motivated by CD5, they also favour CD3 and CD7, or even CD4 (‘my’ friends).

Discovery – for a Socialiser (37)

The Socialiser is second only to the Philanthropist (in terms of raw ‘score’) in how appealing they find Discovery.  Particularly if they are to attend a team day, or if they have a personal recommendation (CD5), they are likely to be interested in signing up.  However, like the Philanthropist and the Free Spirit, they may struggle to find a firm Left Brain reason to convince either themselves or others that they should attend.

Achiever

Achievers are motivated by Mastery, wanting to learn new things and improve themselves. They need to feel they are overcoming challenges.  Achievers are obviously strongly driven by CD2, and CD4 and CD6 will also influence them.  They will also enjoy finding creative ways to achieve (CD3)

End game – for an Achiever(22)

It would be surprising if we retained many Achievers into the End Game, unless they are embedded within a Sustainability function in the business or see professional opportunities in that area. The total lack of any Black Hat ‘calls to action’ will be the death knell for the influence of the very weak White Hat drives we see here.

Player

Players are motivated by Rewards. They will do what is needed of them to collect rewards from a system. They are in it for themselves.  Their primary drivers are CDs 2 and 4, and to a lesser extent 6.

Onboarding (51)

The experience becomes slightly better for Players, as it does for all our player types, once they attend the face-to-face event.  However, the total lack of Black Hat drives will probably mean that they are deciding, even during the day itself, that their participation will end there.  The only exception will be if they see scope for professional advancement or recognition, which will only occur in specific circumstances related to their work, so cannot be relied upon as general motivation for all participants who favour this player type.

Review of my experience of Octalysis analysis

Level I is interesting as an overview but it of little use as an analysis tool. The usefulness increases exponentially with the addition of Levels II and II, and these enabled me to see very clearly where the issues were with the current experience. That clarity in turn, makes it a relatively easy task to then make concrete recommendations for how an experience can be tweaked.  I include a sample of the findings and recommendations I made to illustrate this part of the process.

Level I – overall experience

While the overall score shows a reasonably strong experience, the programme is a markedly White Hat /Right Brain experience, which indicates that we may need to ensure that participants can see sufficient ‘rational’ justification to participate – especially given that the target audience comprises busy corporate employees, and that there are sufficient compelling ‘calls to action’ to drive them successfully through the experience.  The graph shows that the overall experience is about ‘for good’ actions and behaviour changes and personal learning, with a potential strong social element.  We have to ask ourselves about how generally relevant those themes and aspects are, given that they are attending in their capacity as employees.

Level II – Journey

Discovery phase

This phase is particularly lacking in the Left Brain, logical drives.  Again, given our audience, who work in a competitive corporate environment, are we doing enough to convince them that this is an experience which will bring them benefits that are relevant to that role, rather than just a ‘nice to have’ experience which satisfies personal curiosity and social opportunities?

Onboarding phase

Much stronger than the other phases, we can be confident that for the majority of our attendees we have crafted an enjoyable, thought-provoking experience (some exceptions do suggest themselves in Level III).  Even this phase is somewhat lacking in the Left Brain drives, and there is also a marked lack of opportunities for participants to be creative in how they approach the experience.

Giving our participants more autonomy and potential for creativity (CD3) in how they approach the programme would help us to provide effective differentiation of the central experience, also increasing the ways in which they can achieve (CD2) outcomes that are particularly relevant to them, thereby allowing a greater feeling of ‘ownership’ (CD4) over their participantrole

Scaffolding phase

The attrition that we see in activities might be in part attributable to the lack of Black Hat ‘calls to action’ once the participants are left to their own devices.

We could improve this experience considerably, driving greater retention and more desired actions, if we built a journey incorporating Black Hat mechanisms which act as the immediate driver to carry out desired actions (activities that were trained for, participating in community platform),leading to Win-states  replete with White Hat rewards to reinforce the benefits of carrying out those actions.

End Game phase

A properly designed End Game could increase our current ‘Star’ cohort beyond those who have a pre-existing interest in the environmental theme of the programme, which would in turn increase the impact we are able to have by letting us move beyond ‘preaching to the converted’.

Level III – Player Types

Disruptor

The main confounding issues for a Disruptor of the experience are that we do not currently articulate very well how participation in the programme enacts change or how participants have agency.  Once participants have been through the face-to-face training it is unclear how they would be able to link their actions to changes in,e.g. policy or land management.  A Disruptor would need to be able to see these connections to remain engaged.

Their experience is one of the weakest in the Discovery phase but one of the strongest in Scaffolding, so we are probably currently failing to recruit people who could be very engaged.  We need to spot and take opportunities throughout the experience to strengthen our evidencing (and feedback) of positive impacts and change.

Philanthropist

Philanthropists have the strongest experience of the programme, which is maybe not surprising, but this could still be strengthened particularly in Scaffolding and the End Game to include more Black Hat ‘calls to action’.  A similar lack of a ‘prod’ in the Discovery stage may lead to many Philanthropists not signing up at all – a missed opportunity which we must address.

Free Spirit

Free Spirits may feel very drawn to participate but find themselves lacking a rationale to do so, given the other demands on their time.  The lack of creative ways to interact with the experience, and a lack of novelty in activities may well drive them away early, especially considering the lack of Black Hat inducements.

Greater creative opportunities and ‘new’ discoveries throughout the journey would help to keep this player type on board.

Socialiser

Socialisers have a similar experience to Free Spirits – wanting to participate (especially in team days), but finding it hard to justify either to themselves or others.  The social potential is great, but we need to ask ourselves ‘Why this programme?’ as there will probably be rival social-based activities they could participate in if they wanted to.

We need to more deeply embed the social benefits of participation, making the two things far less easily decoupled.  For example, many cite the sustainability actions offered by the programme as an enjoyable way to spend time with family, but they could just as easily do the same walk to the same location with the same family members, deriving the same pleasure, even if they did not carry out the activity.

Achievers and Players

Achievers and Players are the two player types least well served by the current experience, and my feeling is that this is a particular problem given our audience (ambitious corporate employees).  It is quite likely that many ambitious corporate employees do show characteristics of these two player types.  It is likely that they are concerned about their careers, their material possessions, their professional reputations and development and any number of other aspects which relate to CDs 2, 4 and 6, the Left Brain drives, which we do less well in the programme.

That this issue has not manifested itself in feedback and surveys, may be a sign that it is not a problem, but my feeling is that the lack of evidence of this shortcoming may very well be because very few of these player types sign up in the first place.  The Discovery phase is particularly weak for these player types, with no Black Hat ‘calls to action’ at all.

If we want to show ROI to corporates, these are exactly the people who should be attending our programmes – the high flyers, the future general management.

Our programmes need to be linked to relevant business-based achievements and rewards to attract and retain these player types.

The post Octalysis Analysis of a Sustainability Learning Programme first appeared on Ludogogy.

Edward O Wilson who popularised the term in his book of the same name, posits the Biophilia Hypothesis which is that human beings innately possess:

…the urge to affiliate with other forms of life.

The term literally means ‘love of life’ and had been used before, notably by Eric Fromm, while the concept that humans possess this innate affinity can be traced back as far as Aristotle.

Biophilia and biomimicry in design

This article will look at two main aspects of the idea:

1. How games can be designed to utilise/enhance this characteristic to facilitate learning in the sustainability field.
2. The nexus between biophilia and biomimicry (design which mimics natural patterns and strategies) and how that can be utilised in learning design

When facilitating learning for corporate employees, in environmental and business sustainability, I commonly encountered three types of people / reactions:

1. Learners who were already committed activists, or at least acutely aware of the issues we were facing regarding e.g. climate change or biodiversity loss.
2. Learners who were somewhat aware / receptive to the messaging, but who were pessimistic about the potential for change, because they believed other things would get in the way, usually the need for business to continue ‘as usual’.
3. Learners who believed that other things were more important than (and possibly incompatible with) protecting the environment, e.g. the need for economic growth. In extreme cases, this group also included e.g. climate change deniers.

There were definite differences in the perception of connection to nature felt by the respective groups. Notably, not only were members of the first group often ‘outdoorsy’, but this desire to be in nature frequently co-existed with the belief that environment, society and business are interconnected and interdependent.

Learner differences

While working with the first group was often like ‘preaching to the converted’, the intention of the learning programmes was to engender this same belief in interconnection in the latter two groups.  Experience showed that a greater feeling of ‘connection’ led to a greater likelihood of individual behaviour change and of learners participating in action to drive the organisation’s sustainability strategy, once they were back at work.

This is self-evident if we reflect on the attitude of learners in the third group. To believe that e.g. the economy, is ‘more important’ than the environment, one must believe they are separate, and can operate separately. Whereas, in fact, the economy is reliant on resources provided by the natural world. There is no other source for them.

The learners in the second group have this same belief, only to a lesser degree. They effectively believe that economic (or social or some other form of) sustainability can be achieved independently of environmental sustainability.

All you need is love

In the end, we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand and we will understand only what we are taught
– Baba Dioum

I believe this to be true, but prefer this second quotation when I consider the order in which I will design to engender a greater degree of biophilia.

Knowledge without love will not stick. But if love comes first, knowledge is sure to follow
– John Burroughs

Biophilia provides the learning designer with an excellent route to engender a feeling of connectedness.

That Biophilia exists becomes evident when we take learners out into nature (with the obvious exception, for some people, of inclement weather). We feel better, calmer, happier. Games can enhance this feeling by involving us in activities that intensify those feelings. They can also play a part in the case that direct experience of nature is not possible; where learning has to be held in indoor settings or in urban outdoor settings.

Biomimicry is a design approach which utilises lessons from nature, adopting strategies, patterns and processes which exist in the natural world, to innovate solutions to problems. It is most commonly applied to product design.  A well-known instance of biomimetic design is the Speedo® sharkskin swimwear, a fabric covered in tiny ‘teeth’ which improved performance by swimmers to such an extent it was banned from competition. Beyond product design, this idea can be applied to e.g. learning design by adopting natural processes, structures and functions, such as ecosystems or the circular economy.

Design ideas

My favourite designs for games and playful activities I have worked on to promote biophilia have taken concepts directly from nature. In particular, I have found the concept of ecosystems very helpful in facilitating learning in organisations. Not only do games based on ecosystem function teach the concepts that learners need to understand in order to ‘get’ sustainability, but ecosystems are an excellent analogy for the way that organisations work.

Here are some mechanisms which can be used in this way

1. Placing learners in the ‘shoes’ of aspects of an ecosystem, can be a powerful engine for empathy. ‘The environment’, ‘biodiversity’, ‘climate crisis’ and most of the terms we use in sustainability education, are abstract concepts. If however, you are experiencing the life and death struggles and having to make decisions within a game as if you are ‘primary consumers’ within a pond ecosystem, this makes the concepts real.
2. Modelling ecosystem function such that decisions can be mapped against impacts, and relayed as a narrative which ripples through the ecosystem- clearly showing complexity and the far-reaching consequences of each action and reaction.
3. Having learners ‘play’ the ecosystem, while the facilitator represents external factors such as human actions, reverses the ‘them and us’ relationship that exists between the learners and nature, with them inhabiting the ‘them’ for a change.
4. The combination of ‘being’ the ecosystem, whilst simultaneously having the cognitive and reflective ability of human provides a powerful experience, which has on occasion reduced participants to tears
5. The ecosystem can be given a ‘voice’ it does not have in reality, allowing learners to suggest remedial measures that can be taken to undo damage. This is also a powerful  way to create empathy, with learners becoming very impassioned about arguing ‘their’ cause.

Specific examples of design of ecosystem games are detailed in another article, but I hope that this article has given enough information for readers to consider how they might enhance the innate biophilic nature of their learners to facilitate learning around sustainability.

The post Enhancing Biophilia for Sustainability Learning first appeared on Ludogogy.

But a by-product of this design work has been that I have also discovered that the games and mechanics I have created, also have a multitude of applications outside the topic areas they were originally created for.

It was while I was creating an ecosystem game some years ago that I started to investigate systems thinking in a serious way, and much of the research I did then led me to start work on creating a new systems practice approach to learning design.  This beyond the scope of this article, but I can confidently claim that it was the design of a simple ecosystem game that led me to where I am today in my learning practice.

Seeing organisations, and even individuals as systems and parts of systems has also meant that I can find almost infinite application in these simple ecosystem games. The idea of the ‘ecosystem’ can be used as fruitful analogy in nearly any organisational learning. A few examples of how that might work in different topics/settings follow:

• Ecosystems operate at different scales and are contained within each other. A drop of water can be an ecosystem, as can the plant it rests upon, and the forest the plant grows in – and the water catchment the forest is in … and so on. Organisations can be viewed in the same way.
• Ecosystems, when their function is not degraded, are engines of productivity, where waste from one organism is the raw material used by another, and the concept of harmonious balance of function can be extrapolated from this. Also useful for learning around the ‘circular economy’.
• The need for diversity to protect structure and function, can be usefully applied to learning around team roles, ‘groupthink’, how monocultures are vulnerable to unexpected change etc.
• The idea of organisms finding their ‘fit’ niche within an ecosystem can provide powerful reflection, as can the opposite circumstance where ecosystems are disrupted or even destroyed by e.g. invasive non-native species or degradation through the unintended consequences of human action.

Below are design notes for an ecosystem games, which has been used both literally (to support learning about environmental sustainability) and analogously in organisational learning in various topics.  The full game design is available in Downloads – for the purposes of the article I have included just representative samples of the game materials and instructions

Objectives

• To introduce the complexity of systems (e.g. ecosystems)
• To reflect on working in a complex system (analogising to their own role in a project team)
• To encourage reflection on:
  • Personal perspectives on environmental change – what is important
  • One’s place in the work ‘ecosystem’
  • How an individual can create and receive value in a work ‘ecosystem’

One Hour of play

One round of activity – 15 mins

Reflection – 15 mins

Second round of activity – 15 mins

Reflection – 15 mins

Facilitator instructions

Divide group into teams of five.  If there are fewer people in a team

For teams of three – Leave out roles Four and Five

For teams of four – Leave out role Four

If there are more in a team, the sixth team member can be assigned to take a ‘helicopter view’ of how the whole system works, meaning they can look at all the role cards and suggest to players how they might play for the benefit of the team as a whole. This role can be rotated to another member for the second round

Allowing teams of between 3 and 6 people will allow us to implement the game for any whole group size of three or more

How to run the game

1. Distribute role briefs and round one instructions
2. Give each team a stock of coloured cubes to represent the production and consumption in their ecosystem
3. Briefly explain the rules, using the script below
4. While teams are playing, circulate in case any teams are unsure about instructions
5. After 15 mins reconvene whole group for teams to feedback on their experience, and for debriefing
6. Teams should stick to 2 minutes at most. The remainder of the time should be used to draw out discussion using the debrief questions
7. Distribute role briefs and round two instructions
8. After 15 mins reconvene whole group for teams to feedback on their experience, and for debriefing
9. Teams should stick to 2 minutes at most. The remainder of the time should be used to draw out discussion using the debrief questions

Materials

• Five (or as above for smaller teams) role cards for each team
• One copy of Round 1 instructions for each team
• One copy of Round 2 instructions for each team
• Coloured wooden cubes in five different colours

The role cards contain information about what each member of the team produces and consumes, which are represented by the wooden cubes.  In each round different climate change effects occur and the cards also contain information about how that affects consumption and production.

Here is a sample role card (top part)

All the role cards can be downloaded along with the rest of the written materials from downloads

Round 1 instructions script

“I have given you all a set of role briefs and some instructions to play the first round.  These are the rules of the game – which are also written on your Round Instruction sheet.

1. You play for 15 mins and then we will meet as a whole group again
2. You want to operate successfully as a system, but you will need to decide for yourselves what that means. At the end of the round you will get a chance to present your insights on how successful you have been.
3. Read the round instructions and work out how Climate Change will affect each of the roles in your system
4. All roles produce and then consume – everybody does this in order – role 1 first and then role 2 and so on
5. Any units of production left over after all roles have consumed is pollution
6. Resolve the pollution effects after all roles have both produced and consumed
7. Take as many turns as you wish within the 15 minute time limit

I will be available while you play in case you get stuck on any of the instructions.  OK you have 15 minutes.”

Round 1 Instructions

1. The round last for 15 mins
2. Climate Change effects are resolved before anything else happens. These will affect how much you produce and consume, so must be noted before those processes happen. In this round the Climate Change effects are:
   • High temperatures
   • Drought conditions

3. You take your turns in order (role 1 goes first, then role 2 and so on)
   • All roles produce
   • All roles consume
4. Any units left over are ‘pollution’. Pollution effects are resolved after everyone has taken both their ‘produce’ and ‘consume’ turns.
5. You may take as many turns as you decide during the round – up to the 15 minute limit

Your Goal

Your goal is to be ‘successful’ both individually and as a whole system.  What ‘successful’ means is also part of what you need to resolve while you play and talk.  You may also need to come up with some form of ‘admin’ process to track what happens in your system.  You may want to think about:

• how the system works as a whole
• how individual characteristics interact with the whole
• The tensions between individual and system ‘success’

Each member of the team has a special constraint or ability, which will affect how the role will play out.  Also, each role has a ‘secret goal’ which must not be revealed to the other members of the team.

The bottom half of the role card contains both these items.

What to bring to debrief

Having decided what ‘successful’ looks like for your system, you must present your insights back to the whole group – in whatever way you choose – in two minutes or less.

Round 1 debrief questions (examples)

How did you go about deciding what success looked like within your system?

Do any of you feel that your individual requirements were not adequately considered when looking at ‘success’?

Does anyone want to talk about how their individual goal influenced how they played?

How did you go about tracking what went on in your system?

You all went through the same process.  How would you account for the different perceptions between teams?

Was there a conscious decision making process about how many turns you took, or did you just ‘suck it and see’?

What felt particularly constraining about the rules?  What freedom, if any, did you feel you had to influence outcomes?

Round 2 instructions script and debrief questions

Please see document in Downloads for these materials, as well as all the role cards

The post Natural & organisational ecosystems first appeared on Ludogogy.

Could the process of game design be used with teens to support meaningful and creative learning about the self and the world? And might this process activate teens’ natural creative energy and inclination toward exploration to identify ways to change the world for the better?

To find out, we created Game Design Studio, a co-design experience that uses game design to further teens as creators of knowledge, individuals who have a real ability to contribute to meaning-making and surfacing of solutions. Teens work in codesign on games that both represent their lived experiences in the world and worlds they imagine, worlds that are designed to better meet their needs and support their thriving. By creating games through this process, we believe, teens will help to shape in important ways how teachers, educators, parents, and policymakers view the potential and needs of teens. And in this way, teens are changemakers.

Empowering teens as changemakers means engaging youth and communities in drawing on the past and present to create new knowledge. This positions teens not merely as end-users or consumers of programs, but as creators both of knowledge and action steps to begin the work of building healthy, equitable, and sustainable communities.

Structure and Experience

Designing games—like making a painting, composing a song, or writing a poem—is an act of self-expression. Unique to game design is designing a system with rules, roles, ways of progressing, and win and loss states. We use game design as a way to engage youth in thinking about their lived experience, how they think about and understand the world, and what they might like to be different in their world and how they would go about making that change.  Synthesizing their imagined change into a structured game that others can experience supports youth designers in thinking concretely about the specifics of the change.

Through various structured and open-ended activities, we explore questions such as: How do you feel in the current state (your lived experience) and how would you like to feel instead?  What would need to change about the rules, roles, ways of progressing, and win and loss states in your own life to feel that way you want to feel, as opposed to the way you do feel?

Engaging Communities

Games create experiences to engage community in empathetic immersion. Youth game designers learn to balance player agency and uncontrollable constraints to shape the emotions of the player and help others tap into their experiences. At a recent Game Design Studio in Boston, teens shared their experiences with re-entry after contact with juvenile justice social service systems. They created a re-skinned version of Sorry called The Runaround, complete with parole violations, family setbacks, and missed fines. The Runaround is frustrating to play. As soon as you get some pieces out you find yourself sliding back to the start. Players feel the stress, sadness, and frustration teens feel trying to get home and stay home. Though the game rarely has a winner, players have a chance to talk about how the systems designed to serve youth can better meet their needs. Adults take the experience of playing The Runaround with them when they return to institutions and agencies positioned to make a difference in services to support teens.

We believe this game design studio process lays a foundation to support social change, and it includes guiding teens in critical reflection to build hope and self-efficacy related to the possibility of system change. Teens think about and explore through gameplay and game design techniques the design of systems that impact their lives, the interpersonal and sociopolitical processes that perpetuate those systems, and the leverage points that have the potential to change interactions and processes for the better. This serves to prime youth to see their potential as change agents in the communities to which they belong. It can also support their integration of individual-level and community-level empowerment by informing those in power about helpful actions they could take to improve interactions with and experiences for disenfranchised teens.

Game Design Studio creates important spaces for learning and growth, lessons that should be shared with the teens’ communities. The encounters end with game showcases, inviting adult stakeholders—administrators and teachers, social workers and principals—to play the games the teens have designed, and talk with teens about how to make the community one where teens have a seat at the table on issues that affect them.

Games designed by teens offer a doorway to what is like to be a teen today. Rusch[3] writes, “Games can communicate deep messages; they can make us think and feel deeply; and they can move us in a way no other medium can because games enable embodied experiences.”  When we play a game, we interact with the game world, learning how the world works as we act upon it. When adult stakeholders play the games youth designers have created about their lived experiences, the adults experience how rules and roles are experienced by young people. By design, the play may evoke in adults feelings of unfairness, injustice, joy, inspiration, or frustration. Teens have a chance to learn from each other, exploring their peers’ prototypes and sharing feedback and learning with each other. Long after the Game Design Studio is over, teens and adults can continue to dialogue about the issues that matter to them, playing and working together to help teens thrive.

The post Imagining a Better World: Game Design with and for Teens first appeared on Ludogogy.

Please note that this list is not exhaustive.

1. Projects are the building blocks of our professional and personal lives. To live joyfully, we also need a joyful approach to our projects. And if fun is a great tool for motivation and success, where would be the best place to look for it? Games, of course! The main reason people spend time playing games is that they make us happy and are supposed to be fun. So why not turn anything we want or have to do into fun and engaging games?
2. Drama falls away in games. If we look at what we want or have to do as a game, then the stakes are not that high, are they? It’s just a game, isn’t it?
3. We are less critical of ourselves in games. In a computer game we don’t dwell on the fact that we just bumped our car into a wall. Instead, we notice what happened, reverse, turn the car around, and move on. We can do the same in our real-life “games” (including projects and project management activities).
4. We are less afraid of failure in games. In fact, failures in games are often not considered as such, but as steps on the way to winning. Which is especially true for game design. Discarded game designs are rarely regarded as failures. They are scarcely analyzed for why they “failed” at all. They are just steps on the natural progression towards the successful design.
5. When you see and treat whatever you are up to as a game, you can better deal with fear and anxiety. Self-Gamification and its three components can help you to address and bypass fear and anxiety, which are as present in project management as any other activity in which we want to succeed. The more we want to succeed, the bigger the fear, of both failing and succeeding, as well as what people might say in either of these scenarios. But if what we do is just a game, then the fear diminishes considerably, and we are more willing to try again or try something new.
6. In games, you don’t stay upset for too long. If you do, then you stop playing the game. To continue playing, you need to put your upset aside and focus your attention on the next move in the game. Or to another game. Imagine how much easier real-life projects can become if you proceed with them in the same way. In real-life projects, you can do the same: acknowledge the upset and move on.
7. When you no longer spend so much time on upsets and complaints, you save an enormous amount of time. I observed this consistently in many projects I turned into games. What happens then is that the projects or tasks are completed with much less effort than anticipated, and often before the deadline (or at least on time). So you also save money in the process. And thanks to the great atmosphere in the project, and better results than expected, you might even get referrals, not only from your customer, but from your customer’s customers too — all as a result of awareness, small steps, and gamefulness.
8. When we see and treat our projects like games (which we both design and play), then we can stop seeing the challenges the project poses as a hardship, but rather as something fun, to be addressed with curiosity and creativity.
9. You might even become curious about something you previously resented. You might find you are suddenly eager to start work on the project now, just like you couldn’t wait to try out a new (or old but newly rediscovered) toy or game when you were younger.
10. As a game designer, you feel in control; you can be that in project management too. Because as the designer of your projects and project management games, you can adjust one or both of the following: the way you approach them, and the way you record your progress.

11. Game designers are utterly resourceful. And you can be that too, in an instant, if you become aware that you are both the designer (or co-designer) and player (co-player) of your project games. If you consider anything you do as a game, of which you are the designer and the player, then you immediately become resourceful on how to adjust the flow of your work so that it becomes fun for you and all involved. With gameful practice, resourcefulness becomes effortless and extremely fun.
12. Empathy is more natural in games, and we judge our partners in games less than partners and customers in projects.

13. Turning your life into games allows you to treat yourself as your best (customer) player and at the same time, your favorite game designer, to whom you gladly give your feedback to make your favorite games even better. And when you treat yourself like that, you will also treat others with kindness more consistently, and vice versa, since people tend to mirror our behavior toward them.
14. Gameful Project Management (i.e., turning project management into games) enables low-budget, effortless, enlightening, and fun optimization of all facets of your project management. You might frown at this sentence, but this is precisely how the management of your projects and your time can become when you turn them into exciting games and treat yourself as if you were both the designer and the player of your project management games.
15. Turning project management into games will not require you to buy a new software system or hire new personnel. Instead, you can concentrate on improving your project management activities with what you already have at your disposal, and with little additional effort. With a self-gamified attitude to project management, you will become aware of what you need for your work (and even life in general) and make conscious decisions on what to do next. You will also acquire gameful resourcefulness and motivation in any situation, including tight deadlines when increased motivation is hard to achieve but often needed.
16. Games and game design are an endless well of creative solutions for project management. “The design and production of games involves aspects of cognitive psychology, computer science, environmental design, and storytelling, just to name a few. To really understand what games are, you need to see them from all these points of view.” — Will Wright in the foreword to Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster. So why not tap into such a multidimensional and fun discipline for inspiration?
17. Since games are fun and contain elements that contribute to our happiness, why not approach all our projects and activities in such a way that they become fun, engaging, and entertaining for us, in the same way that games do? If we use fun as the goal, compass, and measuring tool in our projects, along with awareness and progress in small steps, then quality, excellence, success, improvement, productivity, efficiency, and all the other criteria of a successful project and business will come naturally as by-products.
18. Any project is already a game; we just don’t always see them that way. Just consider this quote by Jane McGonigal, which I already quoted in my first article in Ludogogy  and which is worth quoting again and again: “What defines a game are the goal, the rules, the feedback system, and voluntary participation. Everything else is an effort to reinforce and enhance these four core components.” — Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken. See the following five reasons considering various aspects of these four core components in games and real-life projects.

19. When you view what you are doing as a game, you are less likely to forget what the goal is. The goal is always clear and visible in a game. In a real-life project, we often get lost in complaints and forget why we started doing something in the first place.
20. Beyond that, we are more willing to follow the rules in a game and to practice it to become better at it.
21. In games, we don’t resent having to record or document our progress: in fact, we love it. Because, with each move of our figurine on a leaderboard, we get closer to winning the game. If you despise writing reports or creating and updating checklists, project (or business) plans, road-maps, and others, then seeing them as your project game feedback system can help. And then modifying these in a fun and creative way will help you put your resentment aside with almost no effort.
22. We are less reluctant to start playing a game than we are to say “yes” to a real-life project.

It is much easier to be present and give our best in games. If we enjoy a game we don’t try to get it over with. And if we don’t have fun playing it, we either leave it for another game (or something else), or modify the design so that we do enjoy it.

The post What playing games and turning life into games can teach us? first appeared on Ludogogy.

The gamification of human activity is by no means a new idea and from a young age, humans have been developing their skills and learning through playful activities including games, which have a unique ability to get players so involved in the gameplay that they enter a unique state of ‘flow’ as they carry out engaging activities within the game.

This has led to the creation of games which aim not only to provide player experiences that are entertaining and engaging, but also try to provide a means of teaching the player or allowing them to hone their skills within certain situations. (E.g. Games which are focused around Mathematics or practising a particular medical procedure.)

Whilst the main obstacle that most educational games will face is creating an engaging experience that will encourage the intended users to keep playing the game, there are other problems that educational institutions face includes:

• Players being afraid of being labelled a gamer by their peers.
• Teachers being unable to properly benefit from these games due to either their inability to properly utilise games within a classroom setting or their attitudes towards games don’t support their use as a learning tool.
• The cost of acquiring the necessary technology and equipment to support the use of educational games and the hiring of specialised staff to maintain and repair the equipment.

The European Alliance for Innovation (EAI) has categorised the challenges that these games face into 3 dimensions(Fernández-Manjón et al., 2015) that each pose unique challenges along with the lines of work need to improve the effectiveness of the implementation of these games within an educational setting.

The Socio-cultural Dimension revolves around the negative image that society has applied to videogames due to the association of multiple cases involving violence, sexism and game addiction. There is also the cultural mindset of school being a place for “serious” activities which excludes playing games and makes including game-based activities to be difficult to include within certain classes.

The main challenges that must be overcome in order to reduce the overall social rejection of games being used as an educational tool are;

• Improving society’s understanding of games as another form of artistic accomplishment, similar to film and music whilst also improving society’s general understanding of the videogames as a medium with what Squire calls “literacy of games”.(Squire and Giovanetto, 2008)
• Avoid designing educational games that include unnecessary violence, sexism or discrimination when presenting conflicts or plots to the player, focusing more on providing informative content that doesn’t distract from the lessons being taught.
• Educating all the involved parties on the social potential and benefits of using videogames as a learning tool, utilising recent research results to reinforce your claims.

The Educational Dimension, which revolves around the concerns of the educational value, teaching effectiveness and efficiency of results of games used as teaching tools as well as the training that teachers will require in order to adopt the new technologies and working habits they may be unfamiliar with in order to effectively use games as a teaching tool.

In order to improve the educational value of games, the necessary measures may include;

• Improving the access of educational videogames in existing and future educational resource repositories by encouraging teachers to both search for and assess the effectiveness of games to be used within the educational sector in a similar fashion to how other educational materials are currently registered. (Looking at educational content, target students’ age group, content etc.)
• Creating effective user and best practise guides for games that may be complicated and difficult to teachers who’re lacking in game literacy.
• Creating communities centred around educational games, allowing educators to share their knowledge and resources with others within the educational sector.

 The Technological dimension focuses primarily on the excessive costs of developing educational games, the lack of effective support tools that allow effective monitoring of the results of player activity and the capability of schools being able to provide suitable devices that can run educational games.

The lines of work necessary for the problems in this dimension to be overcome aim to reduce the technological barriers that increase the difficulty of developing educational games and deploying them within the educational sector, whilst also making it easier for teachers to use the tools that they are given. The required lines of work include;

• Lowering development costs and providing new development tools and methodologies to make he creation of games cheaper and simpler.
• Look into participative models which allow pedagogy experts to easily work alongside programmers and artists within the game development process.
• Reducing the technological requirements of deploying games within the educational sector, striking a balance between having games that aren’t graphically intensive but are also attractive to the player.
• Explore the possibility of developing games that allow students and teachers to use their own devices without disregarding accessibility, security and privacy of the users.

Whilst these points may not be entirely relevant to every development project, they are important things to consider when tackling the problem that educational games face and hopefully we’ll start seeing more games being used within the educational sector without the social stigma that often follows them, leading to a more engaging and fun learning experience for everyone involved.

The post Things to keep in mind when developing Educational Games first appeared on Ludogogy.

I’m a Co-Director of a small company in the Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance space. My firm recently helped to design and execute a series of simulations for a local government in Sub-Saharan Africa to help refine local emergency management capabilities. There were no sophisticated computer-based audio-visuals. There were no LCD screens, and certainly no Virtual Reality headsets. In fact we didn’t even have dice or board games—our mechanics were only playing cards, flip charts, paper and Excel.

But we did something quite unique. Instead of a standard flooding scenario, we modeled something not seen in the area in at least 70 years…maybe ever. A catastrophic cyclone—a worst in the history of the southern hemisphere-type cyclone—bringing cataclysmic devastation, winds, rain, and storm surge. The meteorologists in the room agreed—it could happen in the climate-catalyzed threat environment of the future. Our simulation was intended break business processes apart, and the thinking behind “putting Humpty Dumpty back together again” strengthened Emergency Plans and Standard Operating Procedures.

It was an honor to be part of the process. But going forward it’s not enough to model climate in such a simple manner.

Our climate-catalyzed scenario was elementary. It merely extended a storm track zone in the Indian Ocean several hundred kilometers to the North. In essence, we dialed up the level of destruction in our baseline scenario and injects with an imaginary edit to the meteorological map of the era we just left—the Holocene.

In fact, we now live in a volatile new era, called the Anthropocene. An era driven by C02 increase levels and methane levels not seen since….the dawn of in human history…since our primate ancestor Australopithecus was around…since the only 9 million years after an asteroid killed the dinosaurs….recent news stories provide a large array of “not since XX in Earth history” analogues!

It seems as climatology and paleoclimatology rapidly advance, our current plight of the Anthropocene—our very future–is ironically mirroring a deeper and deeper look backwards into geologic time. And here, in the newest cutting-edge science, and in the space of climatology and anthropology, we find a potential Brave New World of rich scenarios to draw from. In fact, we must draw from them.

During the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) some 56 million years ago, the Earth warmed at an astonishing rate—perhaps 13 degrees in a time span ranging from decades to 5,000 years or so. It was a warmer world to begin with, but in a blink of geologic time, crocodiles and palm trees spread north into the Arctic, the mid-latitudes were sultry and lush forests, and the area around the equator may have been largely uninhabitable. In fact, our primate ancestors may have been born in the lush Arctic rainforests of Greenland, Canada, and Siberia. The rate of rise in C02 and methane loads hasn’t been seen since that time.

While we now live in a warm period between Ice Ages, our Anthropocene plight can draw on quite a few PETM-inspired scenarios. We can imagine the tropics, Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East so searing that there is a catastrophic mass migration to the north. We can also imagine a rapidly-created ice-free Arctic, with jet streams that are irregular, or even non-existent. The PETM-inspired analogue for humanitarian simulations is a relevant, yet bleak one.

There are other episodes in Earth history worth noting. During the more recent Eemian Period about 127,000 years ago, which had similar carbon load to our current Anthropocene atmosphere, and sea levels were about 6 to 9 meters higher than today. The Eemian-inspired analogues for humanitarian simulations foretell catastrophic Sea Level Rise around the globe, swamping cities from New York to Dar es Salaam, triggering mass migration in South Asia, and extinguishing nation-states throughout Oceania.

As paleoclimatology advances, we are learning so much more about deep Earth history. This ranges from erratic and dramatic warming and cooling episodes (years to decades) as the Earth sputtered into and out of Ice Ages, to the time it may have rained nonstop on Earth (after the Permian Period 252 million years ago)…for 2 million years.

Not all of these are perfect analogues for the climate-catalyzed Anthropocene simulations. The continents are now in different locations, biomes are vastly different, and things have changed quite a bit over billions of years of evolution.

Yet what is also a key development to is the increasing granularity being published in the climatology space. For example, certain hotspots in the Arctic for sea ice melt may trigger very specific changes in El Nino episodes. That type of climatological driver can inform a specific scenario where pockets of Arctic “blue ocean” are exacerbating a dangerous El Nino season—and driving catastrophic on-the-ground fires in Australia or flooding in Houston, Texas USA.

Another potential granularity is the very specific “locking pattern” the Anthropocene jet stream can become stuck in, leading to exacerbated periods of droughts and floods. Think of the severe droughts and impact on wheat yields in Russia and China that preceded the food price shock which, in turn, was an underpinning of the Arab Spring movement of 2012. A jet stream locking-based scenario could drive complex humanitarian gameplay encompassing all of Eurasia.

In the end, there is a role in the wargaming and decision support community for the disaster management, humanitarian, and civil protection space. Within this space, there is a niche for climate change-catalyzed scenarios. And for those scenarios, aligning with the most exciting new developments in climatology and paleoclimatology can inspire serious gameplay with circumstances we have only begun to imagine.

In the end, there is a role in the wargaming and decision support community for the disaster management, humanitarian, and civil protection space. Within this space, there is a niche for climate change-catalyzed scenarios. And for those scenarios, aligning with the most exciting new developments in climatology and paleoclimatology can inspire serious gameplay with circumstances we have only begun to imagine. Serious game designers will greatly benefit from partnering with experts in the climatology and paleoclimatology fields and curating these dynamic climate landscapes into the canvas of today’s humanitarian scenarios.

The post Climate Change-Catalyzed Simulations in the Anthropocene – Going Back to the Future with Jurassic Park? first appeared on Ludogogy.

For the past several years, I have been facilitating learning, mainly for corporate employees and leaders, in environmental and business sustainability.  This includes introducing and exploring topics such as Climate Change, water quality and availability, biodiversity loss and environmental degradation.

The information I have shared in learning sessions can be very distressing, and as time has moved on, and more is discovered about the progress of our environmental crises, it has become more scary. Reactions to this vary. Ideally, we want learners to be scared enough that they want to take action, but not so scared that they feel helpless.  For some, either because the situation is too distressing or because of beliefs already held, the reaction is to push back against the learning (and sometimes the facilitator). These kinds of reactions range from occasional questioning of the information being imparted, to in extreme cases, outright denial, and at worst, aggressive and abusive behaviour.

An opportunity to embed transferable skills

This can be a serious challenge for a facilitator, but also a major opportunity, to embed additional skills learning alongside the knowledge acquisition.  More than in many other learning topics, participants need to be able to understand and evaluate the information that is being presented to them. They need to be able to make informed decisions on which information to trust, and they need to be able to understand the processes by which that information is derived.

The learning designer not only has an opportunity, but a responsibility to embed some basic learning in Critical Thinking and Scientific Literacy.

This means that experiential learning, and especially games-based learning, with its emphasis on discovery rather than ‘telling’ is particularly appropriate for sustainability learning.

As an example, let us take a corporate learning programme which has the following objectives:

1. To make employees aware of the contents of an organisation’s Sustainability Strategy
2. To achieve buy-in to the Strategy such that employees will support and work towards targets of the strategy
3. Inform employees of personal actions they can take to live more sustainability, and incentivise and empower them to do so

And now let us explore two alternative approaches to achieving this, and particularly to ‘convincing’ sceptical learners.

Learners need to be convinced that action is necessary and more advantageous (to themselves and the organisation) than inaction.

The knowledge transfer approach

The first approach rests on the idea that learners will realise the necessity to take action once they are convinced by a ‘reasoned’ argument, based on claims (e.g. Climate change is a serious problem), reasons (…because climate change threatens our business model) and evidence ( …and here are the data on damage to similar businesses) This approach uses ‘expert’ presenters to deliver information to the learners.:

1. About the research underlying the data on Climate Change, biodiversity loss etc.
2. Explaining what the data illustrates – e.g. that the graphs show that rates of human-produced carbon correlates closely with rates of global temperature rise.
3. A strategy expert from the organisation explains and justifies the contents of the Sustainability Strategy – showing data on the expected impact of environmental crises on the business

For many of the participants this will work well, but these will be the ones who are already convinced of all the things that the ‘reasoned argument’ is seeking to achieve.  In effect, the learning is ‘preaching to the converted’, which is a terrific waste of effort.

Unfortunately, for those who just need a little more convincing, or for those who simply do not ‘believe’ in man-made climate change, this approach is likely completely ineffective.

An increasing body of research shows that impressions, once formed, are remarkably persistent, and worse, that they are very resistant to change via logic and reasoning, and facts [1].

If you are now thinking ‘that isn’t right’ or ‘I don’t think that can be true’, reflect on that.  You are experiencing exactly what I have described. You believe that reasoning should work and so simply dismiss the claim that it doesn’t.

Various ways in which this approach has failed in learning I have been involved in include:

1. Evidence is simply dismissed (“That isn’t true”, “That data has been manipulated”)
2. Claims are made that the evidence does not show what is claimed (“Yes the temperature is rising, but that is natural, nothing to do with humans”)
3. The credibility of a ‘expert’ is denied because of some perceived shortcoming/vested interest (“She would say that, because she is an activist”)

Even if you have not experienced the above while delivering learning, you can probably all think of examples of this in daily life – people who simply shout ‘Fake news’ when a fact does not suit their narrative.

The ‘Discovery’ approach

In the second approach, there is much less ‘telling’, but this article is not the usual ‘doing vs telling’ polemic. I am not making a claim that experiential learning is better in every case, just that reasoning and presenting facts is not the way to convince those who are sceptical. In fact, the very experience of being ‘told’ may cause a sceptic to become more vehement.

A secondary reason for reducing the emphasis on ‘telling’ in this case, is that imparting ‘facts’ about environmental crises in contact time, is a waste of time.  Information, data and knowledge about these issues are readily available. Precious learning contact should be spent giving learners something they cannot readily gain elsewhere. So, the means of achieving the learning outcomes become instead:

1. Incentivise learners to discover what they need to know
2. Equip learners to find appropriate and trustworthy information
3. Equip them to evaluate that information and its sources
4. Incentivise learners to act upon what they discover
5. Empower learners to act upon what they discover

There is still the need for some ‘telling’.  The learners need to know the contents of the Strategy, but a greater emphasis on ‘discovery’ will help to defuse the resistance to being ‘told’.

Understanding ‘how science works’ becomes more important than presenting what science has found in this approach, and becomes part of the process of evaluating the credibility of information derived using the scientific method.

And although presenting reasoning may not be effective, equipping learners with the tools of reasoning can be.

Instead of presenting claims, reasons and evidence to the learners, allow them to work through the material themselves – through ‘games’ which use this material to teach basic critical thinking techniques and an overview of the Scientific Method.  Two such games are outlined below.

The Credibility Game

Learners evaluate sources of information, based on credibility criteria and the facilitator takes the role of a coach, giving guidance to teams individuals when they struggle in how to apply criteria

Materials:

• evidence in the from of data, infographics, (short) articles, or web based materials (videos, extracts from TED talks ) etc – the same materials you might have presented in the previous approach.
• A sheet containing information about how to use each of five credibility criteria for evaluating information sources; Reputation, Ability to See/Know, Vested Interest, Expertise, Neutrality. This will involve applying a score, out of 10, for how well the source fulfils each criterion
• Pen to allocate points

If you want to explore the ‘controversy’ in great detail – for example, wanting to look why climate change denial exist, and what the main arguments are, ensure that you have a roughly equal amount of evidence for both ‘sides’. Otherwise, this is not necessary, as you simply want to tutor learners in using ‘Credibility’ as an evaluation criteria – by using those skills on material relevant to the topic.

1. Take a ‘controversial’ topic such as Climate Change and layout enough materials so that small teams (of 3 or 4) can take one each (and that they have a good choice)
2. Individually, or in small groups, through discussion, participants evaluate the source of the information.

As an example, in evaluating an article from The Guardian newspaper about the disproportionate effect of climate change on refugees and displaced people, a small team of three decide the following:

Reputation. The Guardian has a reputation for high quality journalism including careful checking of sources, but this is slightly tempered by its reputation for being left-wing and favouring the cause of the underdog, which might lead it to exaggerate the effect on refugees.  Score 8

Ability to know/see. The article is written by a correspondent who specialises in news from the Middle East. This means they are likely to have good access to primary sources and have based the article on personal experience. Score 9

Vested Interest. The Guardian has a vested interest to continue to be seen as a reliable source of information (a vested interest to maintain a good reputation), and so will not knowingly present false information. Score 9

Expertise. The author is a Middle Eastern political correspondent, but is not an expert in science or the climate, so although they could be considered an expert in some of the socio-political aspects they write about in the article, it is possible that they may have misinterpreted some of the scientific data included in the article and drawn faulty conclusions. Score 6

Neutrality. The Guardian does have a left-wing bias and criticisms of international response to the plight of the Syrians, and other criticisms of governments and individuals in the article may stem from this bias. Score 4

3. In turns teams present the arguments about the credibility of each piece of information – but without stating their scores. While one team presents, the others listen and also allocate scores in two ways:
   1. What they think the ‘right’ answer is – what the facilitator will reveal during scoring
   2. The score they believe the presenting team will have given to each criteria, based on their presentation
4. After each presentation the facilitator reveals the ‘right’ score for the information source. The facilitator also leads any discussion on why these scores have been allocated – if any. Presenting teams score 3 points for getting any score ‘spot on’, 2 for 1 point away, and 1 for 2 points away. 0 otherwise. Other teams score in the same way for ‘matching’ with the right answer, and with the answers given by the presenting team.
5. Top scoring team wins.

The same format could be used to create games for other critical thinking tools, such as recognising fallacies or argument flaws.

Zendo

A game created by Kory Heath  His theme for the game was (loosely) Buddhism, but Nick Bentley later wrote in his blog that the game could be used as an analogy of the scientific method[2]. The original games uses ‘Looney Pyramids’[3] although you could use Lego® or other objects.

In simple terms, one player (‘The Universe’) creates a law of nature by positioning at least 3 objects in an arrangement on the table.  The other players then ‘experiment’ and ‘hypothesise’ by creating their own arrangements or by stating their ‘best guess’ aloud.

The game is simple, but very effectively demonstrates how superstitions arise from incorrect interpretation of observations, the value of repeated experimentation, the value of Occam’s Razor.

So often, ‘learning’ is designed to be about knowledge transfer. Obviously this is an important aspect of many learning programmes, but often it is the case that learning programmes transfer much more information than is needed to achieve the stated objectives.  In the example above, although it might be interesting to the participants to learn about the science behind Climate Change, it is ‘nice to have’ rather than essential to the objective.  What is important is that participants are sufficiently convinced, that those who do know about the science of Climate Change, are correct in their conclusions about the issues it will cause.

Again, I must stress, that the above statement is not about favouring experiential learning over presentation, because much experiential learning is also about knowledge transfer. It is about a preference for equipping learners with tools to advance their own learning, rather than creating a situation in which a specific subset of knowledge can be ‘consumed’. Simply put, the goal of any learning experience is to turn a participant into a learner, progressively  and continuously.

“Give a man a fish and he will feed himself for a day, teach him to fish and he will feed himself for a lifetime”

– Confucius (possibly)

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