Prologue

Why did Steve Jobs say that he would trade all of his technology for an afternoon with Socrates?  Also, in presenting the i-Pad and iPhone4, what was his real intention about his comment, “In Apple’s DNA, it’s technology married with liberal arts.”  Although he was famous for laying down the law to employees, what’s the real meaning of liberal arts to him?

After the announcement of the Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab at the Davos Forum in 2016, there has been new-normal chaos, mixed with the game between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol, COVID-19, and the wave of liberal arts, making our predictions for the future more blurry. In the world, many countries which have suffered economic downturns started shutting down because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but Korean entertainment phenomena such as K-Pop or professional e-sports games have seen growth. Why is that?

This article aims to review the reasoning in many fundamental areas of human life, which has led to the  foundation of the ‘liberal arts’, and to figure out why, following the release of the personal computer during the ‘information revolution’, games have been increasingly applied in many areas, beyond simple play, including economics, business, human resources and administration.

This will be expected to contribute to gamification literacy in the fourth industrial revolution following COVID-19, which should narrow the generational discrepancies in detail and increase the mass understanding of gamification as a potential future catalyst of change.

Disintegrating life

Until the agricultural revolution, work, learning, and play were united in human life. Fathers and sons hunted outside the cave to get food, to learn the method, and play with some fun and tension.

In agricultural societies, people sang a song of labor when working and learning. This period was one which combined work, learning, play, and self-sustaining clothes, food, and shelter.

Men were able to harvest and manage all the agricultural matters, and women were also able to make clothes and food. At that period, producers and consumers were the same. In this labor-centric era, there were many children who were more diligent or lazier. But they still stayed in the house without being kicked out. There wasn’t a separation between employment and unemployment.

The industrial revolution and the advent of machines changed every lifestyle. The highest value sought in industrial society was commodification to create mass consumption for mass production. Rapid industrialization and urbanization focused the population on factories and schools. The 3S principles – Simplification, Standardization, and Specialization fully led to the Scale of the Economy. Productivity enhancement, including Taylorism, Fordism, Time Study, and Motion Study naturally excluded the area of play. Afterwards, recreation became just a sub-sector or sub-concept for production.

So, through the process of productivity increase by mass production during the industrial era, life was just divided into work and learning. And, learning was a tool to work, and work was labor which people did not to want to do. The play was missing. After missing the play and dividing into production/consumption and employment/unemployment, the natural environment was damaged. The value of existence for human beings was collapsed. An unknown mass population was deprived of each identity, and the endless division of labor was not just a loss of value but a loss of life. We killed as we divided.

Recently, the reason why extreme selfishness and anti-humanity harm have been spread out has been related to these changes. On the opposite side, liberal arts started emerging slowly.

Towards the Archetype

Following the Asian financial crisis at the end of 90’s, why hasn’t the unemployment rate improved?  The opportunities for full-time jobs have decreased, but the gig economy has been more popular. The wage gap between full-time and part-time jobs has been higher, so it has revealed some fairness issues and social conflicts in Korea. Also, in the economic downturn, the agenda about basic income and flexible working has been continuously discussed. Misunderstandings around how the sharing economy works  e.g. Uber or Airbnb, have gradually disappeared.

What’s the meaning of these changes?  And where will they end?  The meaning emerges from the Archetype, an attempt to recover the value of life before the industrial revolution. The global population (about 8 billion) cannot accommodate hunting or agricultural life in 8 thousand or 0.8 billion population. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic over two years, the sky with 1% of normal flights  looked like the autumn weather in the year 1960~1970. Despite the forced stop, the contemplation based on social distance reminds us of the missing memory and value.

I am glad that there is still a generation with the memory of agricultural society. In vague memory, there are still values like neighborhood, relationships, sharing, and thoughtful consideration. This memory disappeared by the division of labor and decomposition through the industrial society, so it’s a missing piece.

In the latter part of industrial society, integration, convergence, and consilience are technically possible. It’s a network effect. Like social work and village community, there seems to be social cohesion. Relationship recovery is linked to sharing and thoughtful consideration. Sympathy, sharing, and fairness are frequently discussed. In addition, the appearance of prosumers which weakens the separation between production and consumption, and the gig economy mixing employment and unemployment have proliferated. Despite the earlier appearance of COVID-19, remote work and learning concentrate on one place – home. During this, play becomes gamification.

Likewise, organizing the network is recovered, and efforts to recover the identity of specialized individuals from many unknown people are increasing. Recent relevant books cover this kind of demassification. An analog lifestyle can be transformed into a digital one. Artificial intelligence, robot, and big data technology in the fourth industrial revolution can process more than if work depended on human memory and hand. If the fifth and sixth industrial revolutions will be expected in the future, a lifestyle system with 10 billion population may be returned to that with 0.1 billion population. The problem is whether the original value of life, order, thoughtful consideration, and caring will be recovered. Apparently, there is a hope of a liberal arts rennaisance in our current chaotic real life.

The GDP per capita of Korea was over USD 30,000 a few years ago. As Easterlin’s Paradox indicates, it’s still early for us to share meaningful empathy with neighborhoods. However, as Northern European countries show, there are still big gaps among countries and continents. Finally, the possibility of recovering towards the archetype by sharing social value is effected by a small starting wave of liberal arts.

Through the second and third industrial revolutions, worklife gradually changed to include occupation, employment, and starting a business. The evolution and implementation of concepts such as learning being variously, life-long, remote, self-driven, and virtual become clearer because of the social shock of COVID-19 and the fourth industrial revolution. It’s a recovering force towards the archetype. Surely, that archetype means a well-mixed life with work, learning, and play. This is why gamification is necessary.

Epilogue

A middle school student (Age 15, third grade) and a retired professor (Age 67) took a gamified hiring assessment. created by Benchmark.games (Hungary) and published in the Korean market. This gamified solution is to assess the qualification of a potential organization member regarding leadership, motivation, communication, conflict management, etc. The result was that a middle school student who didn’t understand any company business, did better than the professor, who had  20 years of business experience and 20 years of marketing lecturing in every assessment field. For sure, the manual in this assessment mentions that the score is not important, but there is that must be reflected on considering the current period of digital transformation we are experiencing.

Gamification includes the transformational process into a game, or procedural meaning. As mentioned before, society after the fourth industrial revolution seeks the recovery towards the archetype. Highly civilized development and rapidly increasing population cannot reproduce the past life in agricultural or primitive societies. However, our way of life seeks concurrent value. For adequately mixing work and learning in this process, including play as a catalyst is critical.

Regarding what the result of the gamified test between the young student and old professor means, that inclusive point is coincidentally the diverging point between analog and digital. This is the colliding point between the addictive young generation and the old-fashioned parents’ generation. Artificial intelligence, robot, and big data technology will be expected to exceed human artistry and creativity. However, in the strong artificial intelligence era, humanism as human’s unique characteristics has a priority. Gamification already has been spread out in economics, business, administration, the education sector, etc. As a part of life, the value and status of play has been recovered through gamification. To make gamification a justified recovering force towards the archetype, the value of liberal arts focusing on human value is important. Probably, I think that this is why Steve Jobs missed Socrates.

The post Gamification – A Recovering Force Towards the Archetype first appeared on Ludogogy.

However, it is increasingly becoming the focus of primary school trips. Exasperated parents and teachers are looking for new ways to get kids outside. And they see orienteering as a way to do it. But why?

That’s the topic of this post. We take a look at why educators all over the world are embracing the adventure sport and introducing it to more children than ever before.

It Gets Children Away From Their Screens

The average child spends several days in front of their screens every day. And while a couple of hours in the evening before they go to bed probably won’t do them any harm, fourteen hours per day probably will. 

Orienteering is a challenging sport. Kids have to use maps and compasses and traverse over vast stretches of open land to reach their targets. It’s both cognitive and exercise-based. 

Because of this, it has the potential to relieve them of their handheld devices for the entire day. They get to experience what it’s really like living in nature without all the modern technology to which they’ve become accustomed. Pivotally, it frees them from the constraints of city life. It gives them a taste of what nature is really about. 

It Builds Teamwork

Orienteering isn’t something kids can do by themselves. They need a whole team to work together to get to the next objective.

We live in a society which needs people who have team-working skills. We need personalities that can fit certain business environments and bring people together. 

Orienteering is a team sport because it involves so much negotiation and feedback. Each team member is constantly making their views heard while encouraging others to follow their plans. They must also listen to the instructions of other team members and appoint a leader, someone who will make the final decision. 

It Builds Fitness

Education that’s active kills two birds with one stone. Children learn while moving around, which is beneficial for both the mind and body. Walking across muddy fields and up and down mountains is challenging, taxing all areas of the body. And doing it all day is particularly demanding, helping to build muscle tone and set children on the proper course in life 

It Teaches Them How To Look After Themselves

So, while it could be argued that children can always look to their smartphones to tell them where they are, using a map and compass are valuable skills for life. And those are tools that can even be used in places where there is no signal, or when your gadget is uncharged or unavailable. Peoplae with those skills don’t have to resort to guessing or constantly asking other people for directions.

It can also help children improve their spatial and directional intelligence, something that can remain significantly underdeveloped if not built from a young age. The more they practise being in nature and finding their own way around, the more competent they can become. 

Other (Playful) Ways to Enjoy the Great Outdoors

Back when Pokemon Go was taking the world by storm, one of things which was noted as a benefit of playing, was that players got lots of exercise while seeking out particular pokemon or running to cash in when they spotted that a Lure was underway. And while this may be true, the player’s attention was still mostly on a screen and on the mechanisms of a game app, rather than on the their surroundings; a fact that was borne out by a number of accidents in the early days of the game. So while they were getting exercise, maybe it wasn’t the best way to appreciate being outside or in nature.

This aside, it is much easier to imagine an app facilitating a outdoor experience, than a board game, which has always been traditionally associated with being indoors. One of the standout game successes of 2022 is just this, however – a board game which encourages you to go outside and have adventures in nature.

Nine Arches is a truly beautifully realised ‘board’ game which invites you to construct your own true life advantures using a deck of tarot-like cards (in the world of the game they have come from an ancient civilization). With it’s emphasis on being together, being outside and reconnecting with nature, this could just the start of a new trend in ‘tabletop’ games which do their best to keep you away from the table.

Nine Arches is available on Amazon

The post Orienteering Is Making A Big Comeback, And The Kids Seem Happy first appeared on Ludogogy.

Building Blocks of Tabletop Games Design is available on Amazon

The authors make no claim of completeness, and indeed mention a couple of times in the foreword that they are not aiming to write an exhaustive list of mechanics, but it wasn’t until this week that I ever thought there was anything ‘missing’ from this excellent book.

I started to write this article, which is intended to look at ‘Social’ mechanics and structures in games, and naturally I turned straight to ‘Building Blocks’, which was when I noticed there was no ‘Social’ section, gathering together those mechanics which (the way I see it) use players themselves as ‘pieces’ in the game, manipulate player dynamics and relationships, and otherwise ‘play with’ people.

Some of the mechanics I am referring to are in the book, of course, but they are sprinkled throughout the sections. Many others are absent altogether, and I would argue, are missing precisely because a ‘Social’ category has not been included.

Game Structure

Engelstein largely deals with player interaction in the ‘Game Structure’ category, as it is here where the very basic rules about how players interact are contain. Are they competing, co-operating, playing as individuals or teams? Is the activity designed to be experienced alone or with others?

Two interesting game structures here are the Single Loser game and the Traitor Game. The former always reminds me of the old joke about the couple who are at the zoo, when the lion escapes. One person starts to run, and the other says ‘You’ll never outrun the lion’, to which she replies ‘I only need to outrun you’.

The Traitor game is somewhat more popular, and some outstanding games have been created recently. Secret Hitler is a great example, where players unaware of each other’s identity, work towards the goals of one of two sides, and are occasionally forced into acting in a way characteristic of the other side. My absolute current favourite, however, is Shamans, which extends the secret role mechanic by having a neat ‘ritual’ mechanic which changes players secret roles mid-game, which can lead to frantic strategic backtracking to head off the consequence you yourself have been working towards.

Shamans is available on Amazon as is Secret Hitler

Clearly, a game is not a game until it is played. So, there is a social aspect to every mechanic, rule and characteristic of a game. But for me, the criteria which separates the mechanics I think of as specifically ‘social’ from the rest is that they utilise social interaction or dynamics as an experience in the game.

Social Deduction and Hidden Goals

Some of the following are not strictly ‘mechanics’, either, but are characteristics, ways of playing (desirable and otherwise), which arise from the inclusion of certain mechanics and rules.

The Traitor Game is a subset of Social Deduction games, which is itself a subset of the Hidden Role game.  In a social deduction game, it is part of the point of the game to discover the hidden role. But a hidden role does not always need to be discovered. Very often, hidden roles, and the goals which go with them are present in the game to provide differing motivations, and thus asymmetry to the game play.

Of course, roles and goals will not only inform the player’s own decisions and actions, but how they interact with other players too. Such mechanisms in learning games, provide a useful way to facilitate learnings around systems-thinking, and organisational and team dynamics, for example.

An interesting structure for such a game would not go as far as being a Traitor Game, but would nevertheless give ostensibly co-operative players differing roles, which might stymie their attempts to work effectively together towards a common strategy, thereby providing a pretty accurate analogue for the average department-based workplace.

Nor do differing roles have to be hidden. Even in games where plays can (theoretically) have complete knowledge of the goals of other players – take Root – A Game of Woodland Might and Right – each of the ‘factions’ in the games has differing moves and goals and therefore completely different strategies. The visibility of these strategies to all players makes it no less challenging to try to forward your own ends while blocking others from achieving theirs.

There is often much emergent complexity in such asymmetric games, as when playing a game where you all have the same goal, it is much easier to hold in mind both what you want to do, and what you need to stop opponents doing, than if their a multiple differing options for each of these.

Starting to get nasty

There is a whole class of games (often ‘party games’) where one plays as oneself, by which I mean that the games asks the real ‘you’, not some in-game character to make moves and take decisions based on your actual beliefs, values or other ‘real’ characteristic.

One frequent mechanic of such games is ‘Disclosure’, where you are asked to reveal something about yourself. Truth or Dare would be the classic example of this and also contains the ‘Social Manipulation’ mechanic – where the magic circle provides leverage to make players do what they would not ordinarily do ‘because it’s the rules’.

The 1980s game Scruples took disclosure to extremes, calling upon players to reveal their moral compass in response to various moral dilemmas – and is probably up there amongst the most friendship-breaking games of all time.

Scruples is available on Amazon (if you dare)

While party games which are actually designed to cause disagreements might be seen as somewhat unpleasant, some games recognise that the immersion that some from play (as opposed to less interactive forms of entertainment like films or TV) can be potentially damaging to social bonds.  Fog of Love comes with a specific warning that players should be very wary of confusing their in-game relationship, with their own real-life relationship.

Fog of Love is available on Amazon

Emergent behaviours and game characteristics

What is most interesting to me from a games for learning perspective, is the kinds of gameplay and behaviours that emerge from ‘social’ mechanics. Some of these are clearly designed for, and form part of the ‘official’ gameplay.

However, perhaps inevitably when people themselves become playing pieces, or like in some Traitor Games, or ‘Disclosure’ games, you are playing with people’s values and sense of fairness, there is some blurring of the line between one’s ‘in-game’ and ‘real-life’ persona. The Magic Circle becomes very permeable indeed. This can be a desirable outcome, if you are using the game to facilitate deep reflections in the affective domain of learning, but it should be approached with caution.

Furthermore, many less desirable modes of play can emerge, leaving players feeling vulnerable and unhappy. Some player experiences / behaviours are discussed below:

Alliances

Some games (cooperative or semi-cooperative) feature ‘official’ alliances, while many others lend themselves to players making unofficial pacts to help one another, to either further their own ends or to ‘bring down’ another player. Sometimes such alliances ‘bend the rules’ – sharing information or resources that the rules do not strictly allow. While alliances can provide valuable learning about working as a team, negative outcomes can be that such alliances impact the perception of ‘fairness’ in a game , or even make some players feel ‘ganged up’ on.

Politicking

Most games include an element of preventing progress by other players, alongside trying to advance one’s own. Games with lots of opportunities for targeting other players will tend to lead to politicking. If in addition to ‘targetting’ mechanics (voting and judging mechanics as seen in Secret Hitler or Cards Against Humanity respectively, are good examples), the game includes social mechanics which influences one’s feeling towards another player (disclosure, social manipulation etc.), we have a recipe for policticking behaviour.

Such behaviour might include lying in wait, appealing directly to players to behave in certain ways, setting players against each other with a view to mopping up the spoils later, threatening and so on.

Revenge, Kingmaking and other options

An extreme outcome would be to adjust one’s stategy with a view to hurting the play of one person (maybe even at the cost of your own position), maybe because they hurt you previously, or because you don’t like what they have revealed in the game.

Making use of relative positions in play is a common form of politicking – both turn order or current position in terms of closeness to winning.  For example, if an alliance has opted to target a player, but you are not the last player before the targetted player to take a turn, you can force a following player to take an action while reducing the obligation /cost to yourself.

When one’s own position in a game is such that you cannot win, some players opt for Kingmaking as an alternative. Perhaps this reflects the human need to feel in control of a situation. If I cannot win myself, I can at least impose my decision of who should win instead.

Offering ‘out-of game’ inducements for ‘in-game’ favours can be used in the absence of appropriate ‘in-game’ leverage. I have seen fetching drinks and food, or even the threat of withdrawing a promised lift home, all effectively used to manipulate a fellow player into making a certain play.

While much of the above may seem unpleasant, they are all very ‘human’ behaviours, which happen in real life, so with the caveat that no-one should ever leave a play session feeling genuinely hurt, it is definitely worth thinking about how social mechanics for both ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ behaviours can be effectively used (or allowed, or disallowed) in learning settings.

The post People as Pieces – Social Mechanics in Games first appeared on Ludogogy.

I´ve worked some years as an urban planning advisor for the Municipality of Leiria. In the beginning, it was very exciting because I believed we could deliver better results if citizens could participate in the ongoing decision-making processes. But, as time went by, this was not possible to achieve in practice. Some gatherings were not attended at all, while others ended in violent discussions with no concrete outcomes whatsoever. These results were very disturbing and demotivating for all.

Inspiration from Commercial Games

After leaving the job as an urban planning advisor, I went back to the university (University of Coimbra) to do a PhD in spatial planning. My thesis is about serious games. Since 2017 games are my work, either in analogue game design or serious game approaches. I came to think that games are the tools to deliver collaborative planning experiences. I believed it could be done because planning experiences are what many entertainment games provide. It should be possible to apply it to spatial planning. Pandemic, Magic Maze, The Mind and many other modern board games have inspired me. My mind was blown away after meeting Ekim Tan, Juval Portugali, and experiencing a game from the colleagues of Nova University in 2019. Games could implement the communicative rationality principles from Jürgen Habermas. We could engage participants, allowing them to express their claims and negotiate solutions while learning during the process. Would games like Suburbia and Between Two Cities be useful?  

Analogue games (board, card, dice and so on) are special. These games lack automatization, which in turn leads to higher player agency. The game systems are more transparent, being more adaptable. Learning from modern board game designs is useful to understand how to build games that simulate complex realities while being engaging. Eurogames build strong game economies, and American games (known as “Ameritrash”) explore narratives in meaningful ways. Learning from these two design trends help develop serious games, adapting to the necessary goals and targetting players.

The Outcomes the Games must Achieve

But developing games is not easy, and serious games are no exception. Serious games must be engaging and achieve objectives beyond fun. In the case of collaborative planning, the games should incentivize participation while delivering meaningful collective decisions. Players should freely participate, express themselves, learn, negotiate, and assume the game results as their own. If well done, plans can emerge and represent tangible decisions about what to do in a territory. The uncertainty and agency games generate fits in the urban complexity approach. Multiple agents plan and interact, having different power, resources, and knowledge. They can plan and shape a territory, individual or collectively. I tested my first game in 2019. Play happened during a class about regional and urban planning at Polytechnic of Leiria. The experience generated a paper about how to combine game components and mechanisms to deliver a playable experience over a Google map. This experience also explored design thinking processes. The game incentivized students to explore the territory and define solutions for the issues at stake. In this case, the goal was to support traditional commerce in the city centre. Decision-making was collaborative, emerging from the game rules and mechanisms.

Collaborative Planning in Games

Collaborative planning demands many skills from participants. Games require many of the same skills. This skills approach was tested in another experience at the city of Coimbra. This time the process was different, following game modding. It departed from two similar previous tests. In the first, transport games helped engineering students dealing with transport networks. In the second, MBA students played a modified version of Steam to define optimal shortest paths. At Coimbra, players participated in a meeting to define a common goal agenda for the academic culture and sports activities. I challenged them to play a sequence of games, aiming to identify the requisites that would help them collaborate more in the future. Games like Team3, Magic Maze, Telestrations engaged participants in identifying key concepts, such as communication, trust, shared power and knowledge to ideate collective projects.

Unexpected Consequences of Using Games for Learning

But simply using games is not a magic solution. During the experiences, it was evident that teaching the games and supporting doubts during gameplay is mandatory. Modern board games are not known to the masses. The questionnaires for each session showed that 10% or less of the participants knew any of these games. Sometimes more than 90% of the participants had never heard of Catan, Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, Azul, Codenames, or other popular modern games. Even when players understood how to play the games, the results were often not what the game facilitator expected. During a game about network planning, the players deliberately created their network not to be efficient but to block other players, just for fun. This unexpected result is a problem. Without debriefing that clarifies the purposes of the games and how players approached the games, playing can have opposite effects from what was desired. This need to deal with uncertainty and establish an interactive and collective learning flow is why debriefing and complementing the game activities is essential to build serious games. Behaviour analysis and addressing other topics related to the issues at stake is necessary.

The Challenges of Serious Games Design and Facilitation

Using games is challenging. Adopting and building a framework to use games beyond entertainment successfully is not easy. We can transform entertainment games into serious games or create them from scratch. In each case, mastering game design is necessary. Although this might seem obvious, in practice, this might not occur. There are examples of serious games and gamification developed without this game design expertise background. Who’s to blame? Despite games being as old as civilization itself, learning about serious game design is not easily accessible. Some books exist, but they are not enough, considering the challenge at stake. And most of the available literature aims directly at digital games. All games share some design traits, independently of the platform. Therefore, authors like Tracy Fullerton, Brenda Brathwaite, Lewis Pulsipher, Ethan Ham, and others recommend going analogue. Even for videogame development, learning how to prototype with tabletop games is useful. Of course, there are differences, and each platform fits better in some contexts than others. In my case, analogue games are perfect for fostering collaboration experiences. When participants agree to play a face-to-face game together, collaboration happens naturally.

Getting Inputs from Non-players

There are many forms of collaboration happening in games. But can the game foster collaboration even when people are not playing it? Inviting stakeholders to a collaborative planning game does not lead to effective participation. No one can guarantee that participants will attend and be engaged. Prejudices about games are real. And some individuals require seeing an activity and understanding it fully before participating. So, we cannot force people to play serious games. But we should not waste valuable inputs from those not playing either. This balance is not easy in practice. However, analogue games provide some solutions. Playing physical games with pieces and components, where we can see people interacting, is like a performance. If the dynamic is watchable, it can be engaging, depending on the game played. A recently published paper addressed this phenomenon. During a conference about transport sustainability, I invited the audience to play a fast game (less than 30 minutes).

Real Play must be Voluntary

Attendants could come to the stage to play the game. The game challenged them to define the local transport system by laying coloured strings over a map. The available strings represented different modes of transport . This dynamic and game set-up did not force the attendants to participate. Those more timid or suspicious were incentivized to watch first before participating. They could comment and suggest what to do, influencing the actual players. Planning experts and elected officials were the most engaged in participating in the game without playing directly. By doing this, attendants participated in the game. Collaboration happened without requiring all attendants to play directly. The analogue nature of this game allowed to adapt the game in real-time to the number of players available to play. Currently, I am working on another fascinating serious game to address urban security. In Urbsecurity (Urbact), I have been developing a methodology where the participants, through a gamified process, helped me in co-creating a game that is a decision-making tool. Although not yet finished, some positive results were achieved for this method when applied in cities like Leiria, Coimbra, and Viana do Castelo (Portugal).

Games are a Surprising Experience to New Players

What surprised me the most in these last few years was the game’s potential to be applicable for almost everything, even online. And modern board games have this potential also. Consumers are still massively unaware of these games. This one is the reason why they can be so impactful. People are not expecting the kind of experiences new games provide. When we invite casual players to play a cooperative game like Pandemic, they are usually astonished. Adults are used to considering games as childish activities, especially board games. They ignore that there are many different games. Most people never consider that their personality and personal preferences define what type of games they enjoy. Games are not all the same. Understanding player profiles is a key factor for the success of games.

It might seem surprising, but I also deal with game-based learning and serious games for health. In projects like Gym2beKind, health students learn how to use and develop serious games to develop soft skills and specific therapeutics and healthcare. Along my journey, games helped me support brainstorming sessions also.

Games provide us means to enter the magic circle, and we can do it collectively, having fun and achieving serious goals simultaneously. I could not be happier when dealing with games and sharing game-based approaches. It feels like magic come true!

This article summarises a study carried out by Micael Sousa et al. You can read the full paper Fast Serious Analogue Games in Planning: The Role of Non-Player Participants in Simulation & Gaming, Sage Journals

The post Co-creative Experiences – Serious Games for Spatial Planning first appeared on Ludogogy.

The recent trend for Co-Creation means that companies can work through the direct participation of users in product design or projects. This is a little different from ‘crowd-sourcing’ which substitutes the company’s manpower with that of the general public. Instead of a monetary benefit to users, co-creation can steer the the characteristics of products or project development in a more beneficial direction for end-users through their participation in the process.

‘Coca-Cola’ and the band ‘Maroon 5’ created the new song, “Is There Anybody Out There?” by gathering user opinion through SNS for 24 hours. The high numbers of downloads of this song led to income for a social welfare business in Africa. This was the case of co-creation between the company and users.
This article describes my previous experience of co-creation within a small group, and relates to editorial design rather than product development.

Co-creation in editorial design between designers and writers

In my previous three years of graphic design experience, I was an editorial designer, involved in publishing newspapers and magazines for several local communities in Toronto and Calgary. I suggest that this type of work is matched with the basic co-creation.

This type of work in printing and publishment is very simple and intuitive. The intention of editors or proprietors determine rhe direction of publications, and the content of articles and columns will fit these. Advertising also has an important role to provide income, but the interests of advertisers are not always the same as those of the publication.

The co-creation of designers and readers in design editing has a long history, and this is a simpler and primitive concept than the more recent co-creation concept of ‘the consumer is the company itself’.
Usually, editorial designers create the layout by considering the focus of the publication, and complete the design by matching content to layout concept. However, the designer rarely creates article or other written content. Except in very special cases, audiences or writers usually write the articles, and the designer adds the design elements to prepare the writing for publication.

Personal Development through Co-creation

In this process, the designer interprets the article in his or her own way and adds an appropriate design. Sometimes, designers can discuss design with writers. Written contents are often created entirely separately, however, and this process is very basic co-creation.

Also, consumers who participate in this co-creation, by creating user-generated content (UGC) derive reputation and self-satisfaction through displaying their identities and interests to other consumers. Design and media companies can expand their consumer base through facilitating publication of UGC. This process can be the basis for the continuous development of publications and other media properties.

Co-creation in design editing consists of multiple contributions by various participants. It can be challenging for designers to have to think of the new designs on an ongoing basis, but that is part of the pleasure in creativity.

The ‘Novel Relay’ Project

The ‘Novel Relay’ project grew out of a conversation with a colleague who also worked in local media, We discussed how to attract participation from the local community to increase profitability, which was decreasing. After serious discussions, we undertook the ‘Novel Relay’ project with participating writers and readers during the specified period. I worked on this project as a guest designer, and we recruited participants in advance, regardless of previous experience.

The project worked like this. Initially, we sent a request to write an article with a designated keyword to a specific participant. In turn, another keyword was selected from this article, and we relayed that to another participant, and so on, for a number of weeks. So, these serial articles took the form of a longer continuous article.

The Challenge of of Writing to Keywords

Normally, prior to this project, writers would send articles with their own choice of topics to the publication, but participants in this project found difficulty in writing articles to fit with the unpredictable topic. For example, writer A who usually wrote poetry about flowers, was given an unfamiliar science and technology topic, and instructed to write in prose story form rather than poetry. Writer B who usually wrote travel stories was given an unfamiliar cultural keyword, with which to write the column-type article rather than a travel story.

The process of making one big story from various serial articles was a very different direction for the writers. Additionally, this direction was not always what we originally wanted. From the designer’s perspective, I wanted to create an editorial design for this project representing a sort of ‘puzzle’ to decompose and assemble the specific theme. However, the unexpected changes of direction in the writing each week was more like a ragged patchwork, rather than a cogent interlocking puzzle.

Capabilities of Writers

From another perspective, this project gave new experience to designers or writers which broke them out of their habitual work. The unexpected co-creation with users and designers, resulted in the making of unstructured ‘raw’ contents.

When started the project as we ignored the level of competence of different participants. There was a capability difference in story development between professional and non-professional writers, so participants often did not make the connection between each story well. This led to a disorganized project process.

Although the larger project suffered from lack of structure, and was without a unified topic or genre, participants did benefit from the new experience of co-creation. Moreover, the interest and participation in media by local community users was high through this project, and one intent of the project – to increase profitability – succeeded to a certain extent.

New Direction

For designers, the ‘Relay novel’ project offered another opportunity to try different ideas beyond stereotypical designs.

In review, the results of this project didn’t meet our original objectives. Project progress which was forecast by myself and the publication, did not match closely the way that the real participants actually worked. In particular, cooperation to deliver the keyword among users did not work well. Nevertheless, I think that this primitive and unstructured co-creation has more positive points than negative ones. So, for better co-creation, I suggest the following.

1. Designers and participants should define project objectives clearly: My colleague and I didn’t clearly define the objectives of the ‘Relay novel’ project.
2. The right users should be identified for process participation: For example, if the writers were writing in genres and topics they were comfortable with, in the ‘Relay novel’ project, we could have made much better designs.
3. We should identify Customers’ (participants’) needs around the project or product. Unfortunately, we didn’t correctly identify the work trend and characteristics of writers.

Co-creation of the Learner’s Perspective

We need to look at co-creation as a new experience beyond the habitual work. Writers participating in the project were accustomed to working with one genre and subject. From the perspectives of writers A and B, dealing with ‘science technology’ and ‘culture’ requires learning something new. The process of learning new things can be more effectively achieved in cooperation and team building situations – benefitting from social learning approaches.

How could a beginner approach the ’Relay Novel’? If organisers fixed the previously mentioned shortcomings, they couse use this approach well in an organization or education environment. In particular, creative projects could facilitate intrinsic motivation and cooperation among participants. It’s like a game.

Let’s take an RPG (Role-Playing Game) example for structuring the organization of the project. In an RPG, there are various classes of players who participate as fighter, magic user, healer, etc. Members of the party share information about their characteristics and skills, and they set the party’s objective such as retrieving a precious item through cooperation or killing monsters.

Facilitation of Co-creation through Gamification

Setting the priority to be meaningful and measuring it (leaderboard, milestones etc.) is important, if the objectives of party members (in terms of the publication, completed contents) is not to be wasted. They should more specific than simply setting objectives like ‘just participating in’ or ‘playing my part well’. By understanding the classes and skills of members and cooperating, they can defeat strong ‘monsters’. This shows just one example of how gamification can facilitate co-creation efforts.

This approach alters the relationship between educator and learner, and moves beyond motivation by reward or punishment. If co-creation works like a game, people can share their knowledge and learning methods and voluntarily cooperate. And like online RPGs, it’s likely that experienced players will mentor beginners.

In the case of this particular project, this process couldn’t continue because of short-term objectives (deadlines). However, in long-term projects including education or training, continuous co-creation can facilitate mutual supportive learning. Moreover, if we accept and learn from the above mistakes and failures, and carefully design the motivational aspects of participation and cooperation, it is likely that the prospect of participation will be very attractive.

Looking back to this project from the perspective of the business, our co-creation results are just ‘raw’ ones, but the designers, writers, and users used the experience to learn, expanding their own areas of expertise. If the ‘Relay novel’ project had continued for a longer period, knowledge about each other’s areas of practice, and the process of cooperation itself, would surely have developed. If we had had time to level up the process, the publication could by now contain more fresh content. Through this process, unstructured though it was, the writers’ capabilities were increased, and greater user participation was attracted.

The post A Co-Creation Experience in Editorial Design first appeared on Ludogogy.

There are two ways to win most games (AKA Victory conditions). Either reach a certain goal first (get a number of points, reach the last square, checkmate your opponent), or have the most ‘points’ of one kind or another when the end of the game is declared (e.g. the deck runs out of cards or time runs out).

There’s nothing wrong with either of these set-ups. But they tend to promote a certain play dynamic among the players: straightforward competition. Resource acquisition. Racing. Slanting every situation for your own or your team’s advantage. Also, they don’t easily promote complex or nuanced decision-making: you should always make the choice that gives you the most points, or moves you furthest forward in the race.

For learning games, this can be a problem. Is this the approach you want to encourage? Is your learning experience about these approaches and skills? Do you need to develop players’ handling of complexity, or simulate the complexity of real-life decisions and goals? It’s easy to sleepwalk into one of these approaches by default when it’s not the best framing for your game’s learning objectives.

So before you settle on one of these, consider what other set-ups might do for your game, and the way players approach things. I’ve divided other approaches to victory into six broad sections. A detailed analysis of how each game works is beyond the scope of this article, but I hope to provide inspiration and expand your horizons around alternatives. To understand each game’s approach better, I encourage you to look at the games themselves, or better yet, play them.

Ask your players to co-operate

In the most obvious alternative, the players succeed or fail together. The boardgame Pandemic has become a well-known example of this. Players have individual turns and autonomy, but common goals. The result feels very different to more competitive games, and promotes joint problem-solving and co-operation.

A learning game that leverages this dynamic is Colourblind, a communication game originally developed to train Air Traffic Controllers in precise communication. Blindfolded players must communicate information about physical game pieces that they hold, and players succeed when their communication is good enough to correctly match pieces.

The online learning game Evivve does something similar, but emphasises strategizing how each player will contribute their effort towards the common goal. This promotes group discussion and inclusion.

(Terry Wrote a review of Evivve for Ludogogy)

Even if co-operation is not total, allowing for the option of joint wins can create a dynamic where competition can be put aside. The boardgame Cosmic Encounters allows for two or more players to achieve the win condition in the same action, and with it a joint victory. Between Two Cities is another boardgame that makes every action contribute to either a joint effort between the player and their left-hand neighbour, or one with their right-hand neighbour. Any pair can win, but individuals cannot.

Don’t have a set goal at all

Some games have no goals: the goal is to play. Or you can set your own goals. Minecraft is a great example of this. There is no ultimate goal or victory condition. Many people set themselves a goal, to create something, or create their own games within the system. Role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons are also a kind of sandbox limited only by your desires and imagination, as are open-ended computer games like Crusader Kings III. (Also see Terry’s other article about Crusader Kings III)

The ‘life game’ SuperBetter, by Jane McGonigal asks players to nominate things in their real life as ‘allies’, ‘quests’ and ‘power-ups’; goals are set entirely by the player. SuperBetter has been immensely successful in helping people around the world build their personal resilience. Players can set goals that are appropriate to their personal journey and challenges.

Make victory conditions secret or individual

There are many Asymmetric boardgames, such as War of the Ring, based on The Lord of the Rings, where, much like the book and films, one side has to destroy the ring, the other to use it. Their options and resources are built to help them achieve their goal. In the card game Android: Netrunner, one side has to defend a computer system, the other side has to hack it. Each side has cards designed to help them achieve that goal.

The boardgame Argent: The Consortium has ten hidden cards that determine how points are earned at the end. Players must deduce or discover what’s on the cards as part of gameplay. And in the boardgame Ankh-Morpork, players each have a secret victory condition, and other players must figure it out to stop them. The boardgame Dune has a very interesting mechanic, where one player (playing the mystical Bene Gesserit faction) writes down a player and a turn at the start. If that player wins on that turn, the Bene Gesserit player wins instead, which can lead to all kinds of strategic manoeuvring and thoughtful play.

Such arrangements make for more strategic games, with players spending time working out what they should prioritise. This can reflect some real-life situations and skills development, where working out which ladder to climb can be more important than efficient ladder-climbing.

Use more innovative victory conditions

Sometimes changing the dynamic can be as simple as changing the idea of ‘most’ or ‘first’. In the boardgames Ingenious and Tigris & Euphrates, there are a number of different ‘tracks’ that players chart scores on. The winner is the player who, at the end, can say that their lowest-scoring track is higher than anyone else’s lowest-scoring. This promotes broad play that covers many bases, rather than optimising for one thing.

Some games (e.g. the card game Black Maria) just ask you not to lose. Others give two options for a win, such as the card game Seven Wonders: Duel, which allows you to go for a victory based on scientific achievement or one based on military might. Others (e.g. the card game Fluxx, the computer game Baba is You) allow gameplay to change the victory conditions, so that players can’t ever be sure that the route they’re taking will lead to victory, or can change the goalposts partway-through.

The exact effects of these options can vary depending on the set-up, but they all introduce new factors that complicate player decisions, and make them think carefully.

Focus on the margin of victory

In the American Football boardgame, Paydirt, players each select a real-life team, each of which has a rating to reflect their strength. When two teams are mismatched, the player with the stronger team must win by at least the difference in the teams’ ratings to claim a victory.

In Bridge, players in pairs must bid based on their hand strength, predicting how many tricks they will take. The pair with the highest bid has the opportunity to earn points for following through, but bid too high and fail to make the predicted number of tricks, and you end up losing points.

Some boardgames, like Churchill and The Fox in the Forest, award victory for whoever has the most points, unless they have more than a certain amount, in which case they lose. The in-game reason for this is around not rubbing your victory in the faces of those you need to live alongside.

All of these tricks encourage players to assess their strength and make a plan based on that, or aim more precisely at a goal instead of just trying to earn as many points as possible.

Stated goals are not the real victory conditions

Finally, some games pretend that the goal is to win via points, while having a separate, more important, hidden goal. This is quite common in learning games, particularly when you want the players to exhibit and potentially improve on problem behaviours.

A famous example is the Red/Blue Game, a variation on the Prisoner’s Dilemma, where two teams could each maximise their points by cooperating, but often compete by default, with both losing out. Similarly, in Culturallye, players are focused on winning chips, but the real point of the game is to show what happens when new people come into a group or culture, who don’t know all the rules of behaviour.

The original point of Monopoly was to highlight the dangers of unfettered capitalism. The hope of the author was that players would play and realise, to use a quote from the 1980s movie, WarGames, ‘the only winning move is not to play’. A lesson that the computer in that movie applies to Tic Tac Toe, as well as eventually learning about the more serious ‘game’ of global thermonuclear war.

Terry’s innovative learning design tool, The Transform Deck is available to buy from his shop.

The post How victory conditions frame play 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.

1. Take inspiration

Many collaborative games already do things well. Not just co-operative boardgames and ‘co-op modes’ on computer games: party or ‘parlour’ games, word games, ‘car’ games and children’s games too. I’ve found six loose categories of game that I take inspiration from (although I’m careful to remember that some of the best games cross categories or defy categorisation).

‘Beat the game’

The players are a team, with complementary skills, roles or resources, aiming to beat the game’s obstacles and challenges. The best games of this type have systems to differentiate how players can contribute. Examples include Pandemic, The Crystal Maze, World of Warcraft, Dungeons & Dragons, Rock Band, children’s clapping games, Tick Tock, and the co-op mode of computer games such as Portal 2. Many such games can be thought of as collaborative puzzle-solving.

‘Enemy within’

Most of the players co-operate to uncover one player working against the group. The ‘mole’ has their own goal, but can’t work too obviously towards it without showing their true colours. Examples include Werewolf, Saboteur, Wink Murder, Secret Hitler and Spyfall.

‘Limited communication’

Collaboration is hampered by rules and structures limiting how players communicate, and the challenge is to overcome these limits. Charades is a classic example (some people play this competitively, but its essence is collaborative). Other examples include Hanabi, Keep Talking & Nobody Explodes, Codenames and The Mountains of Madness.

‘Mind-reading’

Players must think about how others think and take action based on that, with little/no actual communication. For example, in Mind Meld, players must try to work out what word is ‘between’ two other words, and shout it out, winning when all shout out the same word. But what makes a word ‘between’ two others? It depends how you think. The Mind, Dixit, Cards Against Humanity and Mysterium work similarly.

‘Make-a-chain’

In Word Chain, given a category, players have to name something from it that begins with the letter the last person’s contribution ended with. See also Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, Carnelli, The Exquisite Cadaver and Consequences.

‘Sandbox’

Some collaborative games may challenge the definition of games. Minecraft probably sits somewhere between a game and a toy, depending on definitions and how you use it. But many options involve helping others, collaborating on building projects, and appreciating others’ efforts. Sandbox games gove a lot of autonomy to players, and so have huge capacity to inspire creativity. Other sandbox games include the Legend of Zelda series, and by some definitions, actual sandboxes and Lego.

2. Use shared obstacles, goals and gameplay

Once we start to look around for inspiration, we find patterns in ways effective games often do it. This may be the simplest. Almost any competitive game can be switched from ‘who can do this best?’ to ‘can we beat this target?’. If tempted to use individual goals alongside team goals, remember that some player types will prioritise individual glory.

The most collaborative games are often ones where the shared objective is central to gameplay. Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, where players try to see how few links (films both actors appeared in) they must use to connect Kevin Bacon to a given actor, demands to be played cooperatively, because the conversation is the gameplay. Doing it separately and competing for the fewest links would be markedly less fun.

3. Force interdependence

The best ‘beat the game’ games often nudge or force co-operation. With different resources, roles or skills, Players must often rely on each other. Dungeons & Dragons is a great example of this, where challenges often require different combinations of individual specialties: fighting, spellcasting, sneaking or healing.

Some games use structure to mandate full co-operation, such as The Mind, where victory is only possible if all players place their cards down in the right order, which in turn is only consistently possible through building understanding of each other’s play. Others force communication from all to win; in Keep Talking & Nobody Explodes, players will only successfully defuse a bomb if they combine the separate information they each have.

4. Maximise ways to contribute

Different players have contrasting styles and preferences. Many great collaborative games allow for this, not making every contribution come from the same place. If collaboration in your game is only about negotiating, or prioritises the contributions of the most confident communicators, some players may well have more fun than others.

Games with separate roles like Dungeons & Dragons, Rock Band and Codenames do this well, as do options with many different ways to play effectively and enjoyably, like Minecraft or Consequences.

5. Anticipate issues

No plan survives contact with reality, and that holds absolutely true for games and game design. Your players don’t think the way you do, and they will find motivators, difficulties, shortcuts and more that you didn’t anticipate. So think (and playtest) around how all your collaborative plans might be derailed. Could a player hog the limelight or be marginalised? Could they go rogue on the collaborative goal?

Take as an example the training game, Red/Blue. Two teams each have the goal to maximise their points (not necessarily to beat the other team). Optimal play requires co-operating rather than competing with the other team, but many teams miss the wording of the goal, play competitively, and both end up on a negative score. If well-framed and debriefed, this illustrates how easy it is to fall into competitive behaviour, but it won’t teach collaborative behaviours, unless teams figure out and agree on the aim. Miss that one point, and they miss all opportunity to collaborate – the facilitator must then rely on bringing learning about collaboration out discussing, in the debrief alone, what they did wrong.

The post Five Ways to Design Collaborative Games first appeared on Ludogogy.

In 2019 I had the exiting opportunity to be part of UEK’s programme The Future of GBS (Global Business Services). Students who signed for, and completed this specialisation, had the chance to learn from industry professionals. Myself and five other professionals from Krakow were trusted with teaching project management.

We were all excited and ready to start cooperating with the minds of the future. We were fortunate in many respects, one of such lucky situations was the ability to create the curricula for this course from scratch. I felt so strongly about this activity that I volunteered to teach four subjects. One more aspect of this collaboration that was particularly exciting, and unexpected for me, was the opportunity to teach my subjects via serious games. I designed, developed and played four games – one for each subject I taught. All the games were simulations of real world scenarios where the students had to form teams and collaborate in order to solve a problem. When explaining these games to the lead lecturer of project management at UEK I referred to these activities as RPS (role playing simulations).

Perhaps now is a good time for me to explain why I believe that games are an excellent teaching resource. Long story short, I profoundly dislike ‘traditional’ formal-education. The reasons for this will become clear the more you read my articles, or watch my YouTube videos, but for now it suffices to say that learning disabilities, mixed with an standardise and inflexible education system, cooked at 250 degrees in a third-world oven, is not the ideal recipe for creativity and development. Jim Gee summarises some of my feelings about traditional formal-education when he said “in traditional formal-education settings, collaboration is called cheating. And in the real world, trying to solve complex problems by yourself is not a desirable skill”.

Through studying serious games and game design at EdX’s MIT courses I had a priceless opportunity to learn about the history and psychology of education, and the many challenges faced by those who throughout recent history have tried to change this system. And now I had a chance to use my own serious games to join the fight. I set out to find out, first hand, if students learned more in an active learning setting than simply by passively listening to the teacher talk, memorising facts and answers to existing problems, and then doing the best they could to regurgitate all these data over a standardise test.

One of the classes I taught was Communicating Across Multicultural and Diverse Teams. For this I designed a scenario with low-tech game elements in which the students were randomly assigned to four different teams that represented separate branches of a service centre spread across the globe.

The teams had to hold a project status meeting via a conference call. Online meeting technology and/or etiquette was not one of the main learning outcomes, but I guess we all agreed it should have been. Perhaps from the Time of Corona onwards, Zoom and Microsoft Teams’ technology will be included in all project management training courses -I know, I just couldn’t finish this article without mentioning the “C” word.

The game went on and the players, the students, covered the three scenarios prepared for them. The teams also had some predefined scripts that guided their position in the meeting. For instance, the IT team was sharp, on time and only focused on data numeric figures. The Finance team was bored with the meeting and just wanted to get back to their daily tasks. The HR team joined the meeting slightly late, but they were understanding of both sides of the situation and did the best they could to avoid unnecessary arguments over the conf-call – I know, I was playing with stereotypes, something perhaps a little dangerous, but the rationale for this will be explained in later paragraphs of this article.

The online meeting was interrupted at various stages by background noises such as a dog barking, a doorbell ringing, one team getting disconnected (then trying to reconnect: ‘can you her us? Hello, is the line working now?’ ), and a toilet flushing (the project manager was working from home and forgot to put the telephone on mute while going to the loo). The students laugh at some of the situations and some became slightly uncomfortable with the loo sound.

The core part of the learning activity, as I designed it, was the reflection, or retrospective,  part. Here students were given the opportunity to discuss the characteristics (stereotypes) of the teams in the game, the role of culture in communications, country vs organisation culture, the role of the project manager, among other learning outcomes. I must say, it wasn’t easy getting feedback from the students. Of course, there is the language issue, these young Polish women and men were taking this specialisation, learning material, and playing games in English. Yet, in my opinion the use of English language wasn’t the main issue. The main issue has been documented in academic research on the use of games for teaching. In some cases, students themselves reject games as they want to be told (in written or oral form) what they need to memorise in order to pass the test. And this was one of the questions the students asked me at the end of the retrospective session ‘will it be on the exam?’

I was slightly disappointed. Not at the students, but at the education system. Alas, it’s slightly changing every day a little more. Proof? I’m using my games to teach university students. I’m also learning while teaching and running my games. For instance, one thing that stuck with me after this particular game session was the students’ belief that corporations possessed, and utilise on daily basis, advance technologies to complete each and every job task. ‘For sure these problems do not happen in real conf-calls’ I was told during the retrospective.

Collaboration and teamwork are essential 21st Century skills. And Serious Games and simulations are an excellent way to teach students (at all levels of their education journey) these skills. In the book chapter Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming Jane McGonigal meticulously describes how large and distributed teams can tackle gigantic and unprecedented problems. “No one knows everything, everyone knows something” (p. 201). This line stuck with me forever after reading her text.

Jim Gee discusses this concept a step in his chapter entitled Distributed Intelligence and Cross-Functional Teams. People can become smarter when distributing knowledge not only across team members, the author argues, but across technology and humans (p. 32). Workplace researchers are investing time and effort to identify the many ways in which groups that maximise distributed intelligence produce better results than individuals working separately. This intersection between human and technology collaboration has been defined as the socio-technical-system in the M.Sc. In Managing Risk and System Change delivered online by Trinity College Dublin.

All the serious games I have so far designed, developed and facilitated use team work as a guiding game mechanic. I encourage game developers to keep up this principle when designing games for learning and development. Equally so, I push myself, and encourage others, to always keep an eye on what’s to come. Designing games that exploit the benefits of human-machine cooperation could very well be the next big thing.

The post The next big thing: paper planes and bits first appeared on Ludogogy.

What is teamwork?

Firstly, teamwork is usually defined as “cooperative or coordinated effort on the part of a group of
persons acting together as a team or in the interests of a common cause.”(Dictionary.com LLC, 2020)
Seems like a pretty simple way to understand what teamwork is as a term that highlights what it
says on the tin. However, it is important to realise that teamwork isn’t exclusively used by teams and
can emerge through random acts of cooperation between people who may be outside of your own
team.

This leads to an intriguing situation where it is essential for teams to have effective teamwork to
thrive but you don’t necessarily need a team to display good teamwork. One such way of viewing
the idea of good teamwork would be as The Happy Manager describes as a set of behaviours and
attitudes that encourage the desire to succeed through a sense of unity and enthusiasm in sharing
common interests and responsibilities in order to complete the tasks. (The Happy Manager, 2020)
This leads to the more robust and flexible definition of teamwork being “when a group of people
work together cohesively, towards a common goal, creating a positive working atmosphere, and
supporting each other to combine individual strengths to enhance team performance.”(The Happy
Manager, 2020) A bit longer than the standard dictionary definition, but is more useful for our
purposes of figuring out how to best design games that feature teamwork.

Types of cooperation

I found that one of the most important questions that I feel needs to be asked when designing a
game around teamwork is “What kind of reliance on cooperation do I want to put onto the players?”
This question came from when I was perusing my library of team-based games to determine any
differences between them, after a while I noticed that they tend to fall into 2 categories, games that
force cooperation or games that incentivise cooperation.

Forced cooperation games are ones that are rather rigid and go all in with the idea that the players
need to work together in order to achieve success, regardless of their skill. This is typically due to
these games utilising functions which require the assistance of other players to be accomplished.
Whilst these games are satisfying and certainly give the feeling of working as a team to accomplish a
shared goal, it can lead to frustration through the simple act of people on your team not cooperating
with you, ultimately leading to nothing getting done.

One of the main examples of a game that falls into this category would be the Left 4 Dead game
series where if you’re incapacitated by the enemies of the game, you need the assistance of your
fellow survivors in order to get back on your feet or to stop whatever’s attacking you at the time.
Left 4 dead (Valve 2008): Being incapacitated, needing the help of your allies to get back up.

Games that incentivise cooperation are more relaxed in the sense that the tasks within the game are
accomplishable on your own if you’re skilled enough, but are far easier or offer more rewards when
you work with your teammates to complete them. Although this is a far more flexible approach than
the previous category, it may lead to players acting selfishly should they feel that their teammates
aren’t playing well enough or against their wishes.

One example of this would be the Counter Strike game series which has two teams facing off against
each other, one team needing to plant and defend a bomb at a specific location and the other team
needs to stop them from achieving this, all while trying to eliminate each other. These tasks are
accomplishable by a single player, it is much easier if you work alongside your teammates to get the
job done.

Counter Strike Global Offensive (Valve 2012): Counter-terrorists preparing for the upcoming mission.
Interestingly the aforementioned cooperation categories are by no means exclusive to one another
as there are some games that have managed to combine elements between these two categories to
make some interesting experiences to provide players with the best of both worlds. Games such as
League of Legends have two teams of 5 players choose from a wide selection of characters with their
own strengths and weaknesses to push through and destroy the enemy base whilst defending your
own.

These games combine the elements of these two categories in a way where the things that the
player is able to accomplish within a match is determined by many different factors including;

• The character they have chosen, with some characters being able to accomplish tasks that
  others cannot.
• The performance of the players, their allies and their opponents, with strong players being
  able to easily assist weaker players who are being overwhelmed by their enemies, making
  their weaker allies stronger and able to contribute more to the current match.
• Completing certain objectives throughout the map which has difficulty ranging from being
  able to be fought alone, to needing the help of your teammates to succeed.
  League of Legends (Riot Games 2009): Blue team members fighting off red team members after
  destroying a tower.

Although it can be beneficial to develop a game that combines the best of both of the
aforementioned categories, it also has the risk of combining the weaknesses as well, with
despondent teammates able to actively sabotage your team’s efforts by either not assisting with
completing objectives or ‘feeding’ the enemy through deliberately letting them kill the player,
making the enemy stronger to the detriment of their own team.

Whilst this is more of a personal musing that has been acquired through extensive playtime and
observing games being played at both a casual and professional level, I feel that there is something
of value to be shared from thinking about team-based games in this way.

Things to keep in mind for designers

This section is a set of take-away thoughts that may be helpful to you if you wish to develop games
which have players utilise teamwork.

Firstly, this is more of a reiteration on what was discussed in the previous section but I feel it’s
important to reinforce it here. The main thing that you must ask yourself is “What kind of reliance on
cooperation do I want to put onto the players?” This just makes it easier to decide on how much
freedom you wish to provide the players of your game through the mechanics that they interact
with within the game.

Next, depending on how you answer the previous question, allowing players to choose the types of
roles that they wish to fulfil as they play is very important as this will allow players to play to their
strengths whilst giving them the opportunity to improve their skills at a role they may not be
comfortable with. A good example of a game that does this would be League of Legends which
categorises their playable characters into a variety of roles and they have a match making system
which allows players to choose the role they wish to play in the upcoming match. All in all, it’s nice
to give players agency and freedom to play how they want to.

Lastly, you need to give your players the ability to quickly and effectively communicate with their
teammates. Seems simple enough, but many games still rely on either a typing text system which is
antiquated and forces the player to stop what they’re doing in order to type out their message,
leaving them vulnerable, or a voice chat system, which is reliant on the players having either the
necessary equipment or the desire to talk to people, which isn’t always present. However, many
games utilise a ping system which provides a quick and simple message or notification to
teammates, depending on the type of ping used.

The best example of a ping and callout system used in games would be the one in Apex Legends,
which offers players a wide selection of context sensitive callouts which depend on the player’s
actions and condition (such as “I’m reloading” or “I’m getting shot at”) and notifications (such as
“Someone’s been here”, or “I’m defending this area”) that depend on what the player is looking at
and are quickly accessible to the player without breaking their flow of gameplay.

Finally I wanted to share a neat little article by Leszek Gorniak on Gamasutra which covers some very
important topics in setting the foundations of designing games as a team which utilises creating a
‘Design Compass’ which is something that helps a team to share the same idea for the design of the
current project and also utilising a method they call ‘Question-Driven Design’(2019) which has you
focus on asking questions when faced with design problems which helps to easily break down the
problem that you’re facing in a more manageable way.

Definitely an interesting read if you want to have a slightly more diplomatic approach to solving
problems with fellow designers and developers.

All in all, teamwork is a very interesting beast that exists regardless of being in a team and when
utilised effectively, great things can be accomplished. So, get out there and practise good teamwork!

The post Musings on Developing Games Featuring Teamwork first appeared on Ludogogy.