I don’t really think I’ve ever had the chance to properly document the reasons why I have spent a vast majority of my life working towards being a games designer and why games matter to me, and  to have the chance to actually share this with an audience of lovely readers is a pretty cool experience. With that being said, I hope you find it an enlightening or at the very least entertaining read into my personal history with games.

It all started with games…

Some of the earliest of memories that I can remember involving games would be playing games such as Wario Land, Tetris and Pokemon on the family Game Boy and Saturn Bomberman and the Lost Vikings 2 on the Sega Saturn. Additionally, me and my siblings would also take over the family PC to enjoy games such as Age of Empires, Theme Park World, The Sims, Dungeon Keeper and Black and White. Steadily moving onto the first 2 Playstation consoles with game series including Crash Bandicoot, Ape Escape, Klonoa and Dark Cloud to past the time before getting my hands on the Nintendo Gamecube, thanks to my friend showing me Super Smash Bros. Melee, Super Mario Sunshine and the Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.

I eventually got my hands on a Nintendo Wii to share with the family along with an Xbox 360 so that I could enjoy some of the latest titles the gaming world had to offer, introducing me to the world of online gaming thanks to Call of Duty and Halo game series on the Xbox as well as discovering the realm of MMORPG’s with World of Warcraft on the PC.

I could be here all day adding to my unreasonably long back catalogue of games but I’ll just leave you with the knowledge that I’ve currently got a PS4, a 3DS,  a large library of PC games on my Steam library and a handful on my phone, not to mention a constantly evolving collection of Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic the Gathering cards and board games. If you name a game, chances are I’ve played it or heard of it in one way or another, but why is this important to getting into the mind of this rather eclectic young man?

Well random rhetorical question asker, playing games was both my hobby and my coping mechanism whilst growing up with high-functioning autism and having little to no interest in conventional activities that other kids my age were taking part in such as music, art or sports and always gave me something to use in order to connect with other people that I interacted with.

This led to me managing to make like-minded friends who introduced me to other forms of media such as TV shows, cartoons and movies as well as helping me break out of my comfort zone and try new interesting physical activities such as Go-karting, Bowling and Laser-tag whilst also introducing me to games that I may not have heard of, thus feeding my hobby even more!

Forming my career path

I think it’s safe to say that I am rather fond of games and whilst brushing up my grades at college, I discovered that they offered a Games Development course I leapt at the opportunity and had an enlightening 3 years learning the basics of art, programming and designing games, with the opportunity of flying to Japan for the Tokyo Game Show (aside from the jet lag from a 12 hour flight…it was amazing!). This didn’t stop there, with me spending the next 4 years studying Games Design and Development at the University of Greenwich, primarily focusing on the design side of things including; Sound, User Experience and Interface Design.

I also learned more about Serious Games which completely changed my preconceptions on what games could achieve in the educational, medical and rehabilitation sectors and provides a vastly different experience that found along the likes of conventional educational games such as Reader Rabbit or Mavis Beacon.

In a nutshell, serious games are products that are tailor made to solve problems that the client and designers wishes to solve within an interactive and entertaining way. The goal of these games could range from a broad audience, providing adjustable motion-controlled minigames intent on assisting in the training of patients with low motor skills to games that are intended for a very specific purpose, like a game that tests the knowledge of doctors who specialise in prenatal resuscitation.

During my 3rd year, I managed to acquire a work placement in Milan, Italy with the serious games company Imaginary SRL and work on these rather specific examples as a consultant games designer. To say that this trip was an enlightening experience would be a gross understatement, especially since it was the first time that I’d moved away from my family home and country (go big or go home eh?), I managed to learn conversational Italian despite never learning the language before and it was the first taste of working within the games industry and I can safely say that I want be involved with more of these kinds of projects, serious games or otherwise.

How Games Design has shaped who I am

I firmly believe that I don’t think that I would be the person that I am today if I hadn’t taken the extra step to learning more about how games are designed and developed. This is most likely due to me believing that there is no entirely useless knowledge as being a game designer is all about creating experiences of all kinds, meaning that it is important to be at least familiar with almost all things that can be found or experienced within reality, whilst also keeping an open mind to trying new things and ideas I may not have originally come up with myself (especially in the world of food…why didn’t anyone tell me tasting things tasted so good?).

This open-mindedness has also been useful when I’ve had to work with teams as I although am comfortable with making decisions and directing people, I’m more than happy to concede the leadership role for someone who is more knowledgeable or competent than I am while I take on more of a supportive role within the team. I also make it a point to make sure that everyone on the team has some form of input in the current task (inclusion is important after all).

Outside of my professional setting, having an open minded approach has actually improved my ability to socialise and connect with people in both social and professional settings by actually focusing my attention to the interests of the people I’m talking to and then leading the flow of the conversation to those interests or to subjects that are similar to them (very handy if you’re not 100% sure about what to talk about with someone).

All in all, contrary to the common stereotype of gamers not being social, I’d like to think that it’s thanks to games that I’m the outgoing, albeit slightly cheeky social butterfly that I am today who’s always on the lookout for new and interesting experiences.

I think I’ll finish up here but thanks for reading this rather verbal barrage about my character origins and if you ever want to chat, I’m always about on Linkedin or other avenues of communication (I’m sure Ludogogy has my email tucked away somewhere), might even break the ice with a game of Magic if you fancy it.

But for now, I’ll leave you with both a fun picture I took at an MC Escher exhibition I found in Milan as well as a quote from Lorewalker Cho, a wise old Panda from World of Warcraft that I think captures how I try to view life:

“Eyes open, always be learning”.

The post Why game design matters to me – Part II first appeared on Ludogogy.

• How the facilitator needs to interact with the system
• How the participants interact with the system
• The shortcomings of the technology
• The tech specs of the facilitator’s and participants’ devices
• And the most important: facilitating the game itself

While the intent is to teach how to facilitate a fun learning game, some of the sections are daunting and downright tedious! I also wasn’t getting the results I was hoping for with the certification program i.e. of the first 50 people that signed up, only 3 completed the certification program while most were unresponsive. That’s some scary data!
When I went back to the drawing board, I highlighted a few things that I wanted in the program (in order of priority):

1. Improved completion rate
2. Self-paced
3. Participants to support each other in their cohorts
4. Participants to feel engaged in the program

The more I thought about my priorities, the clearer it became that engagement was the most important element in the eco-system. It wasn’t that people were not completing the program because they didn’t want to or because going through the content was a drag, it was mostly because they were busy. They didn’t always have the time to go through the material and in other cases they would just forget. One might argue: why not use simple notifications to remind people to get back on the program. Really? I think platforms like Coursera set the benchmark of running online courses. How many incomplete courses do you have in your arsenal despite their timely and well researched reminders? Certainly more than we care to admit.

So what then? Maybe a game? Perhaps, one that would require players to interact with each other. Where the currency to progress is linked to the completion of the certification program. And most importantly: the reminders don’t come from the organizers but from other participants. Fortunately for me, my team and I had built such a game a few years ago so I thought of trying it out. I uploaded all my certification content on the game and ran a few test runs.

After working through the initial teething issues through the first several batches, I was ready to launch the competitive mode which really brings the game to life. I set up three teams who would compete against each other for first place.

The pick-up was a little slow as usual. But as members began attending the program, they got more and more involved. They asked other, less active, members to join in and play because everyone was required to increase the team score. As each person played the game they were completing their certification program.

It was absolutely fascinating to see how members of teams that don’t even know each other were playing and competing with one another. The scores were off the charts and I was blown away by the results! By the time we reached the third week of the certification program with the three teams I was able to see that of the 24 participants enrolled, 22 of them are active and progressing in their certification program on a daily basis – a ratio I had never seen before.

So what’s my point? Games can be a powerful tool to enable engagement and interaction when used purposefully. I think one of the reasons I was able to achieve the little success I had was because I spent time in contemplation and research to figure out why my participants weren’t progressing. There’s no doubt that with different data I might’ve chosen another route – perhaps not a game. When we spend time in analysing the root cause and the single most important element that could cause the domino effect of positive behavior which would ultimately achieve your objective, you’re well on your way to designing a game or an approach that is sure to hit the nail on the head!

The post Increasing Engagement by 2000% Using Games first appeared on Ludogogy.

At the end of that period, 3 things brought my attention back to games, although from a different perspective: the concept of gamification (which I became familiar with from my previous work),  the rediscovery of storytelling tabletop Role Playing Games (especially Wraith: The Oblivion) and finding out about the indie developer community.

I wondered for a while why I had got tired of video games in the first place, and why I got somehow interested in them again. Had games changed? I didn’t come to any definitive answer. But I quite like a philosopher named Ludwig Wittgenstein, and an example he used in his book Philosophical Investigations came to mind. That was going to free me from my conception of what games ought to be.

68. How is the concept of a game bounded? What still counts as a game and what no longer does? Can you give the boundary? No. You can draw one; for none has so far been drawn. (But that never troubled you before when you used the word “game”.)

(…)

101. The idea now absorbs us, that the ideal [i.e. the essence of a game] ‘must’ be found in reality. Meanwhile we do not as yet see how it occurs there, nor do we understand the nature of this “must”. We think it must be in reality; for we think we already see it there [when we are able to talk about ‘games’, and readily intuitively classify something as ‘a game’ or ‘not a game’]. 

As could not be otherwise, my notion of video game was totally conditioned by the video games I had played, or had seen, or had read about. But none of them could really be thought of as paradigmatic, simply because that ideal does not exist by itself: we put it together. That undeclared ideal is created and nourished based on our previous experiences, the instances of what has been shown to us labelled as games. And this is done subconsciously by both players and developers.

If you think about it, the genres and subgenres that have come to define the different possible categories of video games just happen to be there by natural selection. At some moment, a game mechanic was compelling enough for the players so that designers decided to reincorporate it (and refine it) in later video games. Other developers decided to imitate them, and that was it. The same goes for narrative and visual aesthetics. Although this of course is something to be expected from a business point of view, this persistence of genres, mechanics and narratives have reinforced the stereotypes and expectations that are held about video games, both by players and non-players. That was precisely what had happened to me at 17: I had got tired of some specific (though certainly prevailing) game design decisions, and applied that judgement to every possible game. Simply put, I had developed a prejudice.

All this motivated me to delve into the technical and conceptual tools on which game design is based, and I got decisively convinced that the potential of these tools went far beyond their conventional use and implementation. Above all, what fascinated me most was the possibility of hybridizing apparently disparate disciplines that interested me, through game design.

Soon after in 2019, I found out about the International Prize for Cultural Innovation organized by the CCCB (Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona).  which set out to incentivise dialogue, reflection and creativity related to the Internet, promoting innovative projects that help to empower citizens and improve the Net. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to put this game design philosophy to the test, so I gathered a team, and we submitted our proposal: World Wild Web.

World Wild Web is a collaboratively designed non-profit video game where players will realize the power of digital persuasion, its economic, political and social influence and its ubiquitous weight on social media. At World Wild Web, you will be part of a team of professional commentators at FloKs, a social network whose business model focuses on an under-exploited digital market: authoritarian regimes. Under the slogan “Your Sovereign Internet”, FloKs offers its clients (the governments of these regimes) a modern and personalized social platform that allows them to integrate their methods of social control in a discreet way. As a FloKs commentator, you will have to participate in the disinformation and astroturfing campaigns of one of these governments in the midst of different crises. Impersonating multiple ordinary users, you will intervene in various FloKs discussions with the aim of mitigating social discontent. To do this, you will make use of logical fallacies, SPAM, fake news and selective censorship to shape the public opinion of Internet users.

We were extremely lucky and our idea was awarded the first prize, which allowed us to finance the development of the video game. At the moment, the code programming is practically finished. We are now incorporating the narrative and defining the different missions that will make up the game. We are inviting various groups of people, both experts and ordinary citizens, to help us include the most relevant themes into the story, so that the game will reflect some of the real challenges that we face in this era of disinformation.

To conclude, I would like to encourage everyone (players and non-players) to constantly unlearn what games are, or should be… Let the indefiniteness of play surprise you. You cannot possibly imagine what you might discover.

The post Unlearn what play should be first appeared on Ludogogy.

A couple of days ago I said that Castle Dice was my absolute favourite game in the whole world.  When I said this I may have been overlooking another game slightly.  The other game is 2048.  For those of you who don’t know 2048 – it’s a simple puzzle game in which the player slides numbered blocks around a 4×4 grid.  When two blocks containing the same number collide they merge to form a block containing twice that number.  The object of the game is to create a block containing the number 2048.  Just search in Google for 2048, but please don’t blame me if you fall into a timesink.

Last night I cracked it.  I made 2048, and this morning I feel free. This may go some way to explaining why I cited Castle Dice and not 2048 as my favourite game.   Castle Dice feels like a ‘proper’ game, whereas 2048 feels like a bit of a guilty pleasure – an itch that needs scratching.  When I’ve finished playing Castle Dice, I feel happy about time well spent with friends and family. After a long session of 2048, I often feel disappointed that I have not yet reached the goal.  Often this feeling is also tinged with the tiniest bit of self-loathing that I have yet again spent x amount of time playing 2048 instead of ironing / working on my own game / cleaning up the mess in the house / filing tax return (delete as applicable).  I feel a little like a reformed smoker who has suddenly found herself begging a cig and lighting up at a party.

With respect to the business learning game I am creating, I definitely don’t want the participants finishing with the feeling that they could have been doing something better with their time, but I do want to capture some of the compulsion to continue which I feel when playing 2048.  One of the things I find particularly interesting is how my intention to play for ‘just 5 minutes’ is swept aside.  Failure to achieve the goal, instead of prompting me to give up, merely drives me to have ‘just one more go’, until I realise that it’s stupid o’clock and I really need to go to bed.

I have witnessed the powerful demotivational effect of failure in some games designed for learning – in particular in a competitive team situation, and I have also personally experienced how I have been demotivated in both game and real-life situations by my own failures.  So what is it about the way failure is dealt with in this game that makes it such a spur to continue, and how can I adapt and apply that to my game setting?

I have spent a little time trawling around the available literature on failure in games and motivation.  I can recommend this.  It’s fascinating, and there are some very well written Psychology, Education and Serious Games papers out there, but I will try to distil from them the parts which I find most relevant to my job in hand.

Experimentation and perseverance – games allow for repeated experimentation and perseverance in the face of failure.  Perseverance is a form of achievement which allows the player to feel rewarded by failure – the ‘I’m not going to let this beat me’ feeling

Problem- solving strategies – on its own perseverance might fail to motivate for a long period in the face of continued failure, but failure also allows an opportunity to try again in a different way – to experiment with different strategies.  And before you ask, yes, you can come up with a winning strategy for a puzzle with the simple rule set like 2048 – I came up with it two nights ago and it was only a matter of time then before I managed to successfully apply it.  I won’t publish a spoiler here, but you can email me if you like sarah@ludogogy.co.uk.  I’ll also give you my system for halving Sudoku solving time if you want. Problem-solving and coming up with strategies reward because they engender feeling of competence, creativity and choice – all of which are components of meaningful play.

Rapid feedback – 2048 gives constant and rapid feedback.  The two ‘formal ‘measures of your success or failure are the magnitude of the highest number block you have managed to create and your ‘high score’ – a points based score which relates to the number of tiles you have managed to merge.  There are other less formalised measures of your progress or lack that can be perceived as you play.  Most notably, your current game finishes and you fail if:

1. You have failed to create the 2048 block AND
2. There are no blocks with the same numbers adjacent to each other which can be merged AND
3. There are no gaps not filled by numbered blocks in your grid.

So, the gradual filling of the grid by blocks indicates you are close to failure.  The distance between blocks of the same number indicate the degree of difficulty you are in.  Taken together, these pieces of feedback build a picture of how well you are playing, regardless of your current score or the highest tile.  All of these feedback mechanisms will help to feed to desire to persevere in the following ways:

• To achieve the next highest numbered block for the first time
• To achieve a higher numbered block next go
• To improve upon one’s high score
• To play better next time

Rewarding effort not mastery – Mastery of this game is by achievement of the ultimate goal – the 2048 block.  However, the high-score mechanism allows a feeling of progress towards this as does the act of achieving a higher numbered block for the first time.

In theory – I mastered the game yesterday and that being the case, I now feel I don’t need to play again – errrr…. except for one thing.  Very stupidly, in hindsight, I downloaded a version of the game which allows me to play in ‘infinite’ mode.  This means I could theoretically play the game without an ultimate end goal (see Tetris) with no possibility of mastery – just the reward of bettering my own performance.  I fear I may return after the current hiatus.

Stakes – the penalties of failure are low.  Nothing horrible is going to happen to me because I haven’t made the 2048 block.  This makes many games unlike real life, where the consequences of failure at, say, rock climbing, are potentially disastrous.  This makes games a safe place to experiment and allows resilience and perseverance in the face of failure.

Simplicity of trying again – When I fail in 2048, it is very easy to try again.  The actual actions I need to carry out to play could not be simpler to do.  I slide my finger across a screen.  Also the first thing that pops up when I do fail is a button which I can click ‘Try Again’ which clears the screen and starts me off, which is actually easier than putting the thing down!

Contrast this with failure in some real life situations and in some games where a large amount of preparation or re-doing is required to make another attempt.  Discovering you do not have enough oxygen when halfway up Everest (in real life or in an realistic Everest climbing sim game) will require you to climb back down, reorganise (and refinance) another expedition and climb halfway back up again before you are even back in the same position – this is part of the ‘low stakes’ element.

All well and good – but what about the self-loathing thing?  Where does that come from and how can I avoid it in the game I am creating.  Without getting too involved or pretending to have in-depth knowledge of Psychology (and Sociology) which I don’t, I think I will look to brain chemistry to explain why I continue to play and Socialisation to explain why I feel bad about it.  I have expectations of myself as wage-earner, mother, household member and member of society which I feel I am failing to live up to if I spend time doing something as trivial as playing a game, when I could be doing something ‘useful’.  But, my reptile brain doesn’t care about any of that so long as it keeps getting the dopamine shots.

I need to balance the two in my activity.  I will, after all, be expecting people to dedicate both money and time to my game.  Succeed or fail, my participants must feel their time is well spent as well as compelling and fun.  When I am designing for the elements above, I must constantly have in my mind the question ‘But what does that help my players to learn, and how?’

Blimey – who would have thought there was so much in it?  For a game based on such a simple premise, there’s a lot of stuff going on.  The lessons I am taking forward to my own design are:

• Give the participants scope to try different strategies
• Include lots of opportunities to solve problems
• Give participants autonomy in their choices
• Make it easy to return from a point of failure without too much recapping
• Build in formal and informal progress indicators which will encourage perseverance
• Feedback should be timely and frequent
• Include inter-team competition only if it is relevant to the goal / learning objective
• Ensure that game goals consider participants’ ‘socialised’ view of themselves and their objectives as well as the dopamine shots

The post 2048 – Making Failure Motivating first appeared on Ludogogy.

At the moment, my absolute favourite game in the whole world in “Castle Dice”.  I bought it about a month ago and I don’t think I can count the number of times we’ve played it since then.  Kids love it.  Adults love it.  I wish I’d made it.

When playing a game it is sometimes hard to put your finger on what it is that makes it so compelling, and maybe trying to analyse it, I guess, might suck some of the fun out of it.  But, being in the business of making games myself, I really have to be able to work it out.

I think the best way that I can describe it is that I feel that Castle Dice is:

• Elegant
• Self-contained
• Well balanced

By elegant, I mean that it feels as though nothing is superfluous or wasted.  Each element in the game serves a definite purpose, which in turn contributes seamlessly to the theme of the game.  Nothing feels like it has been spliced on at the end to make the game more ‘castley’ or anything like that.

By self-contained, I mean much the same thing, but it is more to do with the way the different elements interact with each other.  For example, gaining more farmers will enable you to gain more animal resources or even choose which animal resources you collect.  These animal resources give you the ability to use special abilities which might let you:

• Take your turn first
• Hold more cards in hand
• Gather more resources
• Change the kind of worker you have placed

In turn, having more resources enables you to build more castle parts (the main purpose in the game).  Some of these castle parts also give one abilities or interact with other elements.  One of the ‘Wall’ parts will give you a victory point if you end the game with three farmers (thereby completing the elegant causality loop started above).

This is an example of the Tableau Building mechanic, where permanent or semi-permanent elements come into play which influence your capabilities in further play, or the way the game is played.

There are many examples of these circular co-dependent relationships between game elements, which give the potential for many different, and quite complex, strategies to be played.  Having said that, the basic rules are simple enough for my 7 year old to grasp and understand, so the game can be played simultaneously by players of different ages with equal enjoyment.

The balance within the game, whereby none of these capabilities is more powerful than any other, but can be played in many interesting ways, speaks of extensive and very thorough play-testing, and game designers who really care about the experience they deliver.

Well I can’t create “Castle Dice”, but I do have a game of my own to make.  At the moment I am compiling a list of the Technologies, Mechanics, Story element and Aesthetics I want to include – as per Schell’s Elemental Tetrad.  These four aspects all inform each other in Schell’s model

The technology seems on the face of it to be the simplest element to tie down.  I want this experience to be a face to face event with visually pleasing physical elements that the participants can interact with.  The participants will be playing alone or in small teams and will have a tabletop to work on.  They will be completing records.  From this information I can make a first stab at the technologies I want to use.  A board or similar playing surface will act as a graphical representation of the business they are running (and hoping to make more sustainable).

Counters or similar markers will be used to represent the ‘state’ of the business in numeric terms by being placed on specific positions on the board.  Participants will need to write down certain parts of the business ‘state’ to create permanent records for later reference, and will need to carry out some calculations to create metrics from this data.  So my technology list looks like this;

• Boards
• Tokens
• Pen and paper
• Calculators

To come up with a first draft for the Mechanics for the game was a little more challenging.  I have a list of game mechanics, compiled from other peoples’ list and from my own observations.  There are well over 100 of them and the list is growing daily.  I keep them on a Rolodex (there’s some cutting edge tech for you).  But how to go about deciding which ones I want to use for this game.

In the end, I just took the whole list and picked out the ones which ‘felt’ right for my game given the theme and the learning outcomes.

Half an hour later I had a pile of more than 50 game mechanics in front of me – clearly far too many.  I needed to come up with a way of whittling down my long list considerably.

Fortunately, I had already put in a considerable amount of thought into the experience I wanted my learners to have.  I then created a list of ‘experience categories’, top-level experiences the participants would have.  These were:

1. Goal setting
2. Taking Action
3. Resources
4. Randomness
5. Problem Solving
6. Feedback
7. Ways of Working
8. Values and Attitudes
9. Constraints and Obstacles
10. Structure

The last one is not really an experience category, more a category I included to help myself, the designer to think about the structure of the game, the glue that will hold the experiences together.

For each of the 50 odd mechanics in the pile I placed it into one or more categories as I felt appropriate. For example, ‘Economy Management’ was placed under the categories 1, 2, 3 and 5, whereas ‘Turn-based play’ found itself only under ‘Structure’.

By this method, each mechanic received a number of ‘votes’, which I could use as a basis to whittle down my list.  I started with the pile of mechanics which only had one vote (only support one category), looked at each in turn and rejected them if they were unsuitable.  It is important to note that it was not simply a case of throwing out those with the least votes – the numbers were simply a basis for starting to look at what might go.  The important aspect is to examine each one in the light of the already stated learning objectives, theme and desired experience.

Tableau Building was an early casualty, and proved to me the value of this examination process.  Because I am so fond of Castle Dice at the moment, and see Tableau Building as such an attractive and elegant mechanic, I included it in my long list.  On close examination, it has no place in my proposed game (although I really hope I will get to use it in another game).  This highlights the importance of having an objective approach which constantly references what is important, the experience you want, and in the case of a game built specifically for learning – the learning objectives.

The only way to arrive at something as elegant, self-contained and well balanced as Castle Dice is to strip out all the extraneous stuff.  Don’t become seduced by a cool mechanic or whizzy bit of kit.  If it doesn’t add anything – leave it out.

The post Including only what is needed – Lessons from Castle Dice first appeared on Ludogogy.

Pre-lockdown, in a time that now resembles the Roman empire before it fell, I was looking at a busy year of LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® workshops. By March, I was looking at my bricks and planning to disinfect them and putting them away for the foreseeable future. And yet, funnily enough 2020 had a different plan.

LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® (LSP) is a method for exploring issues, using the famous colourful bricks. Through careful facilitation, workshops ensure everyone’s voices are heard in the room by sharing their models. The result is a deeper commitment to the outcomes, as everyone has contributed to the vision. We can create metaphors to explain complex thoughts or place ourselves into the problem to explore it.

As the Spring evolved into Summer, it became clear to me that actually LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® could be a very useful tool for organisations to start exploring their options for moving forward. What better way to explore barriers to development, re-imagining the future and planning how to get there. Using a playful approach, could LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® allow everyone to share their ideas and concerns in order to move forward beyond this annus horribilis?

It didn’t take long to get the answer to my pondering as I was contacted by a creative organisation wanting to explore the future of their sector. Never one to shy away from a challenge we discussed how to approach it concluding that online was the way forward so I dusted off the bricks and posted the packets out to participants – with the strict instruction not to open them until the session! The element of fun and surprise was needed more than ever.

Since then, I’ve delivered LSP workshops to nearly 150 people online with many more in the pipeline. So what have I learned about playful thinkers in 2020?

• LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® can work well online, if anything it focuses people’s attention on explaining their models and in doing so the meaning is clear to everyone else.
• LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® can still ensure that all the voices in the Zoom are heard!
• Allowing people to think about the future, using colourful bricks is great for their well-being. Every session has so much energy and they are back in control of things.
• We love to build and plan. Lockdown made that difficult and yet playful thinkers used it as an opportunity to look at things differently.

Another takeaway for me has been that when we can’t physically be in a room together, working with the same LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® bricks means there is still a deep connection and level of understanding amongst a team. Whereas some teams might shy away from the idea of using LSP as a method to explore issues previously, now we have to re-imagine how we work at a distance, these brilliant bricks are bringing our thinking together more than ever.

Maybe 2020 is like a LEGO® model we have been working on for a long time, our pride and joy until someone steps on it, or you place a brick on a precarious narrow area and suddenly it collapses. All that work, all that effort and for a while we look at it and wonder what went wrong. Then finally, we pick up the bricks again to start building again, rebuilding stronger, with improvements, accepting the model will never be the way it was, but with some playful thinking it could be even better.

The post Why Playful Thinkers are Enjoying 2020 first appeared on Ludogogy.

You can’t build trust without talking.  You can’t explore ideas without being able to share opinions.  You can’t work together without being able to communicate effectively.

So it felt right that the first official game in my Toybox was Communication Top Trumps.  In fact, the game came first – it was what led me to actually make the Toybox a reality rather than a “one day” in my head.

I actually designed the game as a demo session to share with a group and show them the kind of thing I do.  But it was made quite clear to me that there was more to it than that – it wasn’t just a demo, it was the start of what was to come.

The funny thing is that I don’t recall playing top trumps as a child – I think it appeared in my adult life at some stage and I became aware of just how many different decks were available! So why did I choose this as the basis of my first game?  Because;

• I love a card game – having something to hold in your hand to keep them occupied or give yourself a little mental barrier….!
• I like that it has the ability to show different strengths – even the ‘not so great’ cards have something brilliant on them
• It’s part tactic and part guessing (but also has a winning outcome!)

On top of that I could see even more potential in how the cards could be used in multiple ways.  Bringing elements of other games or activities into the mix allows for a wide range of ways to play.  And I love being able to provide variety for people.

Rather than create a deck of cards with all the answers on, I created a template for people to make their own avatar.  It has a series of communication questions, scales, focuses etc and they choose the answers that suit them.  People make their own cards (without sharing the answers) and then play can commence.

There’s something about being part of the creation of the game itself that gives people more ownership and interest into what happens next.  It builds the curiosity bank up and people are eager to share their answers and to see what others have chosen.

It’s a fantastic way to test perceptions too.  Just because one person appears to be very chatty doesn’t mean that’s their natural state – maybe they feel they have to be like that at work to fit in.  Or maybe because the quiet person never talks about their dreams, you assume it means they don’t have any… only to find out that they are the highest scorer in that area.

It’s fascinating to watch it all play out.  The surprise, the affirmation, the nods, the ahas! And the conversation that simply falls into place around it as people are interested to know more and understand each other’s scores.

Games have a way of opening up conversations.  They allow exploration in such a way that discussion flows easily, more naturally and more openly.  It’s not forced, it’s not a series of tick box questions – there’s room to talk about whatever comes up for people, often things they’d never considered before.

What I love about Communication Top Trumps is that is allows people to feel heard and understood whilst also equipping them with the knowledge about everyone else too.  They can understand the best way to approach someone in their team or who they can go to when they need a different viewpoint to their own.

It makes learning fun – and that is my mission!

The post Communicating through games first appeared on Ludogogy.

I think that the best way to start this particular article is to introduce myself, I’m Thomas Ackland, a budding games designer who strives to produce ‘non-serious’  and serious games that are both entertaining and as accessible by as many players as possible.

This appreciation for games was started by, no surprises here, a lifetime of playing a wide range of games from an early age and having the opportunity to begin learning about games design and development at college, I haven’t looked back since.

Whilst my list of played games is far too long to share without being boring and irrelevant to the point I want to make; I’ve decided to share a couple of games with you that inspired me from both a gameplay/level design and a character/narrative perspective.

Whilst these might not objectively be the best games available (and the games you make may require a different approach to their design), I hope you’ll find this interesting and informative enough to also give these games and design ideas a look for yourself.

Gameplay/Level Design

One of the many problems that game designers often struggle with is how to best teach a player how to play their games. Before the introduction of game design rules that we use now, many games were treated like traditional games, such as football or solitaire where you could teach someone by telling them the rules, showing gameplay or they’ll learn over time as they play.

Whilst there isn’t anything inherently wrong with this approach, the unique thing about computer games is that there are ways that you can teach a player as they play. Without the necessity to use; jarring tutorials, a bunch of notifications or voice lines that you have to read or listen to or a still image showing all of the game’s controls.

The first game series I wish to mention that taught me the rather valuable lesson that if the game levels are designed well, the player can learn about the nitty-gritty of the game just by playing through the levels is the Megaman series developed by Capcom (1987).

The different levels of the Megaman game series are all designed in a way that allows the player to experience the game’s mechanics through play, without the need for the aforementioned information providers. Essentially emulating the “show, don’t tell” writing technique(THE HISTORY OF “SHOW, DON’T TELL”, 2016) in a way that shows the user how the game mechanics work within a controlled environment through gameplay and player experimentation, without implicitly telling them through dialogue or text.

After the mechanic is introduced to the player, they are presented with a corresponding challenge that tests them on their knowledge of the mechanic in order for them to proceed through the level. I feel that this is a more engaging and fun way of teaching and testing the player simply through an effective use of level design.

Character/Narrative Design

The argument of whether plot driven stories or character driven stories are better than one another is a very divisive topic among authors and audiences alike. In the context of games, I feel that creating characters that I enjoy seeing and playing as, are very important to get right, especially if I’m going to be exposed to them for a large duration of my play time. With this being said, having a concrete plot that keeps the game’s story moving nicely can’t be neglected.
Overall, it’s important to strike a balance between having believable, fascinating characters and a riveting plot for the characters to interact with. You can’t really have one without the other in this context. (Weiland, 2010)

The next game I want to share that has a story that achieves a good balance between an intriguing plot as well as having memorable characters to both play as and interact with is Psychonauts by Double Fine (2005). The premise is you are a young man named Raz, who enrols into a summer camp for young psychics (people with the ability to levitate, set things on fire with their minds, that sort of thing) and works with an organisation called the Psychonauts to unravel a mystery of the camp-goers going missing. This is achieved by exploring the summer camp in the physical world and literally going into and exploring the mental landscapes of various quirky individuals in order to learn more psychic powers and acquire more leads in order to get to the bottom of the mystery.

This game manages to work with both an engaging plot that is moved along by a large cast of interesting characters with the added benefit of having the mental landscapes you explore reflecting the character themselves, (an army soldier having a boot camp, a disco girl having a party etc.) adding an extra level of depth to the characters you interact with in the story.

My Serious Games Experience

While it’s nice to share some of the interesting commercial games that inspired me to pursue games design as a career, my time learning about games design lead me to the existence of Serious Games and I was lucky enough to be properly introduced to this format of games through a work placement with the lovely people at Imaginary SRL in Milan, Italy.

During my 1-year placement, I worked as a consultant games designer on a major training program that simulated the experience of working as a neonatal resuscitation specialist. The intention of the product was to be used by neonatal doctors in Singapore in order to test their knowledge of scenarios which were created to the client’s specifications.

I fulfilled several roles including; managing the games design documentation, communicating with the clients in Singapore, drafting designs from the scenario information provided by the clients and QA testing the product throughout its development.

Overall, learning about games design has provided me with a wide range of possibilities that I never expected to experience such as; learning another language, living independently in another country and showing me a form of games design and development which allows me to provide people with games that accomplish more than entertaining their users and I can’t wait to see what new discoveries emerge in the world of games design, serious or otherwise.

The post Why Games Design matters to me – Part I first appeared on Ludogogy.

Self-Gamification is the art of turning our own lives into fun games, of which we are both the designers and the players. It is the application of game design elements to our own lives. Self-Gamification is a self-help approach showing us how to be playful and gameful, but it is not only about games. It has three dimensions or tools for it to unfold and have the maximum outcome.

Here are the tools which Self-Gamification brings together.

First of all, it is anthropology.

“Anthropology is the study of the human species, from DNA to language.” — Cameron M. Smith, Anthropology For Dummies

So, you study whatever is inside and outside you non-judgmentally as anthropologists do when they study a fascinating, for them, culture. Thus, you observe all the dynamics that happen in front of you (your thought processes, the world around you, and your feelings and reactions towards it). And you observe it with curiosity and interest, but without judging, validating what you see, or comparing it to what you already know.

Then you apply kaizen, which is both a philosophy and strategy to break anything you want to achieve or any challenge you need to face into small bits and process them that way, one small “bite” at a time. So, all while being utterly aware, you identify the smallest step you can take toward your dreams or the smallest bit of the challenge you are facing that you can solve with what you have available here and now.

And finally, you tap into gamification and all things gameful and playful. You identify how you can take that little step and appreciate it in a fun way.

And then you repeat—especially any time you need help.

These three tools work amazingly together. They come together into one strong synergy because they build upon each other as well as complement and support each other.

I consider Self-Gamification as one of those ultimate and utterly useful tools, which embraces three skill-sets, just like a simple Swiss Army Knife that can help to cut, open a can, and to repair something with an in-built screw-driver, for example.

Isn’t it amazing to know that we always have available a universal tool to turn any challenge, any task, however big or daunting into a fun game? I tested this theory, and this tool many times, and it became a practice. Even before I formulated this approach, and I test it today again and again. Both because I enjoy it, and also to find out what else is possible without pressure or effort, and instead with fun and pleasure. Even, or especially, in times of crisis.

The Core Gameplay Loops in Self-Gamification

When describing my background in terms of gamification, I often say that I am a non-gamer, in other words, one of those who play games, and especially video games, very occasionally and prefer spending their free time doing activities other than games. And after turning my life into games continuously for several years now, I am still a non-gamer in the traditional sense of games.

But I don’t seem to be able, or willing, to stop turning my life into fun, for me, games. On the contrary, I find myself to design and play my self-motivational games more and more, both in times of joy and those of being upset.

I contemplated why that could be so and even gave interviews on that, but recently I discovered a game mechanic, which could explain why I am so engulfed into turning my life into fun games.

A note to game and gamification designers: This core mechanic of games will be well-known to you, but please bear with me and in mind that I am a non-gamer playing a role-playing game of an anthropologist studying among other this fantastic and still very fresh and new for me game design and play cultures.

Thus, the discovery of this core mechanic, which I made during the revision process of the little book I wrote recently during the lockdown 2020 period and which I call Gameful Isolation (https://www.victoriaichizlibartels.com/gameful-isolation/), was a eureka moment for me.

Here is this game mechanic:

“At the heart of your game’s design, there are core mechanics, and the core gameplay loop. In short, it’s the main activities that structure the entire design and the players engage into repeatedly, in a looping sequence. It’s part of the essence of the game, something you cannot remove without fundamentally altering the experience.”

“In the original Mario, this would be walking, running and jumping. The various enemies, bosses, and environments stem from the core mechanics. They are here to surprise the player, challenge his skills and keep the experience fresh. In other words: to exploit the core loop to its fullest, and add extra depth to the experience.” — Game Analytics (https://gameanalytics.com/blog/how-to-perfect-your-games-core-loop.html)

After learning about the core game (or gameplay) loops, I realized that Self-Gamification, and thus also each challenge, project, or activity turned into a self-motivational game, has a specific core gameplay loop too.

In fact, it has two. These two loops are closely related to the three approaches, which Self-Gamification brings together into one strong synergy.

Here is the main Self-Gamification loop:

1. Become aware (assess) —> play the “Anthropology of Now Game”;
2. Take the small step —> play the “Kaizen Game”;
3. Appreciate (celebrate) it —> play the “Appreciation Game.”

And the first step of awareness, or the “Anthropology of Now Game,” has a gameplay loop of its own:

1. Become aware of your starting point: your circumstances at this moment, how you feel, and the state of your mind.
2. Remind yourself of your goals and dreams for each task. What is the win-state there?
3. Identify the smallest and most effortless step that will take you onto the path from your starting point closer towards the goal of your challenge, project, or activity “game.”
4. Recognize at any given moment the fun ways or elements to take and appreciate both small steps (that bring you experience points, for example), the intermediate goals (the levels in your games), and reaching the goal (the win-state).

The fact that each of our lives is so surprising and multi-dimensional let me “exploit the core loop to its fullest, and add extra depth to the experience” of Self-Gamification naturally, without me needing to force anything.

The only thing I need to do is to be willing to see what is in front of me as a game and actually play those games, including the design and appreciation “games.”

P.S. To find out more about the Gameful Isolation project, where you can access a video series for each of the chapters of the future book, visit the Gameful Isolation page

The post Self-Gamification and the Core Gameplay Loops first appeared on Ludogogy.

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The post Skills I Learned by Playing Dungeons and Dragons first appeared on Ludogogy.