Many artists frequently work from home. I’m one of them. When Covid19 hit in March 2020, my friends were NOT surprised to hear that I continued to paint.

But, learning? Co-designing and releasing puzlkind, a multi-player jigsaw application with voice chat…?

“People I could have foreseen building an app??? SJ, you don’t even make the short list,” said a friend of three decades.

Shall I back up a bit?

In 2011 I had moved from Seattle, Washington to Seekonk, Massachusetts and found myself in a small town, carless and recovering from physical injury. Thankfully the local library offered handy recreation. And I fell in love—with their jigsaw puzzles! No batteries required and totally silent, this old-fashioned mode of re-creation/creation simultaneously occupied my active fingers and soothed my anxious mind.

Some months later, when healed and functioning, I finished a totally surprising and very orange painting called “This Is a Life Worth Living.” This painting resonated with friends and strangers alike. In that same chapter of life, I found myself spending many hours in hospital waiting rooms staring at tattered copies of People magazine as my partner’s mother’s life dwindled. I yearned for something aesthetically pleasing and possibly communal. Some way for us to connect in our suspended state of longing. As an experiment, I decided to transform my new painting into a 1000pc jigsaw puzzle. And so began a multi-year odyssey. The filmmaker/painter became a puzzle zealot.

Solo jigsaw puzzle assembly offered me easily digestible lessons: incremental progress, the importance of breaks, changing perspectives. When a film curator wrote me a letter describing how said puzzle helped her through chemotherapy I was thrilled. I began to make mini-puzzles for the infusion units at our local hospital. Cognitive distraction from simultaneously chemotherapy seemed potentially useful.

I continued to expand my designs and found joy in round puzzles. Local retailer Kurry Davis Jacob and I began hosting public Puzzle and Pie Happy Hours. During these casual encounters I observed magic happening.  Co-creation seemed to improve people’s moods. Or was it the strawberry rhubarb pie?

In 2018 advanced practice psychiatric nurse, Beverly Waldman Rich, invited me to perform a short puzzle assembly workshop with her highly stressed junior level nursing students. Bev and I were equally amazed when the students opened up about their vulnerabilities and self-doubts. After puzzling together these students felt relaxed and heard, which seemed to have a salubrious benefit! A year later Bev brought me to Rhode Island’s Bradley Hospital as a “puzzle specialist” for her doctoral research. I ran one group puzzling workshop with a cohort of clinically depressed adolescents to see how mindfulness training could improve their affect. We were astounded when, after an initial session, our initially antagonistic teens bounded from our conference room to their parents arms, joyfully declaring their future plans: veterinarian, surgeon, artist… Somehow puzzling together had seeded self-esteem. Of all the mindful activities offered, the participants rated my puzzle workshop as their favorite. Dr. Rich was excited to continue this exploration of puzzling and behavioral modification.

Having found her research in a footnote of Jane McGonigal’s ‘SuperBetter’ I reached out to Dr. Xiaomeng “Mona” Xu at Idaho State University to help me understand the neurochemical processes. We secured a small grant to hold a larger puzzle workshop for her community for Spring 2020. In the meantime, other organizations hosted my workshops. I offered sequential writing exercises in tandem with puzzle assembly. And, of course, pie. The applications for this model seemed endless and exciting – social justice and faith-based organizations commissioned puzzles, university professors and municipal teams hosted me for workshops, and library programmers invited me to puzzle with their inter-generational patrons.

SuperBetter by Jane McGonigal is available from Amazon

Each workshop allowed me to observe people entering that well-adored “flow state” – and doing so together.

And then came COVID-19. No amount of hand-sanitizer was enough to keep us together.

I shared my frustration with Michael Ferrier, a dear friend and veteran multiplayer game programmer (Puzzle Together, Remote Viewing Tournament, War of Conquest).  Mike suggested the metaverse as the new home for my puzzles and attendant workshops.

I resisted.  I prefer the world in 3D, not pixels.

He ignored me, wise soul, and showed me a skeletal version of a multiplayer jigsaw puzzle application in June of 2020. We performed a beta test and voila. I was converted.

December graphic designer Ruth Chung joined our Puzlkind journey to promote peace – well-being – via co-creation, connection, and inclusion. Jigsaw puzzles for joy and justice.

As homage to my 2015 “puzzle and pie happy hours” we built an in-app Happy Hour and scheduled our first one on Pi Day, March 14, 2021.

I received my first of many lessons that day:

Be prepared to answer all questions and explain EVERYTHING.

Ten minutes before the event I received a phone call: “Sarah Jane, can you send us the Zoom link?”

“It’s, um, not on Zoom. It’s an app. “

“A what? Hold on, let me move find the browser “

This was a preview of many onboarding experiences to follow.

Explaining to non-digital natives that an app is not a Zoom session.

Explaining that giving microphone access will not necessarily invite the FBI into your living room.

Explaining that the microphone actually picks up that whole conversation you and your boyfriend are having about laundry.

Cardboard jigsaw puzzles had been the perfect intergenerational platform for co-education. No batteries required, no instructions needed. And suddenly I had made a deep dive into a world that seemed to create barriers left and right.  I had made something that required me to learn how to bring the public to a new place. I needed to learn how to make a game to bring people to a game.

Veteran game designers chuckled when I shared my conundrum. They said, “Let us teach each other to help support the differently-abled in the virtual world.”

But how?

This morning I found my notes from a fall workshop co-hosted by ReImagine End of Life and Holistic Underground run by Mazin Jamal and Raquel Najera. In BOLD LETTERS I had printed:

TAKE FOCUS OFF SELF AND FOCUS ON SERVICE

“ASK – WHO IS COMING? and WHAT DO THEY NEED?

Ask yourself, Do you want to invite them? Or INCLUDE THEM?

Here in the U.S.A. many of us pray daily to create MLK’s Beloved Community – Equity, Solidarity, and Access.

Can a humble jigsaw puzzle app bring about that magnitude of change?

The post Puzlkind – the Healing Potential of Jigsaws first appeared on Ludogogy.

This article is the story about how this game was born and about applying changes principles to a game talking about changes. This shows the very same approach we should follow when facilitating changes in organisations, which we call Transformation. This article is about a new game designed to help people in experimenting with changes; in their way of working, in collaboration protocols and in their innovation mindset. However, we will talk also about how change impacts the game itself, because this game was actually designed as an evolution of another game, and step by step it became something unique.

Originally this was written as a series of small posts, published on linkedIN on a weekly basis, so there is a lot of information there. For Ludogogy I revised the material into two articles: one published in this number and the second one in the Feedback Issue. I hope you will like them.

This is not my first submission to Ludogogy magazine. In past I talked about other games such as “DSbuilders”, a game about scaling collaboration, that will be presented in June at XP2021, and “PDCA elements”, an icebreaker game about scaling innovation. Follow this link to access Corrado’s author page

The reason behind the game

Change must start with “WHY?”

Kanban Pizza is an amazing game you can play with your teams to introduce most of the attributes of the flow of change and how you can use kanban principles to survive an evening in a pizza restaurant. You can also integrate a retrospective (between rounds) to help team understand the impacts of  improvements in the process.

If you want to know more I suggest that you watch the following video, which, in particular, shows you how you can manage the session virtually (really useful in these times).

I have played this game many times and facilitated a few less sessions, and this game has a lot of good points. However (IMHO) this game has also some pain points which we could describe with the following questions: Is the work realistic of a true team? What is the competence needed to copy & paste or to cut paper? Where is the collaboration in the team? Are teams really working following such confused norms? And are our teams working in such a confused environment? Maybe these are the reasons why this game often “degenerates” into a chaotic room where people cut coloured paper sheets and run across desks screaming about timing.

My hypothesis when starting this experiment, was we could add new perspectives to the game, inheriting some mechanics from card and board games, and, at the same time, keeping the (challenging) time presure that gives the fun. And, obviously, to find a way to help preparation, debriefing and learning. That’s why I started designing a Real Time Card Game (RTCG) version of the game.

WHAT should be different?

Define criteria to identify the value of your game

In the original version of the game, there is a small level of uncertainty, because we have very few pizza types, few situations to be managed, few blockers… This makes the game predictable and sometimes not challenging except for the manual activities. But maybe this is not the situation we want to create: we would like to put people in challenging situations where the process is the core, not the activities or the material.

Unpredictability is one of the key attributes for a card game, where the unexpected let you take the best of yourself and the fun. Clearly you have to properly balance the game (I mean build a balanced deck of cards and a decent rule set) so that people are focused on the “serious” goal of the game. Keep in mind this is a serious game, that some facilitator could use with a specific intent, so we should provide some guidance to help create the required situations, so uncertainty should be also controlled if needed, maybe creating different scenarios, maybe to enhance one or few of the above attributes.

Finally, the new game should help with its own setup, minimising the time and effort for organising a session, providing some components that you can simply distribute to players or place on desks, and reuse for many sessions. These components should be considered as the constraints for the mechanic of the game because reality has constraints: for example if you are working in a large company, software architecture is not controlled by the team (I know this is against 11th principle of the Agile Manifesto, but, again, this is life!). So these “limitations” should be in place to put players in the position to adapt their improvements considering their current situation.

Another valuable attribute of the game could be “scalability” (working well also in the original game). A game is normally designed for a defined number of players (not always true…), but it could be interesting to create a situation when we have many teams competing or (why not!) collaborating, or maybe create large learning sessions with players coming from different teams.

So our new game should:

• Consist of a balanced deck of cards to create the right level of uncertainty
• Have different configurations of play to create different experiences
• Create constraints to mimic real world experience
• Be scalable to make a multi-team
• experience possible.

Now it is time to talk about the name of the game: Pizza KATA, where “kata”, other than the Japanese word for “model”, is coming from “KAnban TakeAway” which is the actual payoff of the game. Note that “kata” is also a martial term strictly connected with the practice to perfection, a true lean metaphor (also Toyota uses in this way in its TPS, Toyota Production System).

I want to mention that this name was decided after a few tries and experiments, so this process also used the evolutionary approach. It was generated later in the process of game creation, but I need to put it here for obvious reasons.

Now we have a goal and we have requirements. We can describe how this game works.

First of all we need to clarify what a RTCG is: this is a card game where the turns are defined by a time pace and not by the players. This means that time overides the potential time required for all action a player needs to play. This is a completely different logic from a turn-based game (like traditional tricky  games, for example or most board games). The reason behind this decision is about keeping this realistic and similar to our working situations where we have to perform our activities in a world, where timing is not waiting for us.

This is a true constraint players have to deal with, but this is also the main reason for fun in the game, together with the uncertainty that is mainly based on the menu.

The menu of our restaurant

Pizzas must be the most relevant component of a pizza game.

One of the attributes of this game was to create a menu with a certain level of uncertainty and so many more options (instead of the two in the original). Obviously we cannot have a real menu with all possible options and ingredients. However, after some research with some friends we were able to define eight main ingredients that can help to create a decent (in terms of variety) menu. Our pizza restaurant can deliver eight different pizzas:

Focaccia

Marinara

Napoli

Margherita

Diavola

Carrettiera

Capricciosa

Boscaiola

However, if you ever have been in real Italian pizza restaurant, the strength is the possibility to modify your pizza according to your special taste. For our restaurant this is exactly the same. In fact we are able to accept fifteen different special variations. So actually, the menu is composed of 23 pizzas, with just eight ingredients!

Above you can see pizza MARGHERITA card that has 3 variations on the ingredients:

A. is with double mozzarella

B. is with ham and mushrooms

C. is with artichokes

The circled number on the top right corner is the price for the pizza and for each variation you can have different prices.

Clearly as you can see there are some tweaks of the real ingredients, however I think you can understand that this is not really impacting the goals of the game.

Below you can find the menu with all pizzas and “most” of the variations.

Two more comments about pizza cards:

1. The last card is a recap of all ingredients (read “tokens”) that we are going to use in our restaurant (read “game”).
2. I mentioned, in the list you can find “most” of the variations. Actually there is one more variable the customers can control: the cooking time (did you notice the “flame” icon?). As you can imagine this is something which deeply impacts the dynamic of the game, as we will see later.

We just introduced one of the components of the gam. Now we will focus on all other components needed to play Pizza KATA.

Components of the game

Components let you manipulate the reality of the game

Pizza KATA has cards and boards. We will explore them in detail later in the series. But first of all, we need some tokens to play the game. Most of these tokens are related to ingredients for our pizzas. Sure, you remember the pizza cards shown above. One of the cards (the ninth) shows all the components and variations, so we can use this card as a guideline for our introduction.

To make a wonderful pizza you need tomato sauce and mozzarella (line A) and then, to create different pizza recipes you can use ham, salami, artichoke, mushrooms, olive and onions.

These are the basic 8 ingredients and you need a type of token for each of them to add them on the pizza.

Then you need two more tokens (line C) if a pizza requires a “well done” extra cooking and when you have some impediments in the restaurant (be prepared!).

Line B is for removing some ingredients from the basic recipes, so no token is required.

Finally you need a d6 dice and a bunch of timers.

When you are preparing a PnP (print & play) game, tokens are the most “complicated” to create. Actually in the package you can find a paper version of them you can print, however I always suggest to work with 3D objects because these are easier to manipulate, and you need to manipulate them, because this is part of the game (again, be prepared!)

Here you can see the tokens I am using in my sessions and an example with a pizza Capricciosa ready for cooking (with another preview of the crust card used to prepare the pizzas).

As mentioned above, you need timers, because this is a Real Time card game.

You can use the timer on your smartphone but keep in mind, you will need more than one timer at the same time. We will see later how they are used, but for the moment keep in mind the following sequence 1-3-3 (you need from 4 to 7 timers). Maybe you can use a “multi-timer” app that can have many timers running on the same screen.

However, if you want to increase the fun, I strongly suggest using hourglasses. You can use the one suggested for children while brushing their teeth. They are very cheaply available on every marketplace on the web.

I use one minute timers, to create a fast-paced game. You can also use two minute timers to create a more quiet (but frankly, less fun) situation. As mentioned, you need at least four of them.

The specific set of component makes Pizza KATA a true game, complete and “out-of-the-box” as it is. But this approach bring another difference with the original. Game preparation absorbs energy and time that actually should be dedicated to conversation and experimentation.

We have already seen different types of cards available in the game but now it is time to describe the reality where the game is played: the restaurant.

Cards required to play the game

Cards are the essence of a card game.

So far, we have already presented two types of cards.

The Pizza cards describe the ingredients of each pizza and all possible variants. You can find also information about the value of each pizza and instruction for baking it.

Dough cards are very specific double face cards that have been designed to simulate pizza preparation. Preparing the dough is a real manual activity, inspired by true pizza baker: you have to slap on the table with the first side up, then you must roll and stretch for a given number of times. When the dough is ready you can flip the card and place ingredients (tokens) following the specific pizza recipe.

Order cards are the source of the flow and the core dynamic of the game, because this should create realistic, challenging and fun situations. That’s why designing and testing this deck is one of the essential tasks of the whole game creation.

Each of the order cards is designed to show the list of pizzas and the total value. It also has a special marker to easily identify the different types, and an ID to indicate the level of difficulty of the order.

There are seven different order types, organized in decks to be shuffled

• Three decks (I, II, III) of common orders differentiated by size and pizzas: we have basic orders with the simpler pizzas in small quantities, which are actually the most common in a pizza restaurant. We have family orders with all pizzas and medium quantities. These comprise the largest set of the three. Finally we have party orders where we have big orders of all pizzas. These are the most valuable.
• One deck of special orders (S), where some of the items have special variations ofthe eight pizzas in the menu.
• One deck of extra-cook orders (K) where some of the items requires extra time in cooking.
• One deck of urgent orders (X), where delivery in the given time can bring extra value.

Finally, there is another type or cards, event cards mixed with the orders that creates unpredictability with situations that impact on the flow of work: missing orders, double orders, missing ingredients….

All of these cards are designed to create well defined impact on the flow and, as a consequence, increase difficulty but also the fun for players. So let’s see how to use order cards and how Pizza KATA is a unique game.

A session is a sequence of “days”. Each of the days has a sequence of orders and at the end of the day the players have the possibility to discuss and introduce some improvements that can be applied in the following day. Using the order deck cards, the facilitator can apply his/her strategies to create the situations the team has to deal with. Example of strategies are:

• increment the number of cards from one round to the next one,
• mix cards from different sets to increase difficulty with the same number of cards,
• add one or more events to break the flow
• shuffle (or not) the cards to control the sequence or to add unpredictability,
• reuse the same sequence to verify improvement
• a mix of the above strategies in a single deck.

As an example, find below one of my favourite strategies, which you can apply in a 90 minute workshop:

• define 10 cards as a standard day of work and shuffle them every day
• continue the rounds in a day to complete all orders (to empty the queue) and count extra rounds
• Day 1: this is a warmup, with 10 cards from deck I
• Day 2: 2 cards deck I, 7 from II and 1 event
• Day 3: 2 from I, 5 from II, 3 from III and 1 event
• Day 4: 2 from I, 3 from II, 2 from III, 1 from S, 1 from K and 1 event
• Day 5: same as Day 4 but with max 3 extra rounds

As you can imagine, this deck provide the facilitator with a lot of opportunities for experimentation but above all it lets the facilitator design the workshops for the team’s needs, without having to worry about the material because everything is in the game box.

Tracking performance during the game

“Without data, you have just another opinion”

Another asset of the game available in the package (even if this is not exactly a card or a component) is the set of “tickets” you can use to track how the team is doing the job.

The first type of ticket is useful to collect when an order enters the system (collection) and when the order exits from the system (delivery).

This is perfect to calculate the lead time of an order but also the average and helps the team to understand their performance and make predictions on time to deliver a potential future orders. This is the basic statistical analysis a team can perform on their job.

But if you want to understand better the behaviour of the system, you need to analyse the “stages” (i.e. sub-systems), because actually each stage tells a different story. So in the package you can find a second type of tickets

While the first ticket is for all orders in a session, this one is for a single order and let the team track all intermediate times: you can understand bottlenecks, calculate different cycle times, and obviously here you can collect the same information you have in the first ticket.

These tickets can be placed close to each stage, or maybe on a dedicated kanban board that visualises the flow into stages. So, using this second ticket, you can also visualise the Work In Progress (WIP), simply counting the tickets in a given stage.

As you can recognize, these are KANBAN in the strict sense, because “Kanban”, in Japanese, means “card” and these are the perfect prototype of tickets that teams are using to track their real work, so that they can measure their performances.

Note that both tickets can be used to track the orders (as described above) but also to track the pizzas in an order. The difference will be in the number of tickets and in the analysis you can perform with them. It is a team decision how to use them, maybe evolving the monitoring session by session after realising what information they need to track.

This is the end of the first part of this article. In the next issue, we are going to talk about the line of work of the pizza restaurant and how this has been implemented in the Pizza KATA. Finally we introduce the different play modes available: one team, more teams collaborating, and one team competitive.

DISCLAIMER. Notes presented here are personal and cannot be related in any way to any of my employers.

The post Pizza KATA or “Change is a Mindset and not an Action” first appeared on Ludogogy.

You may have emotions attached to this phrase; either in a positive way – you wrote it on a social media post and you got lots of likes, or in a negative way – a person you do not trust all that much over uses it. Those emotions will most certainly dictate how you interpret the rest of this article, or if you indeed continue reading pass this point.

In a very over-simplified way, change, organisational change, has the same effect on us. Based on the emotions we attach to organisational change, which, in turn, are heavily influenced by our past experiences with this kind of activity, our behaviour will be heavily biased in favour of, or against the recently announced organisational change initiative at our place of work.

And guess what – between 50 to 80 percent of all transformation efforts fail. So in this game of probabilities and behaviours the numbers are heavily stacked against change.

Alright, organisational transformation fails and that makes us biased against that very specific type of change. But what relationship does this boring business topic have with games? Can games possibly change our perception about organisational transformation and change? That sure sounds like something taken from the SCI-FI movie Ender’s Game[1].

The reasons change efforts fail in job-related settings and corporate transformation, are many. Each self-proclaimed guru in this field has their own list. Nonetheless, about 80% of the items from all these lists overlap.

I also happen to have my list of reasons why transformation fail. Humour me for a few more minutes – if you made it this far into the article you may as well read the remaining paragraphs. In my experience and academic research, broadly speaking, the reasons organisational transformation efforts can be grouped in two categories:

1. We don’t know what we are doing most of the time
2. Even when we are given a list of tasks to follow so we ensure the change effort is successful, we don’t follow or complete all the tasks.

Training is a fundamental activity in all successful organisational transformations. Yet, training is, at best, under budget, understaffed, poorly planned and horrendously executed.

When properly planned and executed, the organisational effort should use games as part of the set of resources available to train existing and new employees during the highly volatile period of change.

I know you believe in the power of games – you are reading this article and you follow this online magazine. But unfortunately, for many people, people in high-up decision-making positions in corporations, using games to improve training and development is merely SCI-FI. Never mind talking about using games to support the transformation, that sort of claim belongs to the occult.

The use of games in learning and development, and training and development is supported by SCI-FACTS. My own personal journey with the use of serious games started when I came across this podcast, based on a study of risk and human behaviour in the aviation industry[2]

Through my journey in this new and exciting field I’ve developed games that have been used to teach subjects such as Industry 4.0, project management and organisational behaviour.

One of my latest projects is a learning solution called ToolBox 4 Creativity (TB4C). This solution maximises the affordances of game development in order to improve workshops, training, and classroom lectures.

TB4C can be used to ensure participants are fully immersed in the training activities as they focus on building prototypes of games that externalise their tacit knowledge and unconscious concerns.

What’s learned in a well-designed training sessions that used TB4C can hardly be learned in any other training*. What’s more, and this is as powerful as improving the quality of the training itself, data can be collected from the workshop participants .

* A training that uses the same amount of training resources, costs the same and takes the same amount of time.

TB4C is a learning solution that stands on its own two legs. Nonetheless, this is just one of the learning solutions that are part of the Play Learn Develop (PLD) family -research name: Human Centred Organisational Transformation (HCOT).

TB4C will launch on Kickstarter in September 2021. The Human Centred Organisational Transformation model is waiting for EU funding in order to research and develop the Artificial Intelligence and data science elements of the framework.

The main focus of PLD/HCOT is to improve the probability of success of organisational transformation. Remember that this has a failure rate of between 50 to 80 per cent? Right? I believe we can do better. I believe games have an important role to play in this improvement journey.

I hope you enjoyed this article. If you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to reach out through any of my social media channels listed below.

The post Change: a Game of Probabilities and Behaviours first appeared on Ludogogy.

Desire for Play is Inherent

What does this development tell us about games? On the one hand, it shows that the desire for the joy of playing is inherent in human behaviour (Yee 2007). On the other hand, it reflects the fact that with the principle of games – interaction, achievement and reward – it is not only possible to make money, but also to profit from deeply rooted human behaviours; discovery, social interaction and amusement (Wu et al. 2008).

The principle of gamification is utilised by various companies to increase their visibility and to profit from the mechanisms of fun (Wily Global 2018). This could be interpreted as a milestone in the modern recognition of games and as the victory of games over triviality and into cultural mainstream. However, it is crucial to retain a critical stance on the economization of gamification, especially if companies use the mechanisms of gamification to increase revenue rather than being dedicated to the idea of valuing fun as a component of transformation (Peterson 2013). We should rather go back to the roots of games and interpret their rise as part of a social transition embedded in the technological revolution of the last century. If games have the power to instil enthusiasm and excitement, why not use these strengths of games to make a difference in the social sphere? In this context, it is time to see games and gamification as a tool for social change.

Games and Gamification for Social Change

With this background on games and the infinite potential for gamification, we would like to introduce our understanding of gamification as a tool for social change. Following the idea of applying games and gamification methods to create a space for intercultural dialogue, we recognize their potential for the humanitarian field. The workshop “Gamification and Game Design for Social Change” is designed and facilitated in order to introduce the power of games in creating social cohesion by including all the diverse identities on the same board.

In the context of supporting vulnerable people, games are an excellent tool to empower and build resilience. Unlike in life, in games everyone has the same starting point and moves according to their choices. For these groups, life is often characterized by inequality, but games provide a space to be the decision makers for themselves. In games the rules are equal for everyone, in the beginning the materials are distributed equally, the rest is the responsibility of the player. All the players agree on the conditions of winning, and, more importantly, everyone has equal chances to win. For these reasons, games establish a feeling of equal opportunity and a convivial space for agency. Either in front of a screen or at the table, players gain a new identity that they define with their own choices during the process of playing. The magic circle does not have borders.

Target Audiences for the Workshop

Following these ideas, the target group of the workshops are people who are working with marginalized communities, migrants, or vulnerable groups under risk. So far, they have been delivered in different countries with teachers, youth workers, different NGO members and humanitarian workers. The workshop is for all the active citizens who have access and motivation to build dialogue with diverse groups.

The workshop is using non-formal education methods, and Kolb’s (2014) experiential learning cycle[1] is taken as the base of the design. More concretely, the workshop has four chapters: Game & Play, Simulation, Gamification and Game Design. In each section we experience a game, then reflect on our experience, discussing from different angles and critical perspectives and finally considering the process of implementation into the field. Not only inside the flow of the section but also between the sections,

Kolb’s Cyle and Games

1. Game and Play: Through playing a simple game (an energizer or a well known childhood game) it is possible to reflect on the concepts of game and play. This is the section more based on dynamics of the game design. With this approach the focus is on the fun element, and how to make games fun for everyone. This opens a space to discuss the inclusivity of the games in terms of gender, cultural sensitivities, disabilities etc.. The critical questions here are; who can play this game and who cannot, what can we do to include everyone and what can we do to play together? As the first step of the cycle, it is the concrete experience gathering part.
2. Simulation/Role plays/Serious Games: In the second round, using example games provides a good insight on the player experience. Designing the roles that the group is familiar with is especially effective in getting the participants out of their comfort zones and reveals the characteristics of the players. After the exercise, it is useful to discuss more about feelings. Reflection is the crucial outcome of this section. How does it feel to be another person, to make choices as another person? How does it feel to be in that particular role? These questions try to focus on player experience and how game design is shaping that experience powerfully.
3. Gamification: The participants are introduced to the term gamification through example videos. The focus is on the change effect; both behavioral and motivational change. An open discussion is facilitated about which aspects of gamification can encourage a positive change in socially sensitive (polarized) topics. The advantages and disadvantages are discussed. As a cumulative process, the previous parts are always referenced as a start of conceptualization and to give a more holistic view on the process.
4. Game Design: This is the part where participants have a chance to practice the previous steps. Now, they are getting to actively experiment with their learnings. In groups, they are encouraged to design a simple game prototype, based upon a goal with the given materials. The task is “design a game to X”. The goal can sometimes be an easy task like “teach to count to 10 in a different language”, or it can be more complex like “there is a tension in a school against migrant background students”. It can be good to challenge the participants during the design process to make sure they have their critical eyes open (especially when they start falling into the comfort zone and think it was easy; we found something nice). There are challenges that will create problems in their designs. They can be related to inclusion (there is no common language in the group), or social conflict (girls do not want to play with boys). But these serve to encourage flexibility and inclusion, starting from the design. This is an advanced version, but it is important to underline that the game is an active space that designer and potential players always needs to be engaged with. Also, it helps to complete/restart Kolb’s experiential learning cycle.

We are United by the Passion for Play

With this simple design, it is possible to capitalize from the potential of games and to use the human desire for joyful interaction for social interventions. The trends in the game industry and the increasing recognition of games as change-bringing activities are crucial to underline the positive effects that games can have. When using games and the principle of gamification as a tool for social change, we do not only want to stress the idea that games can make a difference, but also that this difference can be based on valuable transformation; valuable for vulnerable groups such as migrants, but also for the common understanding that we are united in the passion for playing.

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The simple definition of culture is the way companies do things -it is the feel, the smell and the vibe you get when you walk into an environment of an organisation. Cultural change is deeply behavioural, if you want a new culture, it means you have to define a new way of being. Changing an organisational culture starts with changing individual behaviour – it has the daunting task of surfacing embedded beliefs and identity that inform the combined habits and collective behaviour.

This article will outline how a transformational game was a powerful tool in a cultural change initiative for a large international mining organisation. We will outline how it fitted and supported other change elements and the benefits derived from applying this approach.

When we consider this type of change, our starting points is to distinguish between diagnostic and dialogic approaches to organisational change.  A diagnostic perspective is very appropriate when you do something that’s being planned – you know what the outcome is going to look like. An example may be the introduction of new technology and its adoption, there is a clear path to get buy-in, education and ultimately use.

Deep behavioural change requires a more dialogical approach, it is about constructing meaning and eliciting a new identity within the organisation. It seeks to challenge the status quo and ultimately a new way of “being” emerges which influences values and behaviours across the organisation. A dialogic change has an broad “end state” however the tempo and how the organisation is going to get there is not exactly defined and planned, furthermore the stakeholders inform the meaning of the end state.

Cultural change within a large mining organisation

A large, multi-national mining organisation embarked on a cultural change journey, with the intent to align its strategic intent with a cultural intent of significance, espousing a leadership style, values and employee engagement and shifting the culture from one of surviving to that of thriving. The 14 elements of the ideal culture were categorised into three pillars of:

(i) Leadership Values  consisting of personal leadership, serving and supporting leadership, inspirational leadership and significant and Ubuntu leadership

(ii) Core Values of Safety, Accountability, Care and respect, Integrity, Collaboration and Innovation

(iii) Engagement Values  from personal, team, job and organisational engagement

Each value was underpinned by a series of behaviours, with definition of how each would be demonstrated across all levels of the organisation.

How do you embed this change across multiple levels within an organisation of 25,000 people in dispersed locations speaking various languages ? When faced with this challenge, it was acknowledged that an innovative approach was required to work in an African context. These constraints led to finding a solution to enable a change dialogue with limited number of skilled change facilitators and which also could resonate with a diverse workforce. In this article we briefly discuss the overall design of the behavioural change and how a transformational game formed a key part of addressing the constraints and complexity.

Prior to unpacking the design, and benefits of the transformational game; it is important to place it in context of the overall change initiative and how it supported (and was supported by prior interventions). Any complex, large scale change intervention consists of multiple components supporting each other.

The First Stage in the Cultural transformation : Leadership Preparation

The cultural change required a new leadership style that was embedded, and even taught in the organisation. This wasn’t about the top 250 leaders; it was an inclusive style and was about any person in a role influencing somebody else. A standard leadership style was defined based on supporting the cultural change (and the renewed 14 components of the culture). A 360-leadership feedback tool measured and participants received feedback on how others perceived them on this style. This initial leadership journey was a series of small group sessions and was in preparation for the next phase of the cultural change. Due to the engaging nature of this intervention, the organised labour representation and leadership, were also included in the leadership development aspects.

The Second Stage : Workforce Engagement

This stage was about engaging the workforce. An important aspect of embedding this cultural change was to make sure that the correct language, symbols and metaphors were being used to get workforce buy-in. Although a central identity and culture for the organisation was the aim, there was also an appreciation for the diverse nature of the various operations. Different operations were therefore allowed to craft a unique metaphor or change journey to embed in the group culture, while accommodating the unique context. Each operation participated in discussions to select a suitable theme (conversation metaphor) these ranged from soccer (La Duma) to the big five animals representative of Africa –  one such metaphor was “The Elephant”. Each operation selected a conversation metaphor which resonated with them, and workshop discussions allowed for the theme to be communicated and related back to the 14 culture elements. Language was an important part of communicating the theme, and each of the 14 elements had to be reflective of actual behaviour in the workplace and where possible weave in the conversation metaphor. As an example in the La Duma (soccer theme) the value of integrity was related back to how a referee would ensure the fairness of each game, and  how this instils integrity in the sport.

Third Stage : Experiential Learning and Transformational Game

The conversation metaphors were communicated and understood across each operation and embraced by all. This was delivered with short impactful videos and workshop discussions hosted by change leaders in each operation. A transformational game was selected as the experiential tool to support and embed the behaviour change.

Why was a transformational game chosen ? A transformational game has the intention of changing the “player” (learner) rather than a focus on content or a topic (The Transformational Framework, Sabrina Culya, 2019). A transformational game which seeks to enable a behaviour change requires people to shift their mental paradigms; how they think. A well-designed transformational game can allow for participation which creates emotional connection while challenging mindset with non-threatening dialogue. The nature of play and social dynamic of a game opens neural pathways – we often refer to this space as the “magical circle” where structure and interaction of a game allows a new reality to be created.  It leads to creativity and openness. This type of experience also brings new energy and motivation required to sustain the dialogue.

The transformational games were designed with the following criteria from the change sponsor and client :

1. It needed to reflect and weave the conversation metaphor (theme) into the game narrative.
2. It needed to be designed on a standard framework however still accommodate the nuances for each operation and their metaphor.
3. The game design needed to encourage dialogue, not just light-hearted fun but also serious conversation.
4. Due to the scale of the rollout, experienced change facilitators would need to upskill team leaders to facilitate the dialogue with their teams.
5. The game design also required a degree of adaptability in terms of accommodating longer teaming sessions (one day) while also being able to be played in shorter on-the-job sessions such as meetings
6. There needed to be clear outcomes and accountability following the session, which could be tracked over a period of time

The intention of the transformational game

We set about looking at the intent of the transformational game – to change individual stories, identity and ultimately shift behaviour within the business. When we brainstormed  and tested different types of design, we realised that applying a mechanical approach of using game mechanics as triggers to drive behaviour, would not be suitable . Our intention was to rather design a framework which would create an environment to loosen mental constructs and encourage a new way of being to emerge through the experience.

The design elements of the transformational game

The change required deep learning, and therefore experiential and active learning was applied, incorporating all modalities from auditory, kinaesthetic, visual and tactile. Our anchor point of this design was three representative areas of (i) Head – How do I think about a value (ii) Heart – what is my feeling about this value (iii) Feet – how can I change my action (ultimately) my behaviour based on reflecting on my thoughts and feeling.

The game play was to foster excitement and energy, while encouraging collaboration and limited competition. A pathway was designed which required teams to journey through a cluster of 4 values, starting with head and heart scenarios, and culminating in feet activities and reflections. The gameplay was enriched with strong narratives of the conversation metaphor. This included a series of relatable scenario for each value, which was carefully crafted in consultation with operations and a test audience.

Game Play

The objective was to move along the pathway with a die roll, responding and progressing with thought provoking  scenarios which would require a choice with motivation or an open-ended question. These forms of game quests and questions invited discussion and over time a dialogue evolved . The feeling of movement was created, and all teams were required to work collaboratively to progress through the scenarios. The surprise element was in how teams then decided to commit to change behaviour in the “feet” icon on the gameboard. As follow-up after gameplay, a leaderboard was framed as an action board with teams reflecting and then committing to on-the-job actions.

How was the transformational game delivered?

There were a series of four transformational game which utilised the same framework and gameplay and was played with four – five of the 14 values per game. Each three – four months a session was facilitated by team leaders either as a full day or half day session. In between the more formal sessions, shorter variances of the transformational game (in a spin-the-wheel) allowed for refresher sessions and a check-in on accountability actions.

1. Team Leader Led

The game was facilitated internally with little to no interference from external sources, this allowed for a non-threatening space to be created. This was an environment to foster more transparency and vulnerability for the reframing of personal stories and re-evaluating underlying beliefs. The benefit of internal facilitators also allowed for more contextual discussions related to the working environment and a sense of shaping the culture change. The guidelines and nature of the game environment, furthermore empowered the team leader as facilitator to open up deep conversation about behaviour in the workplace, that is typically left to behavioural experts or psychologists.

2. Designing relatable narratives within the game journey

Each transformational game had a theme and story (conversational metaphor) selected from the operations and across all stakeholders. This element created involvement and immersion of participants (elements of storytelling). Going beyond telling and teaching into the space of involvement and deeper learning.

3. Sustainability

Delivering the transformational games as a series of interventions which could be facilitated in both formal (teaming sessions) and on-the-job sessions, allowed for a gradual embedding of a new way of being in the workplace. Deep learning and shifting of mental paradigms require multiple sessions, this approach allowed for feedback loops to be created between formal sessions, and temperature checks of general sentiment with the accountability board.The transformational game empowered the team leaders to have the conversations and dialogue which are usually reserved for trained professionals. This approach made it feasible for this large scale rollout.
The transformational game received positive feedback, and certainly empowered each change champion to deliver on their mandate. Here are a couple of insights from people participating in the transformational games :

• This approach is not a top-down-listen-to-the-leader approach, but it is about participation of all members, where all have a voice and viewpoint that can benefit the rest of the team.
• It encourages participation, engagement and the desire to transform our behavior as individuals and teams.
• It is not about who is right and wrong, but about what we can learn from each other. We all have learned so much in life and this we can share with other in terms of our desired behavior.
• I was surprised about the levels of wisdom in the room and how sometimes academic jargon on desired behaviours got translated into practical language and application in work, life and play
• I was surprised to see how team dynamics have changed for the better, how teams become more engaged with one another, and how collaborative conversation, instead of me-know-it-all conversations are taking place.

Adjusting to an Online World

Since this cultural change initiative was embedded in the organisation in 2019, many changes have impacted our world. At Game2Change we have reviewed and recalibrated how we can foster dialogue in a virtual world, and still capture the magic circle which leads to shifting stories and ultimately behavior. One of our key insights in interviewing learners, is the power of writing scenarios which capture imagination and can trigger dialogue. We are exploring how you can capture the “stories” of a culture and design for an immersive setting such as online game journeys and live synchronous sessions. The power of technology will make a transformative game more scalable and impactful in the near future. To learn more about our work and how we have applied transformational games and gamification, especially in emerging and developing markets such as South Africa and Africa – visit our website : www.game2change.com

The post Behavioural Change through Transformational Games first appeared on Ludogogy.

Focus on intrinsic over extrinsic motivation

Extrinsic motivation comes from reward, tangible or otherwise. Intrinsic motivation comes from interest in or enjoyment of the activity itself. When we award points and set people in competition, we’re focusing on extrinsic motivation. When we make something fun in its own right, we’re focusing on intrinsic motivation.

By definition, extrinsic motivation relies on the presence of triggers and incentives. When we remove the rewards, the behaviour can stop or fade. And extrinsic motivation can actually replace any intrinsic motivation that exists. In other words, when we start rewarding behaviour, we risk moving that person beyond enjoyment, and nudge them towards reliance on reward alone for motivation.

The big problem for learning designers is that extrinsic motivation is much easier to design into game experiences than intrinsic. It’s much more tangible. But by taking the easy option, we risk losing our chance at making behaviour change deep and lasting.

We can look to frameworks such as Yu-Kai Chou’s Octalysis Framework or Nicole Lazarro’s Four Types of Fun for inspiration to bring out intrinsic motivation, but the first step may be simply resisting the crutch of extrinsic motivators such as points, badges and competition.

Give learners freedom to try and fail, and feedback when they do

Karl Kapp identifies three interlinked ways to design behaviour change into learning games:

• Freedom for players to do what they want in an open environment
• Freedom to fail
• Rapid feedback for success or failure

And in fact, these three are the basis for most of the more profound, non-book learning we do in life. We live our lives. We make mistakes and have successes. The sharper the feedback, the more we tend to change our behaviour.

The Gamification of Learning by Karl Kapp is available on Amazon

This isn’t easy to design into games. It’s much easier to design a very specific, restricted path, or to focus on information to be learned, rewarding correct answers. But again, resisting the easy option is leaning into the effective one.

Boost ability, desire and triggers

BJ Fogg identifies three elements that need to be present to prompt behaviours:

• The person must be motivated — they must want to do it, for whatever reason
• The person must be able — they must find it within their power, or easy enough
• A timely trigger or prompt must coincide with in-the-moment ability and motivation.

A gamified system that will be at work over a period of time can control for these while it’s in effect. But changing behaviour in a way that outlasts a game-based intervention is more difficult. One answer is to design the experience to boost these three factors when they’re next relevant. For example:

• Focusing on upskilling somebody to make them more able
• Helping them internalise reasons to carry out the behaviour, and so motivating them for when the time comes
• Helping them recognise or create triggers in everyday life.

Games-based behaviour change in action

A good way to illustrate some of these principles is to look at some case studies of games or gamified experiences that have succeeded in creating behaviour change.

Zombies, Run!

Zombies, Run! encourages running, and specific running behaviours like intervals, by adding a ‘game layer’ to the running experience. A narration track tells runners via headphones about targets and instructions within the game world. The most basic of these is essentially: ‘zombies sighted, run fast now’, but further levels of subtlety and complexity immerse the player more deeply.

This works well with Fogg’s three principles. The runner is able to do what’s asked, and the game layer gives the motivation and a timely trigger. By making the story and game immersive and thoughtful, the experience focuses on intrinsic fun as well as in-game reward. And the game offers plenty of choices — demands are set from the player’s running goals — and provides feedback during and between runs.

There’s no doubt that Zombies, Run! structures runner behaviour. It could be argued that it does so only while in-game. But it has the potential to be a long-term or permanent running partner, so this may matter less. And if the app is used long enough to move the behaviour from occasional to habitual, removing it may well leave the habit intact.

Culturallye

Culturallye is a classroom game designed to make people change behaviours around cultures and cultural differences. It sets up separate ‘tables’, each of which play a dice-based game — in silence — with a number of rules. They don’t know that each table is playing by different rules. When some players are switched to a new table, awkwardness and challenge ensue when they don’t do things the same way as the table they’ve joined.

The game allows people to make their own mistakes, and solve them in their own way, just as Karl Kapp suggests. Instant feedback through people’s reactions, and freedom to resolve issues in a range of ways, make this a learning experience that translates well to navigating the rules of the real world. It doesn’t provide extrinsic rewards, but is a fun game in itself, that provokes thought and has moments of surprise and high engagement.

As a game designed to change longer-term behaviour, its relationship to Fogg’s ideas are more complex. But by helping people to recognise the complexities of the issue and how it can affect them personally, it helps:

• their ability to take more culturally sensitive actions
• their motivation to want to change the status quo
• the chance that they will recognise or create triggers for doing so.

Superbetter

Superbetter is a phenomenally successful game focused on resilience-friendly behaviour change. The prototype of the game helped its designer Jane McGonigal to make life-saving behaviour changes in her recovery from a serious brain injury, and the game has helped many people change resilience-based behaviours in everyday life.

Superbetter by Jane McGonigal is available on Amazon

It encourages players to set their own goals, challenges and other important factors, but within a game frame:

• Smaller and bigger desired steps and actions are quests and epic wins
• Your social network are allies
• Useful habits and resources are power-ups
• Challenges and obstacles are bad guys

This isn’t a simple game of ‘call something by another name’. McGonigal develops each of these elements in a way that draws on behavioural change research, while giving the player the freedom to map these concepts to their own goals and life however they see fit.

Superbetter’s success in changing behaviours could stem from how well it follows Kapps’ three points, by allowing so much freedom and instant feedback. Its structure also balances extrinsic reward with intrinsic fun, encouraging players to make the game enjoyable and find fun in challenges, self-set goals and helpful tools, as well as through a strong social element.

It may showcase Fogg’s three factors most strongly of all, though. The ‘game frame’ builds from smaller to tougher challenges, and builds player resources, and the journey gives players the ability to do more and more challenging things. The framing specifics have plenty of motivation hooks, playing on deeply resonant themes of bad guys and power-ups that spring from popular culture around games and films. And the structure of the game provides triggers for action in the way quests and tasks are time-linked, and in the social element via allies.

Change behaviours by using all three

These three ideas can be used as frameworks for design, as lenses for viewing design decisions, and as checks on the effectiveness of design:

• Focus on intrinsic over extrinsic motivation
• Give learners freedom to try and fail, and feedback when they do
• Enhance ability, desire and triggers.

The post Unlock Behaviour Change with Games-based Learning first appeared on Ludogogy.

The game was developed by Focus Games Ltd as part of a research initiative by Dr Gary Mitchell, Dr Gillian Carter and Professor Christine Brown Wilson from the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Queen’s University Belfast.

The wider study investigated public perceptions of dementia and attitudes towards people living with dementia. The game was designed to help improve knowledge and perceptions of dementia.

The game, funded by the Dementia Development Services Trust, was co-designed with people living with dementia who are members of Dementia NI.

Background

It is possible to live well with dementia, and we know that many people with dementia are living active lives with the support of families, friends and communities. As the population ages, and the risk of developing dementia increases, there is a pressing need to ensure that generations understand what dementia is, and how to support people in the community living with dementia.

For example, younger people are now experiencing dementia in their family with limited support due to a lack of understanding and/or negative perceptions.  Carers of people living with dementia can also feel hesitant to go out together due to a perceived lack of understanding of the public. This may result in isolation due to being unable to maintain meaningful activities and social engagement.

Whilst this is slowly being addressed by initiatives such as Dementia Friendly Communities (DFCs) (Alzheimer’s Society, 2018), more is needed to enable people living with dementia to receive the respect and support they need to continue to live active and healthy lives in the community.

Digital gaming or ‘gamification’ is becoming an increasingly common way to educate/train employees in both business and health sectors (Jagoda, 2017). Gamification is also used to educate healthcare professionals and the public about a range of healthcare topics (Carter et al, 2009, Carter et al, 2010, Poultney et al. 2016).

How was the game developed?

Development of the game was a collaborative effort. The project team included seven people living with dementia, three dementia advocates from local charity Dementia NI and six undergraduate nursing students from Queen’s University Belfast. They met together five times throughout 2019 to co-design the game.  Firstly, they identified the most significant misconceptions about dementia and how these could be addressed in the game.  This was supported by findings from focus-groups held previously with people living with dementia.  The key themes of the game were felt to be around Emphasising Capability – NOT Disability, and Normalising Dementia (Mitchell et al. 2020).

The game format was then co-designed with Focus Games Ltd, and this included the digital interface, colours and animations used throughout the game.

Results from the evaluation

Over 1,000 students engaged with the game over a  four week period with 500 completing the Approaches to Dementia Questionnaire (ADQ) before and after playing the game. The findings from this study demonstrated that after playing this game there was a statistically significant improvement (p< 0.000) across all domains of the questionnaire showing more optimistic perceptions of the abilities and the future of people with dementia and what might be achieved by them; recognising people with dementia as unique individuals with the same value as anyone else, and overall demonstrating a more positive attitude towards people with dementia. This improvement did not change even with those who have had previous exposure to knowing someone with dementia (p<0.000).

To date, the dementia awareness game has been played over 3,500 times. A ‘serious’ digital game is a creative way to challenge people’s thinking in areas such as care homes and hospitals where there is high turnover of staff making it challenging to maintain dementia training. In particular, this game may engage younger adults in higher education who may be supporting people with dementia at home or work within service industries who otherwise may not receive education or training in dementia. Further to this, the game could be used as a continuing professional development tool across healthcare providers and care homes.

“Research conducted by Queen’s University Belfast shows that after playing the game, a person’s attitudes to people living with dementia improves! This statistically significant information is being reviewed by an international journal” Dr Gillian Carter, Queen’s University Belfast.

The game is free to play, without any registration or login. It will work on any device and only takes a few minutes to play. Access the Dementia game here.

The post Dementia: changing attitudes with a game. first appeared on Ludogogy.

Is agency even a good thing? If so, then what amount of agency is the right amount to give to players? How should players navigate? And how should they go about making decisions in the game?

This article provides a definition of player agency in games. Player agency includes making sure that players are provided with meaningful decisions during their play. This article reviews the concepts and scope of players’ meaningful decisions as well as the requisite components that make up player agency. Player agency is reviewed from multiple perspectives. Those perspectives include from within the magic circle; from within the game design; and lastly from the designer.

What exactly is player agency?

Some may think that player agency is just about interactivity. But that would be cutting the definition too short. Many things can be interactive. Games however provide players with a level of interactivity and choice that has much larger ramifications. This degree of choice is agency and is built on both a philosophical and sociological framework.

Player agency is about giving players the interactivity to affect and change the game world. Though agency, players have power to influence and change what is happening in the game. It provides them control (or at least of sense of it) of what will happen next.

This means that players should be given the ability to make decisions in the game. But these decisions shouldn’t be trivial – at least from the player’s perceptive. It isn’t just about choosing a particular skin or a hat for a player’s avatar. Instead, it’s about making sure that your players can make meaningful decisions in the game.

Games of course provide this amount of agency in different forms and degrees. Games also share a lot in common with stories and narratives. As such, some applications of narratives that have game-like elements like branching stories or “choose your own adventure” provide the player with agency in order to determine the outcome of the story.

That means in both narratives and games, players provide influence, power, and control  over what they want to do; what they want to accomplish; and perhaps most of all what is FUN to do in the game. Because of this, player agency is much more than just simple interactivity. Player agency is instead about providing players with the ability to shape their own experience.

That power to shape their own experience provides players with the satisfaction of implementing their will inside the magic circle of the game. Through this will, they wield, influence, and implement what can be accomplished inside of the game.

Sometimes that amount of agency affects tactical and strategic choices in games. This is especially true for orthogames where separate and unequal outcomes of a game condition (i.e. the winning condition) are necessary to bring play to a close. However, for other idiomatic games (such as role-playing games) those choices could me much less focused on those game changing outcomes. Instead, they could be more aesthetic. Specifically in how players choose how their avatar looks and is represented in the world.

No matter how agency is implemented or defined in games, it does provide one specific purpose. Agency is part of the core elements of what makes a game a game. Providing a player with the options and structure to make those meaningful decisions is the first step that a designer takes in curating the player experience.

Meaningful decisions

The meaningful aspects of decisions is the heart of what gives players agency in games. This includes being able to benefit (or suffer) the consequences of these decisions.  Sometimes those decisions affect  the player character or other characters within the game. Sometimes these decisions affect your overall strategy and how the player will eventually win or lose.

Often, the way that these decisions are made and how they are presented to players are through game mechanics. The mechanics serve as the vehicle for the players’ decisions. They provide the means to achieve their goals, results, or outcomes.

Game mechanics represent the structures that players have to make decisions within games. Those mechanics are defined by the game designer. As such players agency is constructed not only by the types of meaningful decisions that they can make; but also the structure in which those decisions are crafted. Something that is influenced by the designer’s intent and direction.

This decision structure for designers is something that is can be equally simple yet complex. Branching narratives provide players with the ability to make choices in “choose your own adventure” style of games. However, the complexity of the decisions and their outcomes can easily grow in range and scope.

Yet, the structure of those decisions is created by the simple elements of game mechanics. These are the building blocks which provide the player interaction and ultimately agency in the player experience.

Components of player agency

Player agency stems around the player’s ability to make meaningful decisions. Those decisions originate from different structures within the game. However, the structures of those decisions themselves provide the player with both the sense and the outcome for how their decision might affect the outcome of the game.

This includes how a player might perceive their action. These actions are made up of four separate components of player agency: foreseeability, ability, desirability, and connection.

1. Foreseeability addresses how players might see new options or decisions to be made. These can be from a menu of set options in table top games to a map in open world RPG’s. Both options provide players with the ability to “see” what options may be coming up for them to take advantage of next.
2. Ability relates to players actual in-game ability to do something. This can include consuming resources; going in a different direction; or taking an action against another player. If a player can do so within the confines of the game, then they have the ability to take that action.
3. Desirability relates to players’ needs and wants to take specific actions in a game. This could be based on many different motivations and reasons. Some of it may come from a desire to win; defeat others; or perhaps even just make aesthetic changes to the game world.
4. Connection relates to the player’s observation of the decision possessing some sort of feedback, consequence, or reward for taking that action. It could include setting up a player to win the game; providing them a better position; or moving the game closer to its conclusion. Likewise, it could also just have an emotional impact on other players in the game. No matter what the reason, connection provides the players with some sort of feedback in their choice of response.

These components of player agency all exist in a balance between what players want to achieve and what is constrained to them within the game. While this balance sounds like it easy to determine in the design space, it is often hard to create and implement in practice.

Creating decisions are easy. Creating constrained decisions are a little harder. Creating constrained decisions that are meaningful for players is harder still. That’s because players come to expect a certain amount of agency in games based on their initial perception. Negative agency occurs where there is an upset in the balance between what players expect they’ll be able to do in a game and what they can actually do.

This means that striking a balance between what players can and cannot do in the game is one of the hardest things to design successfully. These decisions need to be crafted to be impactful yet meaningful for the player. All of these decisions must also exist within the relative safety of the magic circle.

Agency in the magic circle

The magic circle is the place that we enter when we begin playing games. It is a unique space. Sometimes it’s cooperative, competitive, or both. Sometimes there are “correct” ways to play in the magic circle. Other times the magic circle exists only to provide a boundary between the real and imagined worlds.

When we cross into the magic circle we cross into the game world. As such, we think that we have much more agency in the game world than we do in our everyday lives. That is entirely intentional. Great games are designed to give players the experience of being in control. This means that they can actively influence themselves and the world around them.

However, unfettered control on behalf of the players would make a lot of games trivial and non-challenging. That’s when really great game design and goes one step further by providing agency to players but simultaneously limit player actions. Many might think that limiting what players can do within a game is antithetical to agency.  In reality, limiting what players can do within the game provides challenge, shapes players expectations, and leads to a richer gaming experience.

Meaningful choices within the game is what makes up much of the player experience. However, those choices don’t exist in a vacuum. While players might make them to advance their goals in the game and win out over opponents, they also take into account some other factors. Players sometimes are called onto make moral choices in the game’s narrative. They must also benefit or suffer the consequences of these choices from the game’s environment.

This agency by players within the magic circle is a fundamental part of what shapes the player experience. There is a push and pull going on. Between the formal structures of the game that creates choices for players and players’ desires to make, change, and break choices in the game according to their wishes.

Agency in narratives

Narratives also possess some degree of agency similar to that of the magic circle. Often the first decision here is for users to decide to participate or not within the narrative. Choosing to read, watch, or listen to some form of medium is the first choice that all participants make.

This is further built in idiomatic games like role-playing games where players are given many choices in how their experience is shaped. Some of it includes decisions for character creation, look, and alignment. However during the game, players make further choices and exercise their agency within the narrative of the game.

Conversely, abstract games or action games that are built heavily on the formal structure and mechanics of the design provide fewer opportunities for player agency. There are times for players to exercise their agency within the game, but it is often repetitive and provides little context for how a player might further affect or change the game state apart from strategic decisions.

One of the most famous examples of agency in narratives are through branching narrative stories or “choose your own adventure.” Here players are given the choice for how to proceed in a story based around specific paths and loops created within the narrative. By taking specific decisions at specific times, players can shape and form how a narrative unfolds. While not complete agency, it provides players the opportunity to choose how a traditional linear format unfolds before them.

Agency in game design

Agency at the basic level could just include the number and level of choices that players have throughout the game. But to treat agency as only the number of choices leaves out much of the player experience.

Some of this is addressed by the designer. This is the person who is charged with shaping the player experience for the player though those choices and other formal elements of games. However, a challenge that most designers face is the ability to create agency and meaningful choices for players that fall under different player types and expectations.

One of the hardest things to design is for players to have meaningful choices in that are within the constraints and constructs of the game. This is often done through larger “open-world” type of games that give users a vast array of different choices and considerations for them. Some of the most popular are Fallout, Skyrim, and World of Warcraft. However, these open worlds aren’t the only way of providing agency in games. Instead, designers could also use very simple mechanics and choice structures in abstract games like Go that provide players with much agency through a simpler design.

To say that player agency alone makes a successful game is a mistake. Yes, agency is part of good and great games. But there are other elements of the player experience that forms player expectations. That’s why it’s important to balance out the amount of choice that players have with other elements of the game such as the core loop; player interaction; and progression.

This can be done by providing the player with a balance and diversity of choice. Some of those choices are considered cosmetic (i.e. choosing a player color for a pawn). Some of them could be “life or death” when choosing a direction to proceed in a narrative.  Yet, other choices could simply provide players with “side quests” or missions which aren’t critical for completing the game; but provide the player with additional fulfilling activities which serves the player’s experience.

The presentation of these choices provides players with the ability to choose these options and play within their experience and their specific desires within the game.  I find this evident in more complex and strategic table top games where there are “multiple paths” to victory for players to follow. Providing these options helps me choose a direction I want to go in. This choice provides me agency in how I want to experience the game.

Likewise, video games with active online communities provide even further agency for players. Here, players can choose to interact (or not interact with) other players in the game. Sometimes collaboration and cooperation work in all players’ advantage for achieving a common goal. Sometimes players’ choices to interact with each other fulfills the game’s competitive nature (i.e. Super Smash Bros).

However, one of the most significant aspects of player agency for video games over table top games is that video games require players to adhere to the structure created by the game designers.  Table top games on the other hand provide players with the ability to create or make their own rules as they see fit within the game. Players simply agree to change how a game is played and that becomes the new reality within the “magic circle” of game play.

Finally, both game designers and serious game designers need to consider the value that agency and decisions provides to players. Making sure that players are reinforced for their specific choice is important for providing a venue of relevant agency. Making a choice that has no bearing or impact on the player experience in the end feels…. hollow.

Agency is important for serious game designers as well as learning designers as a cognitive process that is greatly shaped by the types of decisions that students make and the reinforcement that comes from them. This “constructivist” approach to student learning emphasizes that teaching isn’t about transferring knowledge. Rather, it’s about helping students create their own learning from their experience and conclusions. Serious games help student do that within the game environment.

Agency and the designer

The designer always has many choices when it comes to designing agency in games. Much of the sense of control and meaningful decisions come from the design choices from the designer. At its most basic level, this is based on the level of trust the player has for the designer.

Does that trust exist? How is that trust manifested? Will the player be rewarded for their decision to play the game? All of these questions must be positively answered in order for the designer and the player to have a positive relationship that includes player agency.

This is a challenging and strained relationship for all designers. Especially those table top designers who are constrained by the medium and process of creation. Here, these designers must make decisions and choices that provide the acceptance of agency for players. The varied and diverse choices and decisions for players must be presented in a way that aids in the player’s experience. Without it, the game becomes merely an exercise of pursuing “inefficient means” towards a goal.

Takeaways

This article provided a definition of player agency in games. Player agency includes ensuring that players are provided with meaningful decisions throughout their play. This article reviewed the concept and scope of players’ meaningful decisions as well as the requisite components that constitute player agency. Player agency was reviewed from multiple perspectives including from inside the magic circle; during game design; and lastly through the eyes of the game designer.

This article was about player agency.  To learn more about gamification, check out the free course on Gamification Explained.

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

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

The post What is Player Agency in Games? first appeared on Ludogogy.

The first Summit succeeded beyond our expectations. Instead of a few hundred people, we had well over a thousand attend. We didn’t make enough money to retire, but we DID make enough to cover costs and decide to do the second edition in 2021.

But doing a second edition was always going to involve change. You don’t want to rest on your laurels and just do the same thing over again, do you?

So change we did! The biggest change from 2020 to 2021 was the introduction of LIVE and interactive sessions.  The core of the summit remained the pre-recorded interviews with playful and creative experts from around the world. But we added on the options for people to upgrade their free general access in order to attend and participate in six live sessions: two play sessions, two workshops and two networking sessions.

Another big change was in how we dealt with our speakers. This year, we went to great lengths to pull them much closer to us and to the summit, by having regular online briefings and networking, setting up a WhatsApp group and generally making more of an effort to create a community space for those who wanted to use it.

The original summit was already conceived as an online event before the Covid pandemic got started. We were curious to see how we would go 12 months later. Zoom fatigue, proliferating online options, over-availability of FREE content were all factors that COULD impact our growth.

Publicity to Community

To cut through the clutter, we also did something else new: recorded short promo videos with each speaker after their interview recording session. We also conducted an extensive and regular email and social media campaign to try and find as many touch points with our existing audience and our potential new audience as possible.

This year, we also launched a PR campaign, with content, graphics material and information sent to a wide range of creativity or Play-oriented publications. This resulted in a number of Podcast interviews, a magazine article and a range of blog column inches.

The biggest change in the outcome of the summit has been the emergence of a strong sense of community. While the reaction and feedback to the first edition was very positive, we did not get much push-back in terms of trying to keep these people together.

That changed this year. Comments from speakers and public alike showed that there is a distinct lack of places where people interested in Play and Creativity can congregate, share information, learn, grow and network.

A particular example of this is the WhatsApp group we set up to stay in touch with our speakers and to help them with questions or problems. Not one speaker has left since the Summit closed. True, we are not abusing this channel, but everyone is keen to stay hanging out and to see what happens next.

Numerous emails have come in with questions about the future and expressing the sense of lack of a real play and creativity community.

It’s hard to know what to do with this change in impact. We love it and it feels great, but Communities are complex and complicated things. This information is still in the pot being processed!

The live and interactive sessions were without doubt responsible for a lot of this changing of tide in sentiment. For many of the session the same faces kept popping up, and connections and friendships were started in the breakout rooms in in the Zoom chat.

Clearly, everyone is missing the ability to just meet NEW people and chat about things that are important to you.  As the pandemic has mutated, so has our social response, our willingness to engage and our levels of fatigue

Reading anything into our statistics and figures is next to impossible to do. There are so many variables that effected our success or lack thereof.  Therefore, whatever we DO do next will be all about how we FEEL about the future, and not what the statistics tell us.

Play and creativity are the best weapons to deal with change and the growth it often requires. We hope that, especially in these fast changing and uncertain times, the Summit was able to help people facing change, to find new ways of navigating it, and new tools for taking advantage of it.

The main takeways?

• Play and creativity may never have been as important as they are now
• People are craving a community around these subjects
• The constant nature of change currently is impacting our desires and purpose

The post Round-up of Playful Creative Summit 2021 first appeared on Ludogogy.

In today’s fast-paced environment, learning is the need of the hour. Yes, you may get hired because you’re a talented individual with a great track record and have experience with Fortune 500 companies but the reason you’ll stay on top of a company’s “watch-list” is if you keep learning and growing.

We need to learn to learn quickly and efficiently: what you knew five years ago will most likely not work today. Marshall Goldsmith talks about this in his book: ‘What Got You Here Won’t Get You There’. So in search of a powerful learning tool that meets today’s demands of growth, I have discovered Game-Based Learning (GBL) and here’s why I believe GBL will change corporate learning for years to come.

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There is available on Amazon

1. PROXIMITY TO REALITY for authentic behaviors

Game-based Learning has the ability to build a strong association with reality. What happens in a game-based learning environment has a direct correlation with how you might deal with a similar situation in real life. 94% of participants who have played our game-based learning games say that their behaviors in the game are indicative of how they actually respond. Knowing these responses in a closed-circuit environment are far safer than dealing with their consequences in real-life. For instance: counter-productive behaviors, ineffective decision making skills

2. ACCELERATED GROWTH through real experiences

Real growth happens though experience. And we know that the more experience one gathers, the more wisdom they have because the learning associated with an intense experience gets lodged into one’s cerebral cortex. Game-based learning is about taking months, if not years of experience and condensing it into one or two days. An effectively designed game-based learning experience can also create a similar impact because authentic emotions are triggered due to the experience’s closeness to reality.

3. BRIDGE THE KNOWING-DOING GAP

When people fail to apply what they’ve learned it is not because they don’t want to. In a study conducted by Stanford University, it is found that people don’t apply their learning because they aren’t confident enough in their ability to apply the learned skill/behavior. Game-based learning bridges that gap by giving participants the opportunity to apply their learning in real-time. Participants see the impact of their actions right away and are more confident to apply in other parts of their lives as well.

4. MULTI-FUNCTIONED USAGE for Organisational Development (OD) interventions

Imagine a training program that can be used to achieve not one but multiple objectives; learning, behavioral analysis, skill development, succession planning. Because an immersive learning environment is designed to replicate life — it has several simultaneous use cases. Life doesn’t play out in a linear fashion, many things are happening simultaneously. Job, family, health and wellness and every decision you make has not one but many implications. Likewise, game-based learning allows multi-functioned usability through its implementation.

These four elements stand out strongly from a typical experiential learning or classroom training environment. They also have the potential to change the way corporate training happens because of their multifold impact on everything business: ROI, top-line and critical lead measures that can’t be leveraged without effective learning interventions.

This article was originally published in the Gamitar Blog.

The post Four Reasons Game-Based Learning Makes Corporate Training Better first appeared on Ludogogy.