The first year Narratology for Games module has, as many long standing and ever-evolving programmes do, had an interesting history of being split, merged, moved around and eventually settled into its slot as a popular optional choice in the raft of first year choices. It’s also a work horse of a module combining analysis, friendship forging, narrative theory, academic writing and in recent years TWINE game construction. Our students come from a wide range of backgrounds, and prior experiences so there’s no suggestion of any pre-built in knowledge in any of the spheres the modules encompasses so we start from scratch, and in this modules case we start with dice.

Tabletop RPGs are cool now, they didn’t use to be (apart from on our campus which is the only university I know of where the roleplaying society is bigger then the rugby society) but the wealth of celebrity players that have emerged in recent years, hits like Critical Role and a general acceptance of, specifically, Dungeons and Dragons in popular culture means we have a lot of students who are eager to play a TRPG but haven’t met anyone else to play with, or who knows the ropes. While the lectures in the first semester look at introducing the history of narrative games, Interactive Fiction examples and experiments, live readings of Choose Your Own Adventure Books, Group play of Zork, narrative theory, game break downs etc the practical assignment in the first semester is simple. In your Groups (which in this case the system has arranged for you), pick a GM, pick a TRPG, plan, play and finish a campaign over a handful of weeks. Keep a play journal paying special attention to any world building that happens, characters arcs that emerge or narrative tropes that you identify.

The second part is a little trickier – analyse the play that happened and your role in it and tie it back to any of the narrative theory that we’ve covered in class. This does lead naturally to a lot of Freytag Pyramids and Heroes journey circle diagrams but it’s often the first time the students have considered in any great detail how narrative can be influenced by players, or how hard managing the expectations of players can be. Dipping their toes into auto-ethnographic analysis works well too to remind them they are starting on an academic path where we’ll encourage them to stop considering themselves just to be players of games – but designers and producers of them too.

Once Upon a Dice Roll

We hammer this home a little in the second semester with more applied narratology and the creation of TWINE (Klimas, 2009) narrative games – the students are given 12 weeks to design, produce, playtest and reflect on a game they’ve made. The complexity of the game is entirely up to them and much of the assessment focuses on their participation of documenting their games production and how they have interacted with the iterative design process laid out for them. The only constraint on the game is it must relate back to the random selection of story dice assigned to them – the dice rolls look like this.

These dice, pre rolled for convenience, are derived from the authors vast (and growing) collection of Story Cubes (O’Connor, 2004). The students are allowed to take them however they wish, and drop one if they want to, as long as they explain why they’ve dropped it in their production notes – but traces of the narrative aspects of these dice must be evident in the final version of the game submitted.

Alongside the creation of their own games, sometimes this is the first time the students have made a game solo, we also ask them to analyse the narrative of a game from the last 5 years – bringing that back to the narrative theory we introduced in the first semester, and expand on in the second. We also ask them to display much of this analysis in the form of flow diagrams – this again to help them consider how they communicate their ideas to teams so specific aspects aren’t lost in walls of texts. Hopefully, this is a skill they bring into play later on when they form part of collaborative groups into produce games and they need to communicate ideas to them.

This is How We Roll

As with so many long standing modules in university programmes we’ve had time to refine and see the effects of this module as the students progress through awards. Some TRPG groups thrown together by the computer in the first semester are still playing when they graduate 3 years later, and you can see the benefit of having a support network of likeminded individuals in place from the first week. Students come out of the module being able to call themselves ‘games designers’ for the first time – and often TWINE games turn up in Games Jams and projects going forward. Most of all this module with the analysis and the application of narrative and narrative theory dispels the idea that there is a role for the ‘ideas person’ who won’t need to understand engines, or code, or consider how their narrative effects the production of a game or the people that will play it.

The post Once Upon a Dice Roll first appeared on Ludogogy.

Most games don’t pretend to be real. As a player you sit around a table holding cards or moving pieces, or stare at a screen mashing buttons on an oddly shaped controller – actions that are different from what’s going on in the game narrative. If the game represents reality at all, it’s some remarkably small subset of reality, and there are layers of abstraction between you and that sliver of a world. Playing Settlers of Catan could never be confused with the actual experience of colonizing an island.

And yet: many games do carry a layer of verisimilitude. Even chess, a game in which the abstraction layers are about half a mile thick, can echo the emotional struggles of waging war. A person playing (losing) at chess can still feel emotions about it (crushing pain) half a century later – a ludic echo of PTSD? (Don’t ask me how I know this.)

So a game about X is barely like the real X, nevertheless it can still be evocative of the experience of real X in meaningful ways. That’s the allure of serious games. But what if playing a game about X was actually a lot like living the real X? And still be a game, not a simulation? Come closer, children, and let me tell you a story or two…

Unavatared play and liminal identities

Most games feature avatars – the representation of the player in the world of the game. You are a meeple on a gameboard or a sprite on a screen. As game abstractions go, this avatar is probably the most profound one, because it’s messing with your identity. You might be the most fiscally responsible person in the world, but in Monopoly, if your token lands on my hotel on Park Place, you will bankrupt yourself. A game avatar inevitably signifies that some aspects of your personal identity are not relevant; this is problematic.

Many games use this identity shift as a feature. You are not a robber baroness or a fey elf, but you get to play one in Catan or Dungeons & Dragons. This is role-playing in games. Note that role-playing doesn’t eliminate problematic aspects of avatared play, it just normalizes them.

To me, role-playing gets interesting as it gets less avatared – when it encourages you the player to inhabit not a foreign identity but a liminal one, one that maps to your actual self. So, for example, you play a character that’s a lot like you except less afraid to take chances. Or you take on the worldview and goals of a real-life opponent of yours, to walk an uneasy mile in their moccasins.

But, you say. It says “alternate reality games” in the title of this article and we’re half a dozen paragraphs in and you haven’t got to even mentioning them yet? Ah, good point. I did promise you a story or two. Here we go:

Collaboratively creating the Global Oil Crisis of 2007

Once upon a time, in early 2007, a motley group of U.S. citizens had an inkling that a global oil crisis was looming. As you do. There was no Facebook/Twitter/Insta back then, so to prepare for the crisis they set up their own citizen nerve center at worldwithoutoil.org and spread word about it “just in case.” So, when the crisis did begin on 30 April that year, they were ready to receive the citizen reports about the crisis that began to flood in from across the U.S. and around the globe. As hundreds then thousands then tens of thousands of people began to interact with the site, a unique massively multithreaded narrative of the crisis began to emerge. Reviewer Nina K. Simon described it:

“It is a far cry from the “calculate your carbon footprint” or other casual games about resource usage. It required much higher engagement than reading news articles on the topic; [World Without Oil] was a huge growing, twisting network of news, strategy, activism, and personal expression.”

World Without Oil was an alternate reality game, or ARG. The motley group of citizens were characters played online by gamerunners, and worldwithoutoil.org was the portal to the alternate reality of the (entirely fictional) oil crisis. The people engaging in the game played along with the fiction, telling how the crisis would be affecting them as though it were really happening. And, you’ll notice, it was unavatared play. The game didn’t ask you the player to change; it changes your world instead. Whatever defines you – your wit, your art, your feels, your imagination – you could bring to the game. And this openness enriched the game’s massively multithreaded narrative. The players’ collective story arc, which initially was full of individual stories of disruption and chaos, pivoted to shared practical ideas for adaptation and resilience.

World Without Oil showed that an alternate reality-style game about X can be very much like the real X, and thus more verisimilitudinous and meaningful to its players. An authentic fiction, if you will. Player OrganizedChaos explained the game experience succinctly:

“It was real to me.”

Games reaching out into your life

Every game has a “platform” – the magic circle in which it appears. Football has the football field, chess has its board, and so on. In storytelling games the physical platform can disappear entirely: the game is taking place entirely in the shared imaginations of the storytellers. In alternate reality games such as World Without Oil, the entire world is the platform. Thanks to the Internet, anything can be in the magic circle: players transport the fictional oil crisis to their back-yard garden in Toronto, gas station in Atlanta, residential street in Marseilles, and so on.

World Without Oil, then, had “pull” immersion – once the game idea was in your head, you the player could freely pull signals of the game story from the real world around you. Alternate reality games rise to next-level immersion if the gamerunners can add “push immersion” – if they can arrange for the game fiction to manifest itself in the real world. A classic example: the calls to phone booths in the I Love Bees ARG (2004). In the fiction of that game, a damaged Artificial Intelligence from the future had crash-landed to Earth and, in trying to figure out what had happened to it, was ringing public pay phones (a few still existed then). So that game, which could otherwise seem esoteric and virtual, elegantly pushed itself into the real world to make the experience more immersive for its players.

FutureCoast (2014), an alternate reality game about climate-changed futures, also featured pull immersion. In the fiction of that game, the Internet of the future had developed a file leak. The gamerunners created physical representations of these bits of leaked data – crystalline artifacts – and cached them in public spaces for players to find. When a player successfully recovered a “chronofact,” they (and everyone) were rewarded by a new glimpse of the future… a chunk of leaked data…

…which, as it turns out, was a voicemail. The leak was in the voicemail system of the future. Which may seem, um, underwhelming? Maybe. But here’s the transcript of one:

“Hi, honey. It’s Mom, I was just thinking about your visit and about when we talked about how hard your pregnancy is, and how you’re scared of bringing a new person into this world when everything feels so uncertain. Yeah I told you when we talked I felt exactly like you when I was pregnant with you, so, I’m pretty sure every mom felt that way and you’re definitely not alone. -But honey I think that you might wanna move somewhere with a better water supply and farmable land nearby. You know we definitely got it up here and I would love to help you take care of that baby. So, you know, why don’t you guys talk about it. I know that you guys have your jobs and your friends and everything in Southern California but it might be time to think about moving somewhere that’s gonna be a little safer and easier while you’re bringing up that baby. Ok sweetie I love you thanks for those pictures and call me after you’ve had your next check up. Bye-bye.”

The chronofacts were a “rabbit hole” that helped bring people to imagining, and ultimately creating, visions of possible futures. People would listen to one, then another, then another, of the messages that people will be leaving for each other in the years 2033, 2041, and so on. Ultimately the listeners discover that the voicemails they are hearing were created by people just like themselves. There was a 800 number to call, so they could contribute their own voicemail leaked from the future.

As did World Without Oil, the FutureCoast ARG seeded a fiction that was then grown into something big by its players. By the time the project ended, it had amassed over 500 voicemails, more than you could listen to in a day. Collectively the voicemails built up a guidebook to climate-changed futures that supplies all the texture and context that I find lacking in statistical projections. FutureCoast was an engagement engine for storytelling – a way to encourage people to think about the future and participate in its shaping.

That time you rage-quit high school

Earlier I said that ARGs don’t require you to change your identity (as role-playing games do), and that’s true. But at the same time, ARGs don’t require you to keep your identity. As a player, you can slide easily into a liminal identity (one adjacent to your current concept of self), and players often do.

In 2012 an ARG called Ed Zed Omega explored the values and shortcomings of American education, especially in high school. It did so by embodying a common liminal identity for American young people: the escapee. In Ed Zed Omega, in live events and on the internet, seven young actors played the version of themselves that actually did act on their dissatisfactions with school and walked out. In real life, when a young person leaves school, it happens quietly; in Ed Zed Omega, the students dropped out loud.

Once again we find an ARG that seeded a fiction that players grew into a unique narrative about U.S. education today. The provocative, transgressive characters created a space for voices not normally heard in debates about what we teach and how and why. The Zed Omegas encouraged unavatared play and, when they appeared live, were a landmark example of the power of push immersion in narrative-making play.

Authored and unauthored narratives  

I don’t know why we enjoy authored narratives so much. Maybe because they’re characterized by the things – plot, arc, characters, an ending – that we don’t have in the stories we tell about our real lives. These days, when I sit down with a friend (on Zoom, alas) and we catch each other up on our lives, the stories often sound like just one damn thing after another.

When it comes to stories that help us make sense of our lives, I find that authored narratives fall short. The author is going to bend messy reality to advance the plot and pace the action and give us the sense of an ending, and that’s not what we need. We need to hear all those voices spinning out all those multiple threads of possibility, in huge growing twisting networks of news, strategy, activism, and personal expression.

I wish I could point you now to Thirteen Patient Zeros, an ARG in 2017 about a global pandemic. But to be clear, I can’t. We didn’t run one. We didn’t have thousands of people globally imagining what they would do if an infectious disease with asymptomatic transmission was starting to spread across the globe. I wish also I could point you to Whose Streets?, an ARG in 2019 about the rise of fascism and paramilitary threats to U.S. democracy. To be clear, I can’t do that either, because no one ran one. We didn’t play these things first, and now we must live them.

The post ‘Play it before you live it’ first appeared on Ludogogy.

That’s why I developed an exciting storytelling board game, Every Generation Game: Windrush Edition, to help families, friends and communities share their heritage, history, identity and culture through the telling of stories. Now I’d like to share my story about how the game came into existence and how it is being used. So, make yourself comfortable and I’ll begin…

The Beginnings

I have had a long-standing interest in researching my own family history from Wolverhampton, Jamaica and Senegal using historical records and DNA testing. I have also spent much time as a mentor to young people in Brent and Hackney. I realised that the young people, mainly boys, that I supported were disconnected with learning, their families and the wider the issue of identity and belonging.

This encouraged me to share and promote family history and intergenerational dialogue for the African and Caribbean community and in 2002 I established my website Every Generation to help me spread the message.

I then began to run workshops to engage the community around family history and reminiscing. I worked in partnership with National Archives, local museums and community organisations in promoting awareness of family history and over the past 17 years I have delivered over 200 public events plus various articles and blogs.

In the background I also had a passion for collecting ephemera especially picture postcards covering different parts of the world from 1870s to modern times and I’ve built a large personal collection of cards.

All of these things simmered away until I realised that a board game would be a great way to get people around a table talking to each other and my card collection could provide the visual prompts they need to begin a story.

I didn’t really know how to develop a ‘proper’ board game and spent lots of time tinkering with paper, scissors and glue. I then did some basic prototype work with Universal Board Games in Hackney. Then, by happy accident, I met Melvin Bell and Andy Yeoman of Focus Games Ltd at an NHS conference and I discovered that they have developed over 60 educational board games since 2004.

I described my ideas for the game to them and they happily agreed to work with me to develop and commercialise a new version of the game. After two years redesigning, formulating and testing Every Generation Game: Windrush Edition was launched in time for the 70th anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush.

It is now almost a year since we launched the game and while it’s still early days the feedback we’ve had from celebrities, public, schoolteachers, museums and heritage organisations has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic and positive.

I hope the game will contribute to greater learning and understanding for everyone as fun and engaging to our shared family history of the past, present and future.

How does the game work?

The Windrush Game is a fun and inspiring activity for school or community events celebrating Windrush Day, or a games night at home with family and friends. Picture and timeline cards detailing key moments in recent UK history are used to spark storytelling, with players sharing stories of their own experiences, or using their imagination to create exciting stories inspired by the people and events depicted.

The game encourages players to recall family history, historical events and memories, in order to:

• Tell stories
• Get to know each other
• Reminisce
• Share memories and experiences
• Learn about history and family history
• Create new stories and life experiences
• Have fun!

Using photos to stimulate stories means the game can be played by people who speak different languages, are different ages and identify with different cultures. Players are encouraged to add their own photos to the game, to spark memories and stories about their own family members, friends and experiences.

Where is the game being used?

We always intended for the game to be used by lots of different people in lots of different situations and not just for family get-togethers:

• Team building and social networking The game enables people who do not know each other well to learn a little more about each other. By listening to the experiences of others, it offers a non-invasive way to talk about your own memories and learn about other people’s.
• Older people in care settings The photos and structure of the game give an opportunity for older people to reminisce and recall memories. You can introduce personal photos into the game and develop personal timelines as part of a reminiscing experience.
• People with mental health problems or learning disabilities Social care staff can play this game with service users as a social activity and an opportunity to get to know each other. It could also be played by groups of service users, facilitated by staff.
• Schools, Youth Clubs and Looked after Children The game can be used as educational resource, to inspire creativity, learning and research around the historical facts provided on the timelines. Photos and timelines can also be used as stimulus for creative writing tasks after playing the game.

The game allows all ages to play together, as everyone has the freedom to be creative and tell their own stories. It helps spark an interest in family history – you can add in your own family photos to help personalise the game

As we remember the recent national Windrush Day I hope the game will contribute to greater learning and understanding for everyone as a fun and engaging way to share our history of the past, present and future.

The post Celebrating Windrush Day with The Windrush Game first appeared on Ludogogy.

I was trying to think of a unique way to propose to my now fiancé. I’d spoken to several friends and family about their proposal stories and there was a recurring theme, a lavish holiday; an overpriced restaurant dinner, these things were nice, and memorable for sure, but I couldn’t help but feel that the bride-to-be could see it coming.

Every Christmas and birthday, I tried my absolute hardest to surprise my then girlfriend with something that I knew she really wanted, but had seemingly forgotten about, a tour of a famous film studio; an overpriced kitchen mixer; a French bulldog, but every time, she saw through my plan and knew what was coming. And an off-the-cuff trip to the small Italian village where she grew up would be no different. However, what if I planted seeds that eluded to an Italian proposal, all the while secretly working on the real surprise behind the scenes?

The real surprise was still a secret even to me. So, being a child of the millennial age, I sought advice from the internet. As you can imagine, there is no end to the number of unorthodox proposals that went viral, normally involving a dramatic public display or recruiting the help of many unknown strangers, the very thought of such a proposal gave me anxiety. However, there was one proposal unlike any other, a man recruiting the help of his friend who worked as a graphic designer to design and create a personalised board game. Instantly this felt right and my mind exploded with ideas.

My fiancé is Polish, so we celebrate Wigilia, which occurs on the 24^th of December. I made the decision to propose on this day, which gave me exactly two months to design a personalised board game and have it made, not counting things such as delivery, playtesting; multiple drafts; even learning basic game design!

Now I’m somewhat creative, play a lot of board games, and had a ton of ideas coming to me, but I’m still a long way off from being a game designer. So, with the clock ticking, I completed a few online courses on game design, and embarked on my journey to design a board game.

At the time, I was playing a lot of resource gathering games and figured it would be a relatively simple theme to customise. I started by putting everything that would make the game personal into a spreadsheet, places we’ve been; things we’ve done; in jokes; TV shows; films; songs; future plans, and gave them each a positive and negative effect on resources, the resources being happiness, food, energy and money. The original (admittedly very primitive) concept contained three decks of cards, those that affected my player, those that affected my girlfriend, and ‘communal’ cards, which could be drawn by either of us and would affect whoever drew them. I want to go for a steak? Plus food, minus money. Kamila wants to go out to dinner? Plus happiness, minus money.

The first draft had us each starting in different areas of the board, with the aim being for us to meet up, become one unit and achieve certain things such as our first house, first car, first pets, which would mirror our real-life journey together. After a couple of playtests, the issues were clearly evident and numerous, turns were boring and repetitive; cards drawn didn’t always make sense before the players pair up; some resources ran out very quickly while others were in abundance, but that’s the point of playtesting!

I recorded the many issues in a Kanban board and tackled them one at a time, as this was a resource gathering game, my main priority was to fix resource balancing. I did a complete overhaul of all cards that affected resources, making sure they were more balanced e.g. ensuring that there weren’t 20 cards that provided more happiness and only 2 that removed happiness. Another change I wanted to make was to remove as much of the chance element as possible, leading to a more strategic game. At this point, the dice not only determined player movement but also accomplishing challenges which were integral to completing the game e.g. either myself or my girlfriend needed to obtain our first dog Opie by way of completing a challenge based on the roll of a dice. This was a lazy and boring mechanic that had to go. Around this time, I was playing a few board games that incorporated a mechanic whereby a player would have a winning stipulation unknown to the other players, a secret objective. This inspired me to alter a few of the personal references in my game and turn them into quests to be completed by myself and my girlfriend, as well as each player having a secret quest. This ended up making the most important part of the entire game as my secret quest was to propose to my girlfriend, an objective that was not built into the game, meaning that not only could I not win, but it also provided me with a way to organically pop the question after the game was over.

Now that the dice challenges were out of the game, I could work on removing the dice from the game entirely, I just needed a new movement mechanic, thankfully there are hundreds to choose from. The board at this point only had 7 locations, which were painstakingly narrowed down to from an original list of 17. I decided to go for a familiar aspect whereby each location is a tile and the board is assembled by 9 tiles, chosen randomly at the start of the game. Each tile has its own positive and negative impacts to resources, similar to the cards, and players move from tile to tile each turn, exploiting the resources on each tile. This way I could include all 17 locations and do away with those pesky dice!

As well as some other changes made, the game had been completely reimagined from the initial idea. Each player would now start and end their game separate from the other player i.e. they would not meet up and become one unit. However, I did still want a co-operative element. I achieved this by borrowing from another personal favourite from my board game collection whereby there is a common enemy that occasionally the players must join forces with one another in order to defeat. In our case the common enemy would be our first dog Opie. Opie would have his own track ranging from 2 to 24. Throughout the game, cards would be drawn that advance Opie along his track, when he reaches 24 or if a card is drawn stating “FEED OPIE IMMEDIATELY!”, the players must pool their food resources to meet the required number on Opie’s track. Depending on whether they succeed or fail, an Opie card is drawn providing either a reward or a forfeit for both players.

I also incorporated a series of Dilemma cards which referenced challenging times in our lives where the player would have to choose one of two options on how to resolve, either way it would benefit one player and negatively impact the other. The final piece of the puzzle was to organise the ever-growing plethora of cards into categories that would benefit the flow of the game. There were Buffs that could be traded between players and played to positively and negatively affect resources, Locations that allowed players to fast travel to non-parallel location tiles, Events that needed to be resolved immediately such as feeding Opie or resolving a Dilemma, and Artifacts which were either cards a player would need to complete a quest e.g. buy first car, or black forest cards (our favourite cake) which a player could save up and trade in 5 at a time to obtain an additional black forest token, which had become the way to track how many actions a player can make each round.

On the 24^th of December 2018 myself and my girlfriend traded one Christmas present as was our tradition. The gift I gave was this game. Just by looking through the contents of the box my girlfriend was already in tears, and she didn’t even know the best bit! As planned, my girlfriend won the game and was already ecstatic. I said “Well done, I only had one quest left to complete…” I passed her the card that read “Propose to Kamila” while I pulled the ring box from my pocket, she looked up, saw the ring and burst into tears, as did I. Best present ever.

The post Happy Ever After first appeared on Ludogogy.

Archetypes are a symbolic language of the universe and provide a roadmap to help us read life. This language (or syntax) is embedded within our psyches. By accessing and decoding these patterns we can translate the universal to the personal, the collective to the individual, and in this sense, archetypes assist us in making what’s invisible, visible.

Concepts about such patterns do not belong solely to esoteric discourse. When we walk the city streets the semi-conscious survival mechanism in each of us is always questioning the invisible threads of power to which another individual is connected. We’re always sensing the archetypal patterns, individuated within people and societies, whether we’re aware of it or not.

The Influence of Symbols

It is not commonly recognized that among the many significant shapers of cultural forces is the archetypal realm. These archetypal energetic companions live through us in the physical world by influencing the formation of our rituals, symbols, emotions, behaviors, imagination, perception, ideas and choices. Archetypes are crucial to understand in futures studies, as we move from linear consciousness to embracing a spherical and holographic awareness, for the sense-making and meaning-making capabilities they provide.

In themselves, archetypes are essentially neutral, while comprised of both light and shadow characteristics. This means that their agendas, power dynamics, and motivations can be as beneficial as they are destructive. For instance, if we don’t make contact with, and integrate the shadow (the disowned, disassociated fragments of a pattern), we will meet this largely unconscious element as a projection, a distorted vision.

When archetypes live in us unconsciously, they have a degree of psychic energy that’s largely unavailable to us. This energy can animate on its own accord. To reclaim this dispossessed energy, we must recognize, transform and then integrate it back into our healthy selves, analogous to how the grit in an oyster makes a pearl.

How Archetypes Reveal Us

Now it is not to say that these universal patterns and experiences wholly define us. Rather, they reveal us. Archetypes enable us to access deeper levels of insight, wisdom and creativity that exist beyond the limits of the rational, linear mind (as necessary as this mind is). We increase our consciousness through awareness of the archetypal realm because it gives us co-ordinates of otherwise unconscious data, which we may feel, identify and language in physical space and time.

In January I spoke at the Verslo žinios conference in Vilnius, Lithuania about what I felt would be the four influential archetypes for 2020: Hermit, Healer, Trickster, Liberator. We’re currently experiencing these patterns in their shadow forms: externally imposed isolation; disruptive/destructive health issues; chaos/fake news; tyranny. To be honest, at the beginning of the year, I personally perceived the expression of these patterns rather differently.

Some Archetypes

I was considering the Hermit more in regards to the power of introverts and how hermitage can be by choice or force, but that nevertheless, we all must encounter stillness. Endless thoughts plague most people – hermits develop the capacity to leave the container of the mind somewhat empty so that they can develop a compassionate curiosity concerning society and culture. I then thought that the presence of this archetype was hinting not at getting away from the stress of modern-day life and becoming a defensive recluse that wants nothing to do with others, or focusing on focus instead of practicing continuous partial attention, but honestly assessing our deeper relationship to silence.

With the Healer, I was contemplating how we could bear the pain of others in an honorable spirit and the role of tenderness, kindness, and compassion, both on and offline. When there’s a lack of reverence for a holistic perspective, what are the community and civic interactions that can provide social nourishment and an altruism that extends beyond one’s immediate sense of self and present time frame? The true mark of a Healer is the ability to create, catalyze and channel lasting, beneficial change, while the shadow Healer preaches (and doesn’t listen) to clients and is more interested in their own ego inflation than actually imparting authentic healing. I was also simultaneously reflecting how in the corporate world, diagnoses often feel more like a curse than a cure, and how a more profound and life-affirming hope could be cultivated instead.

The Trickster is often viewed as a duplicitous, mischievous outsider, over-stepping bounds and landing us in situations that are both a blessing and a curse. It asks us to no longer frame experiences as either good or bad, but rather to move from an either/or perspective to embrace both/and. In January I perceived the Trickster as asking us to map our patterns and to tend and befriend our shadows, as the archetype is incredibly dextrous at finding what’s hidden and highlighting our fears. It would break what we no longer wanted and create what we secretly wished for (though were too afraid to actualize), as it chaotically made room for the new.

The Liberator rides the winds of change and promotes messages and actions of light that pierce the dark veils of ignorance that hold us captive and enslaved. Often unconventional and contrarian, the pattern harnesses a courageous and adventurous attitude to dismantle inequality, brutality and redundant, staid, expired systems. I was reflecting on how thinking, feeling and acting beyond the bounds of conventional mores (while meeting the opposing forces that want to keep the status quo) requires an empathetic perspective that honors the sacredness of all things – the earth and all her creatures – together with an increasingly expanding vision of the wider cosmos.

Archetypes are multidimensional and can be read at so many different levels. That’s what makes the study of them so fascinating and concurrently challenging! When we recognize a pattern, instead of ignoring it, or denying its presence, it can become our companion and ally by engaging it consciously. We don’t eradicate a pattern. Rather we transition the pattern alchemically, from its shadow manifestation into its light qualities.

By attuning ourselves to the archetype’s patterning through an internal recalibration, it gives us greater awareness in activating new choices, responses and actions. So how can we today, in March, and onwards throughout the year, work with the light attributes of these four archetypes?

Hermit: Turning inward is necessary for growth (each year has a winter, every project a cocoon stage). Hibernation, solitude, introspection, and reflection – hermitage – are crucial for our expansion. Instead of filling the silent space with trivial busywork (or worry), can we instead endeavor to come into contact with the treasure that only silence can bring?

Healer: Healing is not just about illness. To heal means to make whole, to come into balance. So how can we bring a healing lens to the many aspects of our lives – and collective systems – that require repair? Can we make healing choices? Holistic, interconnected choices that honor our communities, our beloved planet and ourselves.

Trickster: This pattern exposes illusion, unveils our greatest insecurities and teaches us that everything contains its opposite (paradox is its calling card). It can assist us in breaking down conventions and undoing structures, which we no longer want or need. If we can perceive the Trickster as a messenger, what’s the guidance it offers to our previous blindness?

Liberator: Freedom. Hope. Courage. It’s time to question what we are being held hostage to? What keeps us from rising to our potential? Can we liberate ourselves from fear? What inner and outer rebellion is required in this dark hour? Can we embody the ideals of Truth, Beauty, and Justice? The Liberator asks us to free ourselves – and the collective – from all forms of oppression.

As occurs within critical phases of cultural and societal development, we’re presently in a state of transition, a liminal phase. Forces of disintegration and integration occur simultaneously – redundant physical, political-cultural structures crumble, while the earth is also transforming, and the world psyche attempts to merge.

The Richness of Archetypes

Many people often want the world explained in a flat, simple narrative, but it is the subtle yet rich archetypal realm – accessed through attentive, active, engaged contemplation – that can lead one to clarity. When fruitfully engaged, this holographic universe can lead us to find an inner space of poise and heightened perspective, beyond the frequent ensnaring web of social media self-reinforcement with its many flat stereotypes and clichés.

By decoding the patterns in the collective unconscious, and how they’re constellating within each moment of time, we can enhance life’s meaning, rather than dwell within its impoverishments. Then we may encounter a future that many visionaries have claimed is reaching out to meet us, as we synchronously aspire to be informed, and formed, by its emerging potential.

By looking to the collective unconscious for guidance, we can begin to foster a relationship between our two levels of existence, namely the collective, impersonal and often (apparently) abstract archetypal, with the incarnate personal and increasingly individualized expressions of these patterns. What is being asked of us now is to augment beyond the common paradigm of the traditional, linear, rational mind to now include a spherical, heart intelligence – an intelligence that encompasses both earth time, and the visionary Dreamtime intelligence of ancient cultures, through a modern, wakeful consciousness.

Not only in times of crisis but every day, I recommend perceiving events from an archetypal and mythic perspective. To arrive at well-rounded meanings, we can’t enter through logic alone. I feel if we can think mythically and sense archetypally in our futures studies we can better understand our shared humanity, yet honor and appreciate the diverse ways we each live and make meaning. Developing an archetypal eye and working with symbolic and metaphoric narratives can assist us in welcoming uncertainty, navigating uncharted territory and making the unknown our new best friend.

Questions to Ask

What is your relationship like to the unknown? Can you exist in the liminal space? One will always have some trepidation of the unknown, but can we wield the type of creative power, as Odysseus must as ‘Nobody’ on Neptune’s seas in The Odyssey? Can we exist in the space in-between? In transformation, we don’t know who we will be on the other side. When we’re at a crossroads, we’re invited to go into the void of the unknown of our lives, to find comfort in the aloneness, with questions that are often unknowable and unanswerable. Growth has many dark nights of the soul, and evolution very many more.

It is as much about unlearning – an undoing like Penelope in The Odyssey as she awaits news of Odysseus – both weaving and unweaving the stitchings of her needlework. As must we, if we want our world to be symbolically rewoven. When we no longer recognize who we are, nor who we will be, we ‘get’ that we can’t activate the potentiality within us from yesterday – or tomorrow – only from where we are right here, right now, in the living sacred present. All growth occurs most magnanimously in the moment of where one is. Our best teacher is our very own experience if we can be open to its meaning.

For transformation, renewal, and rebirth to occur, it happens at the street level . . . at the imperfect, vulnerable, gritty, messy level of interaction and life. This work isn’t easy – but it is worthwhile – as together we ask inconvenient truths: “What’s conscious? What’s externalized as a projection? What’s in the shadow?” We can only be as competent, and as wise, as the shadow work, we’ve done.

To say we live in an amazing time in human history is an understatement. But by living in alignment with the illumination that the archetypal world bestows (and the insights which reside in the rhythms of nature), we will fixate less on prediction and concern ourselves more with presence. This will enable us to better relax into the future as we learn to make the mysterious and unknown our permanent home. Rather than constantly being consumed with what’s next, we will instead focus on what’s sacred. The honoring of the sacred is what will lead to true intimations of the future.

The post An Archetypal Eye on This Time of Change first appeared on Ludogogy.

But, that only lasted for a couple of weeks till I got exposed to Celtic mythology, then Greek mythology popped after, leading me to Nordic mythology after and the list just goes on with my never-ending fascination for myths & fantasia.

Fantasy are basically stories that predominantly depend on “what couldn’t be”, plus a dash or more of a strangeness element. They are stories that show grand measures of possibilities and extensive lengths a mere human can expand towards.

Yet, isn’t that the nature of all stories?

Quoting Janet Litherland,

“Stories have power. They delight, enchant, touch, teach, recall, inspire, motivate, challenge. They help us understand. They imprint a picture on our minds. Want to make a point or raise an issue? Tell a story”

Throughout my journey with game-based learning for the past 7 years now, I have always been selfishly satisfying my love for fantasia & myth in every game narrative created, because who really wouldn’t want to experience a story with unpredictable possibilities and journeys that can travel far off any of your usual mainstream borders. Stories can transform any traditional learning setting into unique experiences that intrigue learners to delve further, explore & learn.

 According to David Perkins (a professor of Teaching & Learning at Harvard Graduate school of Education) for a learning experience to be effective & objective, we should apply some points within it:

1. Learners must be deeply engaged with the subject matter
2. Learners must undertake intellectual challenges
3. Learners should have a room to take learning risks
4. Learners must face a margin of failure
5. Learners must have the ability to fail & bounce back
6. Learners’ sense of curiosity must be increased

Stories already provide and fuel all the above points when weaved righteously within an educational game’s rich tapestry. Stories are sequences of connected events. Games can tell stories but also stories can be created through players’ interactions with games. Stories are can be told in a plethora of ways. They can be linear, nonlinear, or spatial; they can have a diversity of themes, tone, and objectives.

Nevertheless, Stories are a bit downplayed in game-based learning design, as many designers do associate it more with aesthetics; although stories should be treated as a mother of many different mechanics that make up for a full learning experience:

Narrative – Epic meaning – Identity play – strategy – progression system.

Narrative/Theme:

Is what most games employ as an overarching story of the game. Narratives are extensively used in educational games to engage learners through fantasy and suspense. A narrative can also be built on the principle of progressive disclosure. Rather than try to present a learner with a complex problem, narratives can be used to guide learners through a learning process and gradually let them encounter increased complexity.

Epic Meaning/Calling:

Is the drive that is most associated with the feeling of being the child of destiny in a story. It builds the feeling that your role is one that’s unique & indispensable in the pursuit of a purpose or cause that’s more grand than your individual being, such as saving humanity from an asteroid, or perhaps discovering the long lost art of alchemy. Meaning in the context of a game, can be tackled by giving purpose to the learning being attained; something that, when used, makes for a better sense of one’s imprint – even though it can be completely devoid of materialistic, or extrinsic rewards.

Identity Play:

On the other hand, Identity play (or well-renowned as an “avatar”) drills through motivating a learner through an alternate identity that they assume in the story of the game, which has multitudinous benefits that extend from evoking safety by buffer, and by shielding against personal loss, all the way to letting learners customize their own avatars creating a more immersive experience and a higher score on the ownership measuring stick.

An assumed identity can reach an enormous level of intricacy and complexity because a player’s avatar can assume the damage for them, shielding them away, and reminding them that it is not them being hurt in times of loss.

Strategy:

What is a story without strategy to it? Strategies are the guiding torches of any story’s decision-making process taking learners onto a series of up rises, climaxes and downfalls. Strategies make learners think about what they are doing, why they are doing it and how it might affect the outcomes of the game eventually.

Progression system:

Stories are progress maps for learners. Progression systems are represented in levels/stations/stops to help map a learner’s progress through the intricate system of the game. It is as crucial for learners to see where they can potentially go in the system as to see where they came from. This mechanic can utilize other mechanics such as PBLs (points, badges & leaderboard) as a representation of progress or a qualifier to a new level.

A story is a motherlode of mechanics that are all inter-related. There is no single mechanic that is developed separately from another in a story (if built righteously), since they are all interconnected and any change in one will have an impact on all others.

If, for example, the strategy mechanic was to change in order to offer a complex situation, that would possibly have an impact on the narrative mechanic, as the narrative would change to support the new strategy direction, while game progression system and identity play would also be impacted in order to integrate and highlight the change of narrative/ theme in the game.

In conclusion, games sure do encourage creative behavior and divergent thinking, (Fuszard, 2001) acting as learning triggers allowing learners to  immediately take action, make meaningful decisions and volunteer to invest more and more time in the learning process, but all that wouldn’t happen profoundly without one epically engulfing story intriguing them one step at a time.

The post The Treasure of Atlantis – Story as Game Mechanic first appeared on Ludogogy.

The game is a work in progress. This article deatils the version that you can see at Corrado’s workshop at AgileTour London 2020 in October.

As both these article refer specifically to terms related to Agile methodology, you may find this terminology reference in the Ludogopedia useful.

In this article I want to tell you the story about how DSbuilders evolved from the initial version with particular reference to card design. I think this is helpful to understand how creating a game can be complex like writing a book.

I started working on this game in March 2019, after a couple of PI Planning sessions with a SAFe ARTs (Scaled Agile Framework – Agile Release Train). During those situations I noticed teams were struggling in collaborating and we were not able to engage people in the right way. SAFe is very clear about the objective of PI Planning and defines a very precise agenda, but there is no clue on how to make people work. The reason is because this is based more on the experience and ability of the team members rather than the coaches’ experience. What could we do to enhance this ability? A game obviously.

So I had the idea to create a situation where teams have a complex interlocked backlog of stories to let people test the collaboration model quickly and safely. Ideally this should be a serious game because we should have some fun to make this really effective (otherwise it is just like normal work) and we should create some realistic, challenging but feasible scenarios where people can understand what they are going to do without worrying about building it.

So we came up with the idea to use a Star Wars like scenario.

The first draft of the backlog (i.e. the set of all components to build) took around two months, in the spare time of my working days, and gained great momentum with the idea of arranging a meetup on team collaboration.

I was so focused on the backlog, but actually I had no idea on how to build 100+ cards. So I started to learn about standards (cards are poker sized so you can use standard products and services), tools and techniques.

Keep in mind that the game now has four different type of cards (Components, Initiatives, Events and Roles, 135 cards), but at the beginning I focused on the Components cards.

Here is the first version of the cards: apart from the basic graphic, the logic of the connectors was completely different (here you can see three of them in the bottom right corner: “MOD”, “LIV”, “DEC”). However most of the information were already there and even with this basic format we were able to arrange the first sessions and in particular Play14 unconference where we managed two different sessions. Here we had a lot of gamers and I collected a lot of feedback that brought about the second version.

This card on the right in particular is just from the second session of Play14 where I introduced the new version of the connectors literally drawing them on the card. Good or not, this prototype created overnight was good enough to be successfully tested.

Next time you are asked for an example of MVP you can mention version 1 of DSbuilders!

With all the feedback collected, I approached version 2 and we tried to experiment with colours. Even if  the main graphic goal was to concentrate most of the information in the top of the cards to optimise the distribution of the cards on the mission board.

The colour experiment was not really successful, also because I think that colour shouldn’t convey any information, so that ideally, cards could be printed also in greyscale.

Here I added the second evolution of the connectors, directly based on the feedback collected from players until that moment (100+ people have been already involved).
Connectors looked like the weakest feature of the game: apparently players were not able to understand how these were working. In the image on the right you can see in the card I06 how the “connector producer” card is differentiated from the other components cards. Also connectors switched to four types.

On the right you can see the true version 2 of the cards. The design of the card now looks more linear: I created specific icons for Defence, Supremacy and Complexity and I integrate the new connector icons. As you can see cards are still greyscale.

In this version I also reviewed  dependencies: a few mistakes were fixed and some more logical connectors have been created. Finally I introduced at a later stage the third improvement on the connectors: tokens.

This version has been developed for a series of workshops between October and December, planned as follow ups of the successful September sessions. And obviously I collected more feedback, but also I started thinking that the game was almost ready to go public.

Finally came the new version of the cards that have completely redesigned with the metaphor of the “blue print”.

As you can see here the graphic review was the main improvement, even if I added few more ideas to improve collaboration and make this more realistic (for example the adoption of the alien alphabet). Now the design looks more professional and with the 3D boxes with shadows gives an idea of a working desk with all information randomly placed over the project sheet.

Is this the final version? Let’s start collecting feedback and we will see, for sure I have in mind some expansions.

Are you ready to conquer the galaxy?

The post Evolution of DSbuilders cards first appeared on Ludogogy.

Experience Categories

I had already decided a list of the types of experiences my players would go through. These consisted of:

• Identity
• Other people
• Goals and achievement
• Discovery
• Evaluation
• Values
• Problem Solving

And now it was time to turn my attention to one particular components in Schell’s Elemental Tetrad, Story. The following is what I wrote about this process at the time.

Jesse Schell says that, “A good game is a machine that generates stories when people play it.”

I want my players to be able to create compelling stories about running a business, about the successes and failures that arise out of the decisions they make while doing so.  Ultimately I want them to learn something useful from creating these stories, specifically about maintaining financial records and how these and simple metrics can aid decision making.

The Lens of the Story Machine

I want to create a story experience which is partially pre-scripted (has some underlying structure) but will give participants freedom to create the story for themselves.  This is extremely important when considering my Experience Category “Identity”.  Participants must feel they have autonomy within the game.

Jesse Schell’s questions for Lens #65 – The Lens of the Story Machine – are as follows:

• When players have different choices about how to achieve goals, new and different stories can arise. How can I add more of these choices?
• Different conflicts lead to different stories. How can I allow more types of conflict to arise from my game?
• When players can personalise the characters and setting they will care more about story outcomes and similar stories can start to feel very different. How can I let players personalise the story?
• Good stories have good interest curves. Do my rules lead to stories with good interest curves?
• A story is only good if you can tell it. Who can your players tell the story to that will actually care?

My answers to these questions currently are:

Choices

Participants will make choices about:

• What kind of business they wish to run (manufacturing, service, retail etc.)
• The products or services they offer
• What markets to cater for (e.g. quality, service or price driven)
• The pricing of these products and services
• Numerous resource allocation decisions
• Strategic decisions (e.g. exploit vs explore, growth vs consolidation etc.)
• Operational decisions (e.g. allocation of workforce to projects)
• How to finance their business

The goals they can strive for (the reasons for making these choices) include:

• Making a greater profit
• Growing the business
• Improving cash flow
• Increasing market share
• Reducing staff turnover
• Reducing costs
• Increasing ROI

Conflict points

Potential conflict points that could feature in the story of the game are:

• Losing out on sales to a competitor
• Negotiating T&Cs with a supplier
• Negotiating T&Cs with a customer
• Operating in a shrinking marketplace
• Conflict within their own (management) team

Personalising the experience

Opportunities to personalise the experience can arise from

• Autonomy to decide the kind of business they wish to run within the game
• Freedom to allocate appropriate roles within the team
• Naming their company and designing a logo (trivial icebreaker activity)
• Participants can choose and modify an individual skills profile
• There is no set path through the steps which participants must take each round

Given the enormous number of potential learning situations around business, what I really want to do, rather than creating an individual game, is create a games system into which different situations and choices can be dropped in a modular fashion to create vastly different experiences which would meet vastly different learning objectives.

As a keen player of tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons, my ideal situation would be to create a similar system for business learning games.  This would hopefully facilitate immersive learning experiences in which participants are free to make decisions that are meaningful to them to help them to learn about real-world business situations that they are facing.

For example, the ‘skills profile’ mentioned above would equate roughly to the character stats seen in RPGs .  The skills profile of, for example, a Salesperson in the game would detail how good they are at, say, negotiating with customers on price or payment terms.

Skills profiles can be augmented by experience or training.  I would also like to see a place in my game for things such as ‘power-ups’ and ‘levelling up’ – definitely not usually associated with the serious business of business games – but with definite applications in my mind.  What is a corner office and the key to executive bathroom after all but evidence of levelling up?  What is becoming an ‘Influencer’ on LinkedIn but a kind of power-up.

Interest curves

‘Interest Curves’ refer to variation pace.  This is not only important in games.  In learning, variation of pace helps to ensure continued engagement.  Good interest curves include periods of high excitement (peaks) interspersed with periods of low excitement (valleys), which bring about anticipation of further peaks.  Particular peaks, such as the one which should occur at the beginning of the experience (‘the hook’) and near the end (‘climax’)  help to ensure initial interest and that the participant goes away from the experience, satisfied, but still with a level of further interest.

In my experience I see potential peaks:

• Decision making and negotiation
• Problem solving
• Feedback and results
• Levelling up
• Interactions with others
• Achieving (or failing) at a goal

And valleys:

• Administrative tasks or mundane tasks (paying costs etc)
• Debriefs
• Reflective time

Within the context of a learning event the other necessary interruptions to the game / learning (meals, coffee breaks) should also be considered and will need to fit into the overall structure appropriately to create an effective interest curve

Telling the story

Finally, the story needs to be told. I would hope that the experience will be compelling enough for the participants to tell their stories after the event, otherwise I don’t really have a viable product, but I have little control over that – other than designing an experience that will encourage that later storytelling.  From a learning perspective it is absolutely essential that the learners will spend some time telling their stories during the event.  Much of the learning will come from reflection on the decisions they have made and the sharing of their experiences from within the game and their work life with the rest of the cohort.

The post The Lens of the Story Machine first appeared on Ludogogy.

Netflix has always employed elements in their design that can be found in games that help make users glued to their screens. Now they are taking Gamification to the next level with interactive storytelling. But does the new approach get users hooked? Let’s check the results!

First let’s talk about the Game techniques Netflix has already implemented well and that are key to the addictive nature of this platform.

The Alfred effect (Game technique #83)

This is, “When users feel that a product or service is so personalized to their own needs that they cannot imagine using another service.” Netflix gathers data on what you watch, how long you watch it, and what other people who watch what you watch, watch. It aggregates and parses through all this data to create personalized recommendations of categories and films you might want to watch. Want to feel just how powerful this technique is? Just boot up your friend’s (or a stranger’s) Netflix and you’ll feel a discordant alternate-universe version of a Netflix recommendation engine.

Cliffhangers

Netflix encourages users to binge their content by structuring the content so as to leave the unanswered question of “What will happen next?” in the users’ mind at the end of every episode. This activates Core Drive 7: Unpredictability and Curiosity and causes users to want to watch the next episode, “Just to find out.”

Netflix isn’t the only one who does this of course. Many forms of media utilize cliffhangers. But, Netflix is so good at this and so known for it, they’ve become synonymous with user’s binge-watching whole seasons of shows they release.

Autoplay

At the end of a piece of content, Netflix defaults to automatically playing the next piece unless the user opts out. This means the user has to overcome both inertia (Core Drive 8: Loss and Avoidance) and their innate motivation to be curious (Core Drive 7: Unpredictability and Curiosity) to stop the experience.

Netflix gets interactive

Over the holiday season, Netflix released Bandersnatch, which is a choose-your-own-adventure (hereafter known as CYA) experience adapted to its platform. While CYAs are not new, this is the newest expression of them using up to date technology. In pre-internet days, CYAs were contained in books. Now they are common in games such as TellTale’s The Walking Dead or Detroit, Become Human.

Bandersnatch is an “episode” in the series Black Mirror, which is like the Twilight Zone for the smartphone generation. The word “episode” is in quotes because it’s like an interactive netflix hybrid of show and game.

This experience uses two major game techniques here that other content on their platform (or any streaming platform) haven’t used:

Choice-based narrative

Every 5 minutes or so, the user is presented with a choice. There is a default choice, so it’s possible for them to simply watch the story as a movie. But, they are triggered through the onscreen UI (two choices presented with one highlighted by default) and via the narrative itself. A character says, (paraphrased) “So what’s it going to be? Frosted flakes or Sugar puffs?” as one of the first choices.

Countdown timer

The feedback mechanic is a slowly decreasing line at the bottom of the screen. This is a common Black Hat technique that creates a feeling of urgency in the user, which makes them want to act fast. These two techniques have been used to great effect in dialogue-driven video games in recent years.

Why now?

Introducing this “new” form of storytelling and engagement is a shrewd move by Netflix. Netflix faces fierce competition from both other streaming platforms, as well as users moving to more interactive types of online content.

As Netflix’ licensed streaming content continues to get prohibitively expensive, they continue to invest more in data-driven original niche content to keep their subscribers happy.

But other streaming platforms, such as Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Youtube can do this too. And soon Apple and Disney will join the fray. This has created an arms race of content creation, or what we consumers call, “Peak TV” The problem is that there is a hard cap on the amount of content consumers can consume, so at a certain point, increased content stops becoming a market differentiator.

And games are dominating more and more of users’ attention. A recent earning statement (Via Forbes) from Netflix claimed, “We compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO.”

So Netflix is right to start adding interactive elements to their narrative. Now they all need to think different to stay ahead of the curve.

The challenge of gamifying narrative content

There has been userbase backlash. Many users see this type of storytelling as just a gimmick and that having choices reduces the meaning in the narrative. We know that to effectively motivate users through Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity and Feedback, choices need to have influence on how the story unfolds and show the immediate effects of strategic decisions. In other words, choices need to be meaningful.

But Netflix’s business model may likely run counter to creating narrative content with true meaningful choice.

CYAs are fundamentally more expensive to produce. In a modern CYA book such as Romeo or Juliet, there can be 800 endings. But, in Bandersnatch there are just 8. And even so, the script for Bandersnatch was 170 pages long, which roughly equates to 170 minutes of content that needs to be created. A normal episode of Black Mirror runs about 60 pages.

Because users can take multiple paths through the content, each user may only experience half or less of the content that is produced. More branching paths to the story means more potentially unseen content. Unless of course, choices don’t matter…

What if the choices aren’t meaningful?

Leaving out procedurally-generated storytelling (such as the Nemesis system in Shadow of Mordor/War games), the content business doesn’t scale unless users are offered only the illusion of choice. Instead of a truly branching narrative, with endless possibilities, the choices must lead back to the same set of outcomes.

Bandersnatch, to its credit, tries to deal with this problem in the narrative itself. The story centers on a character who is trying to create a CYA game of his own and is dealing with all the same problems (in a meta way) of Netflix. By lampshading the limitations of this form, the content creators hope to make the lack of meaningful choice more thematically connected. It makes it feel like less of a cheat, because the user understands why their choice is less meaningful.

But, this creates a bigger problem. Bandersnatch might be a test-run to see if these an interactive Netflix niche can become part of their unique offering in the market. But, most shows that they offer are not thematically linked to this content form. So, while it might work in this case, what happens if they try to apply this to romantic comedy? A documentary? A biopic?

Netflix is already trying again, this time in the survival genre with You vs Wild. Will this be another flash in the pan gimmick or will it be the beginning of new popular trend in Netflix’s arsenal?

Suggestions for Netflix

Here are some things that Netflix could do that would make this interactive content more effective.

Implement more explicit gamification

In part of Bandersnatch, users attempt to open a safe that has a password. They can only learn the password through watching certain parts of the branching narrative and they can learn of more passwords by watching more of the story. They could lean on this even more by hiding codes inside the storytelling itself.

This means that users who want to see all the content have to re-watch the story like a puzzle. Instead of offering branching narrative as the main source of engagement, easter eggs and secrets like this could extend the shelf life of a product. Bandersnatch was already seen as a puzzle by an army of redditors, who mapped the entire flow chart of the story within days of Netflix releasing it. Creating mysteries like this must take the collective intelligence of internet detectives into the mix and scale the problem accordingly unless they want their hard-earned puzzle to be figured out within hours of their content being released.

Crowd voting

Instead of creating lots of different branching narratives, Netflix could release content in discrete episodes. Where the story goes next could be voted on and users could see how others voted. This is essentially taking the mechanics of American idol-style shows and applying them to narrative on a streaming platform. This would work better in a show with a short production time or a show that was cheap to produce, such as a mockumentary.

Shift the framing

Tell the user up front that their choices will be recorded and given to them later. This means that their choices are empowering because they tell themselves something about the user, not that they actually impact the story. This is using the same underlying motivation used in quizzes like “What Game of Thrones character are you?” These choices could then be shared with other users or pushed to social media to generate buzz.

Use Moats (Game technique #67)

Moats are skill-based pass/fail states. Think of a boss battle in a game. The goal is to test the user’s knowledge of the game mechanics. If the user fails, they have to play the level again. In an interactive Netflix example, users could be asked questions that depend on things they’ve seen before. If the user fails, it causes them to pay more attention next time, which means the content must be rewatched.

Of course, these ideas would have to be properly designed with motivation in mind. Netflix, if they are smart, are just getting started in incorporating gamification in their offerings in order to stay ahead of the curve.

The post Interactive Netflix Gamification is Here, but Will it Get People Hooked? first appeared on Ludogogy.

As Sherrelle Walker explains, this is due to our brains being structured in a way that causes us to seek out coherent narrative structure in the stories that we hear and tell, then using this structure to absorb any information within the story and then connect it with any of our own personal experiences.(Juliani, 2014)

This is especially true with children with the Writer’s Bureau (2009) and the British Council with the BBC (2016) highlighting some of the benefits of telling stories throughout their growth which include;

• Increased confidence, self-esteem and understanding of empathy.
• Improved listening skills and verbal proficiency.
• Learning about various concepts like shapes, colours and objects.
• Learning about tasks and activities such as taking care of animals or preparing a meal.
• Discovering diverse cultures and people from around the world.
• Understanding emotions and how to cope with certain feelings.
• Offering a method of relaxation by enjoying stories during their downtime.
• Improving the development of their imagination.

Although there are many benefits to utilising stories within education, there are several challenges that come with the territory. Most of these challenges come from the stories that you’re hoping to use, the implementation of the story and its relevance to the subject being taught.

Mcnett provides a useful table of learning objectives that can be referred to in order to test the viability of a story that is intended to be used within an educational setting. They also point out that a story that doesn’t accomplish any of the objectives in the table doesn’t necessarily rule out the story being beneficial to the situation it’s used in, rather it runs the risk of being considered irrelevant to the current situation and a waste of time.

Although it is important to find stories that are relevant to subject matter that you’re hoping to tackle, if you don’t present the story in a way that captivates the audience and makes them want to listen, then you’re just wasting time and you might as well just hand your listeners a textbook about the subject they’re being taught.

Luckily you don’t need to be an actor to tell a convincing story and the British Council has a handful of techniques and skills that can be practised in order to improve your approach of storytelling, such as;

• Adapting the story in your own way
• Rehearse the story so that it feels natural when telling it.
• Vary the volume, pitch and tempo of your voice to exaggerate expression and to differentiate between you narrating and playing a character.
• Utilise body language, including your hands and face.
• Engage with the audience through eye-contact and looking at your audience as you speak.
• Utilise silence and pauses for dramatic effect where necessary.
• Remember to pace yourself to match the mood of the story.

(British Council and BBC, 2016)

This is only really scratching the surface of using stories as a teaching tool but hopefully this serves as a decent start to anyone who may be interested in learning more about a way of teaching that has been a long-standing yet effective method throughout human history.

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