What makes play work? The answer is that great work is also great play. Great play makes us more productive. That means that great games can also help us become better, and more productive, individuals.

Let’s examine game play as work, and why we continue to play games, despite difficulties to the contrary. Part of why we continue to play is because we enjoy the feelings of “competent engagement” that we get from games. This allows us to get more serious about our work. But, it also affects how we approach game play.

More productive

So if play is like work, do games make us more productive? They sure do!  Playful activities are intrinsically more motivating and can help you become more productive in the workplace.

So it’s no wonder why employers are turning to games to help make their workplace more gameful and engaging. If games are already dominating the attention of some employees, then it makes sense to incorporate aspects of games into the work environment.

If you look closely, then you can see this already happening in some workplaces. Think about a sales team that tracks their monthly, quarterly, and yearly sales goals. That could turn into a competition where individuals are striving to outdo one another.

This feedback system could easily be gamified where management adds challenges. Those challenges could include sales goals. They could also support their sales team by providing them with new ways to source leads and earn some significant wins.

Bernard Suits defines games as “a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” That doesn’t sound very much like work. We traditionally think about work as overcoming necessary obstacles for us in order to attain something in return.

So before we dive deeper into productivity at work, let’s first determine why we play games to begin with.

Why we play

Games foster intrinsic motivation. That is the desire for us to play because we enjoy the process. The three parts of intrinsic motivation include competence, autonomy, and relatedness.

Competence comes from our ability to take part in and affect the game. This means that we have the ability to do something. Autonomy addresses peoples’ abilities to act independently from others in making their choices. Relatedness reflects how choices made affect the game, its outcomes, and the people we (sometimes) play them with.

These intrinsic motivations are also present in active and productive workplaces. Employees who are most productive are also competent: they can do the job that’s assigned to them. High performing employees can also work autonomously and execute their own actions according to their own agenda. This affects their relatedness and how their actions affect themselves, their coworkers, and the whole workplace.

So how can someone associate “play” with “work.” It’s because play is inherently intrinsic.  We are capable; we are autonomous; and we are relatable. When we are playing we are the most productive workers.

That’s why the opposite of play is not work. Great play IS great work. The opposite of play is depression, and it’s something that we should work to avoid to have the most active and engaged workforce possible.

Competent engagement

So what makes play = work and what makes work = play? The key here is to be competently engaged. If we feel competent at something and we feel that we can have an impact on the environment through our actions, then we are engaged.

Part of what makes games so engaging is that it is an easy way for us to demonstrate our capacity and our competency. We keep playing because demonstrating that competency is addicting. Demonstrating that competency is SO addicting that we’ll keep playing games until we demonstrate mastery by “beating the game.”

This feeling of mastery, this inherent feeling of demonstrating our competency, is exactly what Raph Koster describes in his book A theory of fun for game design. It’s the ability for us to experiment and demonstrate our mastery is what makes games an inherently pleasurable activity. That activity is work.

That’s why even hard work can become engaging, motivating, and addicting. We can volunteer to spend long hours to just hit the top of the leader board. But whether that is in Dance Dance Revolution or part of our sales meeting is a matter of venue and location.

Getting serious while working

So what does that mean for games? We can play while we work because play is work. Games are serious business, and should be taken as seriously as our work.

That serious attitude demands that we become part of a larger community where thousands band together for our love of work and play.

And that is why we love games. We love to work. Games are about training their players to solve complex problems, to develop their competency, and display their mastery over these challenges. There is no better definition of work than games.

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

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

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Playing games and creating games not only can teach high-level concepts but also build collaborative learning skills. Creating games develops rigorous learning connections to entrepreneurship, innovation, and the iterative cycles of business development.  This Entrepreneurial Ludic Learning ™ I believe will create environments of learning and livelihood that will transform education and the workplaces of the future.

The instructional pedagogy of gaming and game creation and their systems  used in my high school business classrooms  are compatible and reproducible  in any classroom. They also have worked in my management consulting and personalized education endeavors. In short – they work!

The news is filled with headlines of teachers in the United States leaving the profession of education en masse, teacher labor strikes or shortages, underperforming schools, and conflicting curriculum goals.

Yet every day, countless teachers are making magic in their classrooms, from urban to rural, affluent to impoverished; and these teachers, some with little to no knowledge of business process analysis, are doing just that! They analyze, they incentivize, they deal with human resources issues and motivation and continue to be productive.

Play – Entrepreneurship – Management; three words that most people would not put together when speaking about education; however, in my tenure as an entrepreneur coach, instructional developer, adjunct professor, athlete and coach, singer and performer, and teacher of Business and Career Education and Social Studies with over 30 years in classrooms, board rooms and server rooms, I have worked to empower my students and clients by teaching innovation, iteration and integration through project and problem-based learning and gaming and I have seen its results firsthand!

Not only are these three words, Play – Entrepreneurship – Management connected, but optimal in learners’ deep understanding of the oftentimes difficult and unfamiliar vocabulary of vocational or any of their studies.

We want to make students college and career ready? I daresay then we better start playing MORE!

We are inherently problem-solvers by nature. We are curious and crave connections. We love to play.

Gaming is the ideal platform to make learning “stick”—to afford students deeper leveling, broader reaching, and easier recalling of curricular concepts.

Like gum under a desk, students (from birth to adulthood)  use games, play, and the iterative methodologies to not only form good learning habits, but also to transform themselves into  managers of their own learning, entrepreneurs of their ideas and players of a self-determined future—the sticky learning concepts we all epitomize.

So why don’t we play more?

Perhaps the educational systems in the United States are stuck in a poorly translated world where the definition of a game – loosely translated from German, is “any activity which is executed only for pleasure without conscious purpose.”

The “former” models of U.S.  education are very rigorous. There can’t be pleasure and fun in education! We most definitely can’t do anything without a conscious purpose!

Well then why, as we look to the Finnish model,  do they hold “ the unofficial title as the country with the world’s best education system since 2000?”

“Finland also has the smallest gap between the weakest and strongest students in their educational system.” (Staff, Math & Movement & Hancock)

Why? Perhaps it is in that the Finnish model of education that focuses on the importance of ‘play’ and ‘joy’ in education.

And maybe, as purported by Jane McGonigal, everyone from HR Directors and Superintendents would be serving our world better by looking at the skill sets that gamers hold that will be ideal in not only  transforming the workforce of the future but also energizing and improving outcomes of educational systems based in an agrarian model that no longer exists for most.

The workplace learning skills of McGonigal are:

Blissful Productivity

Urgent Optimism

Social Fabric

Epic Meaning

McGonigal believes that these four things cannot only create happier workplaces, more productive and collaborative employees but also a better world.

So we need to BUSE it up in the classrooms and workplaces, to increase joy, optimism, connections and meaning though gaming.

In addition, entrepreneurship (or as I view it, game based learning) needs to be accepting that there will be failure.  RISK is inherent in creativity and without creativity there will be no change.

This is why Entrepreneurial Ludic Learning™, MUST look to the iterative process of the production cycle of business and game play to allow our students (the employees and entrepreneurs of the future) the creative and productive outputs that will make learning stick.

So why have we driven risk taking and failure from learning? Why has the four letter word RISK become so bad especially in the education world?

Let’s look at why risk and failure has been cast out of education.

Do we like failure? The simple answer, NO!

My question then is why not?

It hurts. It makes us look bad.

This is where cognitive theory kicks in.

In discussing gaming and learning with my “crew” (A group formed from the onset of the Games in In Education Symposium in the Capital District of NYS that encompasses teachers, game developers and business people.)  and oftentimes we speak of the challenges of the neurotypical mindset as non-neurotypical learners. We also wonder if non-neurotypical is a better way of creating challenging material and improving education for all.

What can we learn from non-neurotypical learners? Are all learners non-neurotypical but conditioned to be neurotypical through habit? How can we break the habits to form better neurological connections?

Malcolm Gladwell calls them “Outliers,” business teachers call them innovators (entrepreneurs), cognitive scientists call them non-neurotypical, and historians call them rebels.

Perhaps more simply put, some, no, many people enjoy coloring outside the lines in a world full of boxes drawn in permanent marker.

We speed just a little bit. We put just enough coins in a parking meter and try to stretch out a minute or two more. We show up at 7:20 am for a 7:30 am appointment…

So if most people want to take risks, why don’t we call it that? Why don’t we fess up to wanting to make mistakes and own them when we make them?

Why are schools encountering more and more students that are non-neurotypical or on the autism spectrum?

According to the Autism Society: “Prevalence of autism in U.S. children increased by 119.4 percent from 2000 (1 in 150) to 2010 (1 in 68). (CDC, 2014) Autism is the fastest-growing developmental disability… and its prevalence has increased by 6-15 percent each year from 2002 to 2010. ”

How do we, as teachers encountering more and more students that are non-neurotypical, (Note: Non-neurotypical learners are students most commonly placed on the autism spectrum but this term can be used with any student that does not benefit from or has difficulty with learning in traditional ways.) address the learning needs of the increasing number of students presenting with these learning types while allowing those who enjoy the structure of neurotypical lessons and procedures through either preference or as I dare say “habits,” create engaging and robust lessons?

Well, by incorporating gaming of course!

When in the 1950’s Professor Leon Festinger’s in his groundbreaking book, Theory of Cognitive Dissonance stated, “when there were discrepancies of opinion or ability among the members of a group, pressures arose to reduce such discrepancies.” He also wrote:

Dissonance results when an individual must choose between attitudes and behaviors that are contradictory.

Dissonance can be eliminated by reducing the importance of the conflicting beliefs, acquiring new beliefs that change the balance, or removing the conflicting attitude or behavior.

We feel the pain. We don’t like it. So we do everything in our power not to feel it. We push away anything that is different to “fit in” or to just make the pain go away. We habitualize our experience to create habits.

We may not like doing things the way everyone else does them, but we crave acceptance and hate the pain so we have engaged in learning  methods that may not be the best for us.

We then take that learned experience about risk avoidance from schools  into the workplace.

We fear taking risks because we fear condemnation, losing jobs and/or status. It can create toxic work cultures.

As an organizational management consultant, I have been involved in workplace improvement projects that take a year or more due to the resistance to change cellularly ingrained in our being.

If we want to create the employees and entrepreneurs of the future, how does this cognitive dissonance thwart discovery, inquiry, and change in the educational setting?

How do we go from the scientific, exploratory and risk-taking toddlers to the fear-filled, settlers of the status quo?

How does this subversion of creativity and discovery learning from our childhood continue onto the workplace?

How do we, in turn, address this shameful statistic that “35 percent of young adults (ages 19-23) with autism have not had a job or received postgraduate education after leaving high school”(Shattuck et al., 2012)?

To me, students are just employees and entrepreneurs in training. Their ideas, suggestions and prior learning MUST be valued, acknowledged and, painfully at times, corrected if we are to create the social change agents and entrepreneurs of the future.

We must teach them about cognitive dissonance and about the pain that comes with failure without stifling the growth and creation that can spring from it. (Festinger)

We are told, by administrators, the public, and the media that as teachers, we should create a learning environment that creates a safe and productive learning place for all of our students.

So how do we accomplish that with the oftentimes limited financial resources, oversized classrooms and over-taxed time schedules of teachers, students, and families?

My answer came by developing a business process analysis model for educational purposes through gaming after asking myself the question, “How can I pull my unique knowledge of organizational management, employee motivation, and the habitual nature of what makes worksplaces successful and games fun and use it to make my students’ ‘user experiences’ better?”

Businesses of learning—make no mistake,  school is business.  Not-for-profits are still businesses and therefore need to be viewed through a business mindset.

How can we as teachers utilize the boundless studies on workplace performance to assist us in helping our students be better learners? We want them to enjoy learning, to crave more of it, not see it as an enemy. We want to produce a service (education) that more and more customers crave and create a positive experience when engaging in it.

We as teachers need to take risks, and to allow our students to do the same in a safe environment to change the oftentimes bad habits of education.

In other words, we need to PLAY GAMES!

So I hit the books. I dug out my undergraduate business textbooks and articles. I researched successful business leaders and the brain based learning theories that they engaged in to change bad habits and improve their users’ (employees’) experiences. I talked to my friends and colleagues.

Paul O’Neill in October of 1987 as the new CEO of Alcoa decided to make a small but substantive change in the way Alcoa did business. He decided to focus on worker safety. That was relatively unheard of in those days of fierce Japanese competition within the metals manufacturing  industry. That one “small” change led to a quintupling of Alcoa’s profits.

In a nutshell, Mr O’Neill changed habits.

Schools, and by extension, teachers, are like airplanes. Oftentimes there are problems with the inner workings that cause the oxygen masks to fall from the ceiling.

Discipline problems, unsafe home lives of our students, substance abuse, truancy, cheating, absenteeism, tardiness, disruptive behaviors—all of these are things that individually can send a plane down and when multiplied, can bring the plane and our oxygen masks from the ceilings.

Our first reaction is to put the oxygen mask on our students.  But as everyone knows from the demonstrations on the airplanes putting YOUR oxygen mask on first, allows you to have the strength to give O2 to help those around you.

But how?

Focusing on righting the airplane by focusing on teachers FIRST. Taking business concepts of caring for your employees, creating a positive work environment that is safe and secure and FUN!

“It should go without saying, if the person who works at your company is 100 percent proud of the brand and you give them the tools to do a good job and they are treated well, they’re going to be happy,” “If the person who works at your company is not appreciated, they are not going to do things with a smile,”

– Richard Branson tells Inc. president and editor-in-chief Eric Schurenberg.

How do you get that smile? How do you get teachers to feel as if they matter and that they are valued?

In our professional meetings we need to play games. We as teachers need to learn more about how playing games affects learning and we need to listen to business learners and entrepreneurs, watch TED Talks and continue to learn about how game theory can improve user experiences.

Ok, I know, I know…it seems crazy, but I have questions about when you play games in your classroom be it online, teacher directed “Kahoot” or “Jeopardy” type, or just letting your students play a card game like “Uno” during free time or recess.

What do your students look like? Are they smiling? Do they push through frustrations after losing a game and try again? Are you smiling and happy?

Isn’t this what we want our students to do in their learning? Isn’t this what YOU want to be doing?

Let us take it one step further now. Imagine having the student, who may not be engaged in the lesson, but who you observe drawing beautiful pictures. They obviously enjoy that and have a talent. Why not engage that talent into creating a game with a team of others in the class?

Why not have them take the learning objectives and concepts of the content and create a game?

Let your students  naturally figure out who is good at what, figure out what game modality would best address the content, create a materials list, storyboard the game play, collaborate to find the answers, and present that to other students by developing the rules for their game along with the finished product.

They can briefly explain their game in a roundtable or direct presentation style to the others in the class and let the other students do an analysis of their playing experiences with tips to the creators as to how to make it better and thereby engage in a peer analysis.

Then take it a step further—ask other teachers and/or parents/members of the community to sit on a panel of investors and have these student creators pitch their game to them.

Cognitively robust, collaborative, and creative are the three phrases that come to mind in that educational exercise as well as play, entrepreneurship, and management.

Through play, gaming, and game development, students engage in entrepreneurial, collaborative, and creative processes and learn self-and team-management techniques.

Through learning through play and game-creation they hit upon every Level 4 in Danielson’s Framework For Teaching.

So take a risk, play “Risk^©,” encourage risks in your classroom.

Gaming is a great tool to change habits, improve learning outcomes, and prepare students for the future workplace. Let’s play!

The post Entrepreneurial Ludic Learning first appeared on Ludogogy.

In an ever more complex world, large organisations rely on their ability to react or proactively change through large scale strategic initiatives, or as they are sometimes called, Must Win Battles. These could be initiatives such as implementing LEAN, changing production methods or finding new ways to engage customers. Unfortunately, many of these initiatives will, regardless of how great they look on paper, fail due to poor execution or a lack of stakeholder buy-in. Multiple studies¹ show that strategic initiatives often fail, because the people who run them have not prioritized the ‘softer side’ of change management such as timely involvement of the necessary stakeholders.

To be better at execution strategic transformations and lead major changes we need to get serious about stakeholder engagement and how we create the necessary support, commitment and empowerment. To be specific, we need a more refined and nuances approach that goes beyond conventual stakeholders mappings, and where we have an professional approach to organizational diplomacy and ‘office politics’. In short, we must expand our change leadership toolbox with inspiration and tools from both negotiation tactics, conflict resolution and influencing.

PLAYING TO WIN

On way to train and refine the critical skills of organization diplomacy and stakeholder engagement is to use game-based training and leadership simulations.

One example is Gamechangers, a board-game based leadership simulation, which focuses on the softer side of managing large strategy initiatives. In a fictive setting, the game lets the participants drive a large scale strategic transformation, and it shows how a large part of the initiative’s success depends on their ability to build coalitions and alignment. It zooms in on the crucial start-up phase, where stakeholder must come together and align expectations, and on the anchoring phase where they need to keep momentum and make the change part of the new reality of the organisation. In order to push through, they must be firm, but they also need to show flexibility in order to secure the right buy-in from key stakeholders.

The leadership simulation provides a safe training environment where the participant can learn from mistakes without jeopardizing real projects, budgets or colleagues. This helps the players to be much better prepared when they have to deliver when it really counts in real life.

TIME TO GO ANALOGUE

Digital tools for training are great for many things but when it comes to the training of refined leadership skills we need to put down the screens and engage face-to-face. IMD, one of the world’s best business schools, are among an increasing number of institutions and companies who use board-game based tools to train leaders and executives. In the words of Robert Hooijberg, Professor of Organizational Behavior: ”The leadership simulations stimulate, as we like to say at IMD, real learning with real impact for our executives.”

Every year new studies confirm that approximately two-thirds of all change projects fail. If your organization can accept these dire odds fine, but if you like to win and deliver, than you need to get serious about the softer side of change management, and in particular the aspect of stakeholder engagement. And for this, game-based training can be an invaluable training tool.

1. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/how-to-beat-the-transformation-odds

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KPI’s work in a similar way to a score track or health points etc in a game or simulation, offering visualisation of, how well a player is performing in the context of the game.

In most cases, a game or simulation needs a defined winning condition. If this is unclear to the participants, they cannot play to their best abilities and may become completely disengaged. Knowing the winning conditions will generally inform and influence any decisions taken during the game. This is dependent on two other points:

relevance – understanding one’s role in achieving the winning condition.

ability – being able to achieve those conditions.

This second point, ability, can also be affected by personal perception, believing one is able to achieve something irrespective of whether that belief is well founded.

So, it is in the real world. A lack of measures leaves the individual unsure of their progress or whether they are doing the right thing. Measures that don’t relate to your work-life or ones you feel ill-equipped to affect do not inspire and may demotivate. Visible measures that are achievable and understood inform and influence decisions. Where the importance of measures is increased through bonuses or other reward mechanism, they truly become the scoreboard of your working life and may disproportionately influence decisions towards an unanticipated and detrimental direction.

One difference between the simulated world and the real world is that in the real world the measures are not necessarily directly linked to a goal and the goal may not be clearly defined and articulated.

Exploring measures in game-based learning

The impact of measures/KPI’s can be usefully and practically explored in game-based learning by having different players or teams with different success criteria or winning conditions. The session facilitator can also investigate how the impact of these criteria differs when kept hidden or shared with the other players/teams.

Simulations can provide a very powerful tool in understanding the interplay of these elements and in transferring this insight back to the real world.

Using objectives in simulations

Objectives, or strategies can set rewards for interim achievements or end-game scoring. Below you see an example of the achievement cards I have for the Stabil-IT simulation. I have a few cards that can be placed next to the board to provide interim targets. The cards can also be used to introduce advanced gameplay avoiding the need for all the information to be given at the beginning of the game.

Here you see two alternative versions of the reward for solving incidents either setting it at the same level (2 points) or a higher level than the other achievement cards, as well as the common information on the back of the card (only revealed on achieving the objective). Focusing on the short-term objective can cause a player or team to lose site of the overall goal, even to the point of risking their ability to succeed. It can also place them in destructive competition with other players/teams. Using this type of mechanism in a simulation can help to create and reinforce awareness of the risk of short-term target driven rewards in achieving the long-term goal for the company.

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“Work is actually very similar to play and even more like games. The main difference is perception.”

I agree with that whole-heartedly. In fact, if we look closer, we will notice that projects, especially those at work, and games have the same components. The following revealing definition of game components by Jane McGonigal in her book Reality Is Broken is known to many:

“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

I am a business owner, so after reading this, I could immediately see parallels between the projects I was working on for my customers, and games. A contract or an agreement, which my customer and I both sign, contains all four of these components. Each project has a goal, there are specific rules, like how I shall do it and by when. There are reporting and evaluation systems in each contract, which is indeed a feedback system even if the progress is not recorded by getting points or badges. And finally, when my client and I sign the contract and make an agreement, we both demonstrate the free will to participate in that project’s “game.”

The same applies to job contracts which lead to your job “games,” with their goals, rules, feedback system (the regular meetings you most likely have with your boss, before or after which you and your employer provide some kind of evaluation of each other), and both sides demonstrating the voluntary participation by signing the employment contract.

So, any project (or task in that project) is already a game. We just rarely see them that way.

Why do we need to see and treat what we do as games? If we don’t want to see, call, and embrace what we are up to as games, then we won’t be able to “play” them and enjoy them in a similar way to games. Only when we become open to seeing our projects as games, can we identify how we can modify their design to make our “project games” exciting and fun.

The post To Play at Work, See What You Do as a Game first appeared on Ludogogy.

Is this situation unavoidable or would it be possible to make the experience of working feel more like playing by consciously ‘designing’ it? To be clear, what I am talking about here is far more than what currently goes into designing work – which usually stops at the writing of job descriptions, consideration of ergonomic/hygiene factors and creating processes around line-management.

The kind of design I mean would look more at how workers experience their work, considering how they are motivated and rewarded, the meaning they find in their work, how they can grow and progress in a role, and allowing them leeway (within the constraints of the role) to exercise creativity. Such design would also look at processes to smooth the path for workers to behave in ways that are beneficial to the organisation, and align the goals of the individual to the system they operate within.

There are disciplines which already encompass this kind of design User Experience (UX) Design, and Games Design, so what could we learn from these disciplines which could make work better?

Designing feedback in work

To take one single aspect, Feedback, which is one of the most important tools of people management, frequently (if not nearly always) fails to deliver what it could in an organisational setting.  There are numerous feedback models – some awful, and some very good, which can be used to steer employees in the right direction, mentor them and help them grow, but none of these, however skilfully applied can compare with the efficacy of feedback in (well-designed) games.

Timeliness – in games, feedback is almost constant.  There is a decision-action-feedback cycle which occurs with every move that is made. In Chess, you make a move, and the game gives you feedback in the form of your new position on the board, and the subsequent next possible moves, and relative positions of pieces, which you can now see.  You are given further feedback by your opponent, whose own move is, at least in part, a reaction to yours.  Video games give you feedback on your decisions by tracking your score, your remaining life points, your gold coins – the mechanisms are endless.

In work, you can often wait weeks or even months before receiving feedback on your decisions and actions.  Some organisations even make you wait until an annual appraisal to tell you that you are on the wrong track, remove your autonomy by requiring that your goals and targets are set or approved by your manager, and miss out on the opportunity to use feedback as a constant facilitator for steady and constant progress.

What can games tell us?

So what are the design considerations we should use when designing the feedback mechanism in our games/work to be timely relevant and contextual? Ideally there should be two way learning here.  Not only can employee experience designers learn from seeing how well-designed games work, but games designers should also be able to learn from good design of work.

One of the first considerations should be the level of support via feedback given to the worker/player.  Too little and they may find it difficult to advance, too much and the engagement in the playing / working process will be lost.  Players need to feel that the decisions and moves they are making within the game are autonomous.  This is not only important for the engagement in the activity, but discovery provides valuable opportunities to create sticky learning.  In an ideal situation, there should be enough flexibility in the system to monitor and customise the preferred level of support for any individual player/worker. Computer games do this well where feedback is based on game play stats (amount of ‘life’ left, progress towards next level) the level of performance expected from the player could be calibrated to their previous performance – a process of differentiation familiar to a classroom learning environment, and which could be profitably applied to the world of work. Arguably this is what personal appraisals are designed to do, but the necessarily infrequent nature of such a large-scale evaluation, renders them ineffective as a tool for consistent progress.  How could frequent ‘micro-evaluations’ and goal/target adjustments (such as are implemented in games) be built into the design of your job?  This, I believe, would necessarily mean that the employee would largely need to undertake self-evaluation – a change which in itself would increase autonomy and exercise of creativity.

Games mechanisms

So what measurements might you use?  We can learn much from games here which contain progress measures of innumerable kinds – the feeling of constant forward momentum will support continued action.  The actual form the measure will take can be tailored to individual requirements.

‘Are we nearly there yet?’ – another form of effective progress measure for keeping players on the straight and narrow, particularly effective for time bound or target-led goals

‘Streaks’ of activity – a measure of consistent action, for example, visiting the game daily and feeding in data can  make it more likely for activity to continue, with players reluctant to ‘break the chain’, particularly if this has a strong graphic representation. (e.g. red crosses on a calendar).

Getting ‘better’ (or worse) – a clear definition of a future desirable state, along with a simple way of measuring ‘units of progress’ towards it.

Personal bests – a time honoured way of keeping players engaged.  Imaginative design can move beyond the obvious here – so you don’t just get a PB for your highest number of action repetitions, or the best time for carrying out that action, but also because you have achieved your longest continuous streak.

Comparison with others – leaderboards and social sharing of achievement can be a powerful incentive for competitive types, and comparison with one’s own performance in previous events / time periods can provide a similar encouragement.

Awards and rewards – the lines between feedback and other games mechanisms can be blurred.  For some people visible and concrete symbols of success are a powerful incentive for progress.  Game ‘stuff’ like badges or the earning of in game currency which then can be used to buy virtual goods for use in the game

Levels and powerups – enhanced in-game capability or access to new content can be a powerful incentive to progress.  Clear level boundaries for gaining these achievements also work well.  As someone who has frequently stayed up ‘just one more  hour’ to gain the capability to cast a  more powerful fireball spell once I level up, I can attest to the lure of the level boundary.

These describe how these mechanisms work within games – what would be required to build these same mechanisms into a work setting?

The post How games do feedback better than your boss first appeared on Ludogogy.

One of the best ways of learning for behavior change is through a simulated experience. These simulations create a practical context in which learners can practice repeatedly in a controlled environment.

Why are simulated environments key to learning new behaviours?

• They provide a safe space to make mistakes and learn from them.
• They provide the means for learners to immerse themselves in situations by performing tasks that resemble actual job activities.
• Learners can experiment with new ways to deal with the same solution.

Let’s take an example of simulating team work in a newly assembled project team. There are many new behaviours that need to be learned for a new project team to be successful, such as the need to develop an emotional bond between the team members, understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and how to help each other in times of need. There are also behaviors that might need adapting or improving, such as how to collaborate and communicate with each other effectively, how to manage time effectively, and how to prioritise when balancing several tasks.

Board games are a great way to create a simulated experience in the workplace. Project Ninjas is a good example of a collaborative board game that aims to achieve behavioural change through a simulated experience. It provides a practical context of working on a project team with time pressures and challenges. The original Project Ninjas board game is based around a traditional project management methodology with four phases: Initiate, Plan, Deliver, and Close. The team must collaborate to complete all the tasks and they win if they complete the project on time. The Agile Ninjas expansion provides a similar experience, but simulates agile project methodology in a practical context. This is great for project teams beginning to use Agile processes.

It’s really important that after running a simulation, you debrief with the group on their experience. If the simulation is a game or a fun experience, they might get carried away with it and forget what the purpose is. Give each individual time for self-reflection on their own behaviours so they can come up with key actions for what they need to change going forward. For example, someone might need to adapt their communication behaviour on a project because someone on the project team doesn’t like email and can be slow to respond, instead preferring more verbal ways of communication. These key actions should come out of the team reflection and/or the individual’s self-reflection.

The post How board games can achieve behaviour change in the workplace first appeared on Ludogogy.

Right now, gamification and games are so focused on online implementation that you could be forgiven for thinking they’re mainly about tech. But online is just one playing field, and tech is just one ball. There are others: face-to-face learning, workplace performance management, behaviour change in real-life situations.

If you look across them all, they’re all really about motivation. How we can hold games up to the light, see what makes people want to play, and apply it to elsewhere. In making new games or in making people want to do more of some things and less of others.

And there’s one constant across the many people out there picking apart what makes people motivated to do things in games or gamified systems: difference. Different things drive different people and players. One size never fits all.

Competition as a Default

But there is a default size when managers and decision-makers want to bring games, play and game-like elements into the workplace: competition. Points, awards and achievements, leaderboards. I’ve seen twenty sales leaderboards for every well-planned collaborative tool.

Here’s the problem: take the suggested game drivers from some of the most respected experts in the field of why games motivate, and plot whether they are more strongly associated with competition-focus, collaboration-focus, or neither.

Focusing on the left-hand column leaves swathes of drivers untouched.

The Issues with Competition

Let’s think about how that might look in practice. You implement a game or gamified system at work, designed to promote the behaviours you want, using a blunt leaderboard or other purely competition-focused method. You’re losing out because:

• You’re missing the chance to harness the non-competitive drivers
• You can weaken intrinsic motivation — studies have shown that when you reward behaviours people wanted to do anyway, it can make the behaviour less likely
• You may reduce confidence and engagement in the losers, or those off the pace
• You may increase conflict if people take it too seriously
• People can start to game the system, prioritising points over the team and the work
• It can trigger a threat response, even for the winners (who may protect their position)
• You de-incentivise collaboration, and aren’t helping people learn to work together
• You may see an overall performance improvement, but driven only by those who engage, which may paper over a performance drop in those who don’t

If there’s so much that’s bad about it, why is it the default? The word default reveals a lot here. Many defaults are not the best option when analysed carefully. But a quick-fix leaderboard is common, it’s easy to do, and it’s widely (lazily) supposed to motivate people.

Improving Competition

To be fair, not all competition-focused ventures are as bad as all that. As well as combining elements, game design is about careful design thinking and playtesting. Monopoly is an awful game because it has poorly designed elements (few meaningful choices, high luck factor, simple strategy), but also because it doesn’t factor in the player experience: what it feels like to troop round the board yet again when your opponent has six hotels and you have none.

So you don’t have to ditch competition. You could start by designing it better, and avoiding its negatives. You could:

• Make the competition intra-group instead of individual
• Reset the clock often so people never feel like they’re too far behind
• Have many metrics; somebody may be down on sales, but up on feedback scores
• Have metrics designed to give everyone something to aim for, e.g. biggest improvement
• Base leaderboards on levels instead of score, with careful structure to smooth progression up the levels, particularly early on
• Frame the whole thing well and put the ‘play’ into it; think about how you present its seriousness and its place in the workplace
• Pay attention to how people engage, and continuously improve the system to engage those who don’t buy in at first
• Make sure there’s no clash between the game and the work, or between the game and real-life concerns like pay and benefits
• Look beyond the competitive drivers and incorporate some from the other two columns

Bringing Collaboration into Play

And in particular, you could try to up the amount of collaboration you’re including in your design. You could:

• Measure and reward things that need and develop collaboration, like team projects, helping others, training and knowledge-sharing, and collaboration on new ventures
• Incorporate some kind of mentorship or buddying
• Give people opportunities to team up and achieve things together
• Let people give each other awards or structured positive feedback of some kind
• Measure against an average instead of absolutely, or against external organisations
• Allow the players to adapt or input to the design of the system or game over time
• Include qualitative feedback as well as quantitative
• Drop or downplay the idea that there have to be winners, that there is a ‘win’ state that can only be achieved by some
• Keep in mind the whole time how people are or aren’t enjoying it as a team

Even one or two of these could nudge your engagement levels and impacts in the right direction. Defaults, though, stay defaults a lot longer than they should. It takes proactive action to change things for the better. Why not start now?

1. Review competition-focused play in your organisation, and remove or change elements that drive it towards negative impacts
2. Assess which drivers your organisation taps into with games and playful systems and adapt them to tap into non-competitive drivers, particularly collaboration
3. Look for opportunities to create new play, games and systems in your organisation using the ideas in this article

The post The Dangers of Competition in Workplace Games first appeared on Ludogogy.

Ever since the industrial revolution, ‘work’ has always been separate from ‘play’, as efficiency and rationalisation increased with the times. However, within the turn of the century, the implementation of playful work environments continues to evolve the working practices in modern organisations to encourage the creation of creative and innovative ideas.

Some of the major corporations such as Disney, Google and Apple were not born from sophisticated business plans but rather on the value of playful innovations. Google themselves once encouraged their employees to utilise 20% of their time to explore and play with new ideas.

The ever-changing field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is no stranger to playfulness with concepts such as, ‘computational humour’, ‘ludic design’, ‘ambiguity’ and ‘provocative and curious interactions’. All of these concepts revolve around creating systems that explore unique and playful HCI experiences that are not limited to games or entertainment programs, allowing the user to express themselves in a way that suits their own creative needs.

The major factors that come into determining the effectiveness of a workspace allowing employees to implement playful practises include:

• Space and Place; This is achieved by simply having recreational areas such as meeting and breakrooms or having ample space within currently existing workspaces to allow employees to diversify their workflow with playful activities such as meeting up at a colleague’s desk or utilising a wall or door to display sticky notes or announcements.
• Social Aspects; These can be achieved by allowing playful activities to be carried out by employees within two distinct social interaction patterns: ‘Synchronous’, where employees interact with each other and objects within their surroundings directly, such as meeting for lunch within a canteen. Conversely ‘Asynchronous’ patterns, where employees interact with one another indirectly by means of displaying information such as recent events or announcements on a message board or as a notice on the door of a shared workspace such as the break room.
• Interpersonal Aspects; As the name implies, these aspects are vital for providing structure and opportunities for the playful practises of employees, allowing them to interact with one another both in and out of work. One example of something that can allow interpersonal interactions could be an announcement board that displays things such as recent achievements accomplished by staff members, announcing upcoming events and sharing personal experiences such as marriages or recent births.
• Instrumental Aspects; These aspects are similar to interpersonal aspects except they are more focused on injecting playful means of carrying out work-related activities, such as time-management, appointment making, networking and making official announcements. Examples of this could include utilising sticky notes to display temporary absences on an employee’s office door or having a creative member of staff create a more visually pleasing poster outlining work activities on a notice board.

Most of the aforementioned aspects of playfulness can be fulfilled by modern organisations in a multitude of ways that don’t have to break the bank. Only asking that the employers give their staff the opportunity to break the mould of the conventional workspace in a way that allows their creativity and playfulness to strive in ways that enhance their work for both them and their colleagues.

Main reference https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220956245_Organizational_probes_Exploring_playful_interactions_in_work_environment

The post Simple Ways of Making Work Playful first appeared on Ludogogy.

I didn’t start out making games. But I quickly recognized that play was the active ingredient in fostering workplace creativity, learning and change.

The first time I used play to solve a business problem, The Denver Post wrote a story about it and my boss tried to fire me for upstaging her. That’s how I knew I had something of value.  The next time I used play to solve a business problem, I created a P&L game for my retail managers. We broke sales and profitability records, and my boss took credit for making the game. Yup, I definitely had something of value.

A friend suggested I ‘take my little treasures’ and go make games and playful experiences to help other people solve their business problems. Be my own boss. Soon, I was watching hundreds of drugstore managers so deeply engaged in playing their performance improvement game (The Bottom Line Game), they didn’t want to leave for lunch. Later, the CEO pointed me out in the back of the room and said, “I have never seen people rush back from lunch to play a learning game. Bravo!”

This is when I started making games.

For decades now, I’ve worked alongside creative colleagues and clients to design games and playful experiences that help people work and learn together in new ways to solve all kinds of business problems in all kinds of industries. Serious problems that can keep people and businesses from growing, like innovating drug development, leading organizational change, business acumen, advancing selling skills, expanding product lines, executing strategy, learning to learn, changing culture, retaining talent, increasing revenues, creative product development, mastering skills. To name a few.

My games (board games) and experiences (live, interactive) are largely custom-made for each client. I never make the same game or solve the same problem twice so I can keep learning, too. What is the same about every game and experience are these signature principles:

• Co-created with clients
• Self-facilitated by participants
• Collaborative and competitive
• Gameplay requires new behaviors
• Game named for higher purpose
• Engaging visual design

Recently, I wondered if my thirty years of game making – so far – held any lessons worth sharing with a wider audience of makers and users. I asked my nephew Ryan Baechler for his insight and he responded like he’d been thinking about it all his life. “Sue, when people play your games, the play is the work. To play, score and win is to learn, do, and change. That’s what makes your games so valuable and unique.”

The play is the work. Everyone should have a nephew like Ryan, who also happens to be a creative publishing and product development executive. I took this as a ‘yes’, so here are a few lessons in hopes that more people will make and use games and playful experiences to foster creativity, learning and change.

Lesson 1. It’s play that helps us do serious things better

I wish I’d said this, but it was Jake Orlowitz, Wikipedia founder. Here’s his whole thought:

“It’s play that makes people unafraid to fail and confident to try new things. It’s play that helps us do serious things better because we enjoy them and feel a sense of joy in our achievements.”

All the games and experiences I’ve made help people do serious things better. It’s where the conversation starts with business leaders. What do people need to learn and do to stay competitive? What do people have to know, feel and do to change behavior? What are they doing now? What’s in the way of change happening? Who needs to work together to make these changes/improvements? What does a successful outcome look like?

Once I know what the leaders think has to happen for the game experience to be productive, I go to the people whose behavior has to change. The game participants. I ask them the same questions so I know how to acknowledge what they already know and do, and fully engage them in the experience. Then, I design the game for the participants, knowing the leaders will get what they want.

For example, a biotech company was competing for top talent and competitive advantage. Specifically, their drug developers needed to work more creatively and collaboratively so that new drugs could be discovered and delivered to patients faster and better. Nothing is more serious than that. When I questioned leaders and participants, they all embraced the business goals and behavior change. They wanted a game experience that engaged them in the whole system of drug development (not just their function or role) so they could better understand how they could be more creative and influential. They wanted to try out new behaviors in the game, see the impact on patients, collaborate outside their silos and make real progress together to accelerate behavior change. We named the game Ring That Bell after the symbolic ‘bell ringing’ at the FDA when a new drug is approved. The ultimate ‘win’ for all drug developers.

Lesson 2. Games are transforming the way people work and learn

Transformation is change. And, it’s what the best games do best. Behavior change during and beyond game play is what I strive to achieve with every new game and playful experience.  Jesse Schell, owner of Schell Games and Carnegie Mellon University professor called out this higher purpose of games in his book The Art of Game Design, saying that “games are on the verge of transforming the way people work and learn in the same ways they already change consumer behavior.” Game designer Sabrina Culyba wrote The Transformational Framework, based on her work at Schell Games to help game developers intentionally focus on the player’s behavior beyond the game, not just inside the game world.

Those of us who make games that are intended to change behavior, know that all games are not the same. Will it be like Monopoly? the hotel executive asked me as we discussed how we would empower guest services people in a new game. We imagine it working like Oregon Trail, the scientists told me as we talked through how people would learn new ways to work together. In my experience, the best games and playful experiences are co-created with client teams who start with what they know and like about consumer games they’ve played, and leap to a whole new level of expectations as they realize the transforming potential of games and play.

In another example of taking leaps to transform how people work and learn together, a client team told me how they needed a new way to teach their 450 consultants how to sell services and grow revenues during their annual 48-hour sales meeting. Their mantra was ‘bigger, farther and faster’. I asked, “What if you brought your clients and consultants together in a live, interactive learning experience to discover more potent ways to accelerate growth? Everyone could learn, do and change together in real time. And, what if the clients paid for the experience?” It was a bold idea, yes, but well within the transforming power of gameplay. We invented the large game-like experience, named it BiFF (Bigger, Farther, Faster).

Not everyone on the client team was convinced up front that a playful, fun, game-like experience could change how consultants sell and increase revenues. In fact, some did not participate much in the planning and execution, just in case it was a failure. As my journalist friend and performance strategist Joe Robinson says with a wink “Grownups have responsibilities — problems — for crying out loud. They can’t have fun while learning.” But, when the CEO’s of six client companies stood up at the end of the event to describe how they’d been ‘BiFFed’ – one even declaring out loud he would re-engage the consultancy – everyone took credit for the success. They even deemed BiFF a ‘powerful competitive advantage’ and turned it into a continuing education program — for crying out loud.

Lesson 3. Why those who play, win.

How do you know the game is going to work? 

Not everyone likes playing games.

Games don’t seem serious enough for adult learning.

We don’t play games in our company.

When you say games, do you mean like Jeopardy? Or ice breaker exercises?

I still hear resistance like this when the topic of games for learning and change comes up. And, it can be a good place to start a conversation about why those who play, win. But, it’s more and more likely now that I hear:

We’re excited about using a gaming approach.

We sketched out a game idea and want you to help us make it.

A game would get more creative results than what we’re doing now.

Teach us how to make a game while we’re co-creating the game.

In an article I contributed to a few years ago for People and Strategy Magazine, about how games improve performance and results, my game maker and learning mentor Dr. Michael Carter explained why those who play, win.“In some cases, a game’s critical ingredient is simply the suspension of disbelief: Players enter an environment that prompts them to make choices, solve puzzles and generate original solutions. The value-add to a real situation is the license to fail, the no-fault nature of gameplay — it’s great to win but not really fatal to make a mistake, which, after all, is one of the best ways to learn something so you’ll never forget it.

In other cases, the special sauce is the teamwork, where players learn to gauge each others’ value to the effort and judge whom best to rely on at critical junctures.

In all cases, a game is about play, learning and trying to excel. As such, it draws as deeply as possible from those who engage.”

The play is the work. To play, score and win is to learn, do, and change.

Games aren’t magic. But they are compelling. As game co-creator, friend and creativity expert Dr. Steven Kowalski points out: “No wonder business professionals are leveraging gaming design principles and mechanics in everything from executive development to performance management and goal setting, to even the budgeting process. Gaming technologies rely on the small wins — and often sudden leaps — in achievement and skill.”

As you game makers and players know, it takes a thoughtful design and a genuine enthusiasm for people to create game frameworks that trust players’ emotions, creativity and motivations to work, learn and change together to achieve a goal. In front of each other. In a work setting.

But, when the play is the work, it works.

The post The Play is the Work      first appeared on Ludogogy.