When I was a child, I enjoyed going to the games arcade and running on deserts and beaches. This game was called ‘OutRun’, a classic game masterpiece. The reason why I still remember this game after thirty years is that ‘OutRun’ gave me real pleasure, beyond just providing competition.

I have memories of driving a sports car in various cities in Europe. The reason why those experiences of playing ‘Outrun’ are important in the context of this article is that small cities that have problems with population decrease and economic downturn can be revived by games like ‘OutRun’.

A small city is not a destination for tourists

When a city loses energy, it doesn’t position itself as a destination that tourist wants to go. This is also related to not offering suitable attractions for tourists by utilizing various assets that small cities have.

Until now, cities have usually only looked at physical development, depending on attracting tourists by building up the infrastructure. So, the unique attractiveness and contents of the city are not differentiated. Although the road, buildings, and parks are invested with many resources and manpower, the numbers of tourists who visit small cities do not increase.

From a non-infrastructure, experiential, perspective, typical gamification such as stamps and selfies was generally used. However, tourists don’t have much interest in those. These kinds of programmes can be experienced in many other cities.

If the experiences presented by cities are almost identical, it is still very likely that tourists choose the large cities, which have more sightseeing and content.

The city’s brand value is not increased just by a slogan or a well-known landmark. The more important thing is the level of recognition. Visitors go to the city because the prestige of the city and the expectation of ‘recognition’. The ‘basics’ of hospitality and simple ownership of landmarks can happen in any city, and do not differentiate. The important thing is for the city to recognise the value of the unique characteristics of that city and what the things that make it attractive. This is how they will lead tourists to have different and more favourable perceptions of the uniqueness of the city.

Merging gamification with city branding

A blend of gamification and city branding can be one approach to giving small cities more energy and appeal to tourists – to compete with larger cities.

Many small cities already have connected various technologies such as Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Extended Reality, and metaverse applications which are used in digital games, with city branding.  The pace of these changes were accelerated by factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and many activities have been moved into digital-based online environments.

City branding has evolved, and now consumers can get city-related content and information without necessarily visiting the city. The city’s assets and technologies are connected to more various, and often free content, beyond the physical infrastructure.

For example, Watson Adventures is a game to explore the city through finding treasures, and Travel Earth is a game which allows ‘visitors’ to travel the city through videos. Ganes such as these are already part in the gamification effort related to city branding.

However, what is important to ask, is how these services can provide pleasure to users, and how these can lead to positive outcomes for the city providing content for the experiences.

The perception of ‘Experience Value’ is what a city should aim to maximise for their (potential) visitors. This includes differentiation – the idea that a particular city can provide an experience which others cannot, and any gamification should be designed to enhance that perception.

 Online, Content, Experience value

City branding using gamification has three main considerations. The first one is that it has to make effective use of the digital online environment. So much of life is now firmly embedded into the online ecosystem through social media development, media diversification, and the fact that we now live in the virtual post-COVID-19 era. Online-based activities have fewer time and place restraints, and cost less money.

Although many areas have been transformed by the use of online applications, city-related content is still in the offline sector. Programs for attracting visitors to the real ‘places’ are most popular. Simply ‘reproducing’ images of the city is not the way to effectively utilise digital online environments in this context. The important thing is content.

The second one is that city must focus on ‘content’ showing the city’s unique attractiveness. This process needs to be designed from the users’ perspectives to create a sense of differentiation. Rather than simply reproducing and seeing spaces, it should lead users to have curiosity and participate in those spaces and experiences. The activities should have the focus of making the users want to visit the real cities.

Finally, the experience value of the city should be discovered. Simple ‘Appreciation’ content; images, reviews, videos; have a limit.  It is necessary to tap into experiences which can both be remembered, and can prompt pleasurable ‘looking forward to’ planning. There is a place here for devices connected to online environments – augmented reality, virtual reality and other immersive technologies. In addition to asking “What kind of experience can be provided?”, it becomes important also to ask, “What do we want users to feel about the experience?”.

Through the COVID-19 pandemic, the environment has changed fast. In addition to these changes, the tourism market and tourists’ attitudes towards visiting cities have also changed. One of the methods  to meet these environmental changes effectively is Gamification.

I still remember driving in the beach and desert with a steering wheel handle in the games arcade. I still have feelings of driving by seeing the cities in the game. If Gamification can be seen not just as a game but as a solution tool to adapt to environmental changes, it can be an opportunity for reversal for small cities in economic crisis.

The post Making a small, vibrant city through gamification first appeared on Ludogogy.

I have often come across the idea that Monopoly can teach people about economics. If you want to teach the lesson the original creator intended—that gaining vast wealth at the expense of others is problematic—then you could argue that Monopoly does it well. But that’s more a philosophical position than a set of skills.

What many people mean when they say ‘teach economics’ is ‘teach people the skills to operate well in an economic system’. And this, Monopoly is not very good at. For a game to build skills that are useful in a real-life system, it needs to do two things:

• Give meaningful choices, where good decisions tend to good outcomes, to build the ability to make good decisions in the context
• Provide a reasonable analogue to key elements of the real-life system where these skills are to be used

In Monopoly, you mainly choose to buy or not buy the properties you land on by the roll of the dice, which is neither a very meaningful choice nor very representative of real-life. Luck is part of real life economics, but our choices are rarely so constrained. A game that does a better job (although not specifically intended as a learning game) is Acquire.

In Acquire, players draw tiles, much as in Scrabble, and keep them on their own rack, choosing one to play on their turn. Instead of letters, each tile represents one square on the gameboard. The gameboard is simply a grid of empty squares, each marked with a number for the column and a letter for the row. So I have the tile ‘1-A’, I can place it in the top-left square, marked ‘1-A’.

As the board starts to fill with tiles, sooner or later a player will place a tile next to another. When they do this, they form a hotel chain—they can choose from seven named chains, some cheaper, some more expensive. The player gets one free stock in the chain, represented by a card. From that point on, at the end of a turn, players can buy up to three stocks from any hotel chain on the board.

If two hotel chains sit next to each other, a player could place a tile that links them together. When that happens, the smaller merges into the larger, shares in the now-defunct smaller chain earn a choice of compensation, and the biggest stockholders in the smaller chain get bonuses.

Why does this make for a good economics teacher? What should learning game designers do to emulate it (rather than Monopoly) if they want their game to build skills for real-life situations or challenges, whether economic or any other?

Present interesting choices that represent real-life choices

In Acquire, when you hold stocks in a chain that merges into another, you have three options—sell them, trade two-for-one for stocks of the bigger chain, or keep them in the hope that the merged chain will re-form anew. This can be a tough choice.

Maybe the two-for-one deal right now is a net loss, but it makes you into the majority stock owner in the larger chain, which could rise in value. Kept stocks lose the opportunity to profit now, but if the chain reforms, you’ll have a head start towards a majority holding. Selling the shares might let you buy some expensive and valuable shares you otherwise couldn’t afford.

Players are forced to balance short-term with long-term gains, to consider probabilities of various outcomes, and to calculate expected returns—all key skills for real-life economic systems. Learning game designers should look to build in choices that are not clear, and force the kind of problem-solving and decision-making that we want learners to take from the game into real life.

Allow players to determine priorities and goals

There are many things you could prioritise in Acquire. If you own a lot of stock, or a majority holding, in a chain, you may want to prioritise increasing its size. If you need ready cash, you may want to prioritise merging it into another chain. When buying stocks, you might choose to prioritise getting a majority stake in a chain, or you might look to spread your investments so that you profit from activity in many chains.

This goes beyond immediate choices—it’s not just ‘how do I achieve my goals?’, it’s ‘what even are my goals?’. Although there is a single win condition—be richest at game end—there are many paths and sub-goals. Again, this is reflective of the real-life system we’re considering here.

Learning game designers should look to give players control over the route they take and the sub-goals—or even the ultimate goals—they set. To go back to Monopoly, the only real choice of goal is which set to collect, but that’s strictly limited by which you land on. Acquire’s freer choice is more meaningful and skill-building for the player, and more reflective of real life. If games give this freedom in a way that mirrors a real-life situation, players can build skills to navigate that situation.

Build real-life considerations into game decisions

To help players learn to invest wisely, a game needs to make players consider risk versus reward. Monopoly’s risk versus reward consideration is mainly a simple one around the risk of buying/not buying a property, once you land on it. You can’t choose to take the risk of landing on another player’s hotel in hopes of a big reward, or assess the expected return on turning a chance card before deciding whether to turn it.

Acquire asks players to consider risk and reward in many ways. Should you start a new chain now, to get the free share, and risk having to split your buying between the new chain and an existing one you’re already competing for a majority stock holding in? Should you merge two chains now while you know you’re a majority stockholder, or take a risk and allow them to grow first, even though somebody else may overtake you?

Risk versus reward is a key factor in many good games, so game designers should consider the risk and reward in players’ decisions for any game. But here, it’s a key skill for the real-life situation in question. Learning game designers should look at the skills they’re trying to build in players, and ask: how can I make this a consideration in the decisions and actions that make up my game?

Set variables carefully to represent real-life challenges

In Acquire, there are 25 available stocks in each chain. Players get one stock for starting a chain, and can buy—if they have funds—three stocks each turn. These numbers are not accidental or random. 25 is an odd number, meaning that 13 stocks guarantees a majority holding. This can be achieved with the free stock for starting, plus four turns of buying only that stock (with your three permitted purchases per turn) and nothing else. So whoever starts the chain, can get majority holding if they can afford it and focus all their efforts on doing so.

But what if you have two races on at once? You may have to choose. Or, what if you’re a turn away from getting that majority, and somebody merges another chain into the chain, and trades in some stock in the acquired chain to overtake you? All these concerns, and the specific numbers that facilitate them, represent very well a simplified model of the dynamics and challenges of scarcity.

Set the stocks at 26 per chain, or allow players to buy as many stocks as they like per turn, and the dynamics change, as do the lessons and the skills. Learning game designers should consider and play with the variables in their games, with an eye to the challenges they put to the players, and the skills they build as a result.

Few elements, many possibilities

What Acquire doesn’t do is model real-life economic scenarios by including many complex elements that bring the intricacies of real-life stock trading and the hotel business into the game. The rules and components are fairly simple. I explained the core of the game in three paragraphs above, and the components are simply the grid board, the tiles, the 25 stock cards for each of the seven chains, and a reference card showing the costs and values of each chain. That’s it.

But from the interrelations of those elements emerges a set of complex—but not over-complicated—possibilities. The simple rules about how chains grow and merge give rise to options and possibilities around growing your chain or merging it into another. The way stocks are bought and majority bonuses are given gives rise to scarcity and tactical competition for control.

By limiting the number of elements, but making each interrelate to others in a number of carefully thought-out ways, Acquire models many important decisions and skill-building moments from real life, without confusing players or muddying the lessons. Learning game designers should resist the urge to represent real life by including every little element and agent separately, and try to represent them in spirit, simply, but in a way that brings into the game the important decisions or considerations.

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

The post Acquiring Real-Life Economics Skills from Games first appeared on Ludogogy.

Arguably, nearly every game, even if it is not specifically about money, or economics, has some element of economics embedded in it, because there is nearly always a return of ‘value’ from the play decisions that players make. This article, however, looks at in-game economies in a more literal sense, focusing on the creation and destruction of value you will commonly see in games where there is money, or other items with material value, or in gamification applications with collectable and exchangeable points, for example.

Sources and Sinks

Currency, or points, or whatever the unit of value you have created for your game or gamification design, must come from somewhere. These are your ‘Sources’, and you often see them implemented in games through quests (for which you get rewarded for completion), looting, (either by ‘finding’ in a landscape or stealing from the corpses of vanquished foes), or maybe through minigames. Although you often hear these referred to as ‘gold sources’ or ‘gold taps’, they don’t necessarily refer to currency, both usually to anything which has value within the game, and so could include things which could not necessarily be exchangeable for currency (real or in the game world), such as life points.

The places in your game or gamification application where the value created by sources is destroyed, are called ‘Sinks’. In the game, quite often this is not a literal destruction, but a transfer of value from one form to another, because the most common sink in most MMORPGs is the shop, where you can swap your hard-earned gold for a kick-ass sword, or contrarywise, trade in the leather armour you looted from a low-grade enemy for a few coppers.

The dangers of a poorly balanced economy

 It can be tricky to get right, but balancing your sources and sinks is essential if you want a compelling game experience, and even more important if you have an exchange between the ‘soft’ (in-game) currencies and ‘hard’ (real world cash) currency as part of the way you monetise the game.

If your sources are too productive, or you do not have enough sinks to destroy the value that has been created, you will get inflation.  Whatever it is, gold or other resources, that is too available, will effectively lose value. The game becomes too easy to progress through, and if you have real-world monetisation connection, you will find that demand for real world transactions will plummet.

If the opposite is true, and your sinks outstrip your sources you will end up with deflation, and in extreme cases, such as the situation found with the New World in-game economy, players have started to hoard (game) cash, and are instead bartering for items, which they would ordinarily buy with that cash, but are now unable to do so.

Interestingly, inflation can also have benefits. In games with a fixed end point, allowing players to find more and more efficient ways to farm gold as they level up, gives them a great sense of progression but can be balanced by the increasing prices of high-level items, the sinks.  Inflation also helps to tackle the ‘latecomer disadvantage’ when someone comes late to a game, maybe attracted by a new expansion, but could be discouraged by the amount of effort required to reach this point in the game. Controlled inflation makes more currency available to players early in the game, making it easier for them to progress and keeping them engaged.

There are multiple mechanisms to control the flow of value in the game including:

• Incremental mechanics – where sources and sinks increase proportionally as the game progresses
• Resets – Starting everybody back at zero from time to time will obviously combat inflation, but can be controversial – as many players will resent losing what they have worked hard for
• Gambling – If the mechanics of gambling in the game are designed as they are in casinos – the house always wins’ – then this is an effective way of removing value from the game
• Mega high cost sinks – Much like the real world, items can be made very attractive merely by their unattainability, and having a few items which have very high costs will drive players to want them and thus remove high quantities of value from the game in single transactions
• Taxation – where the game itself takes a small cut for transactions that happen in the game – for example, a ‘gaming house’ takes a small fee if two players want to wager against each other, or the mages guild charges a fee to bring a dead warrior back to life

Given the complexity of designing an in-game economy and the constant need to balance it throughout the life of a game, it is small wonder that there is an actual job, which deals with this and nothing else – The Game Economy Designer

How in-game economies foster engagement

This is not however, just a matter of making the numbers work, or in the case of a monetised game, ensuring a stable revenue.  These mechanisms are also all about creating a great play experience

Having multiple sources and sinks give variety to your game/gamification, and opens up possibilities for players to make meaningful choices

Multiple sources usually also means that you will have multiple types of ‘currency’ which can be used in many different ways, reflecting different paths to ‘progress’.  For example, you might have ‘gold’ or a similar resource representing money.  This tends (like in real life) to be the most widely transferable currency, and can be swapped for goods, services, and even other forms of ‘currency’, e.g. if you could ‘buy’ extra lives.

Another form of ‘currency’ could include lives, which you ‘spend’ in order to continue playing and whose ‘sinks’ would be strong(er) enemies, disease, poison, even extreme exhaustion or old age. Yet another is the staple of many business learning games, ‘effort’ – often implemented as actual people in worker placement games.

Ultimately, all of these things are actually ‘points’. Points in games are usually of two kinds, cumulative, non-exchangeable points – for example, experience points (XP) which allow you to level up in an RPG, or exchangeable points which you can spend to get other stuff you need to move on in the game. In Settlers of Catan, for example, you spend wood, grain, wool and brick to build roads and settlements, or you can swap two of one resource for one of another

Exchangeable points

In fact, exchangeable points are pretty much the bread and butter of games, and money is not really a special case; it’s just an example of widely-applicable exchangeable points.

What the exchangeable points are actually called is usually a function of the theme and aesthetics of the game, as is what the sources and sinks themselves are called. The wool, wood etc of Catan (which is about building settlements) function extremely similarly to, for example, spell points for a Mage in an RPG, but only at the point of use, where they are both swapped for something else that creates ‘progress’ for the player. In Catan it is the building of a road, in the RPG it is a kick-ass Fireball which vapourises a group of enemies. The sources and sinks differ considerably, though. In Catan the resources are ‘harvested’, generating resources using a combination of the mechanisms of terrain control and random number generation. In the RPG the spell points are a function of aspects of a character (level, and stats such as ‘wisdom’ or ‘magic’). As far as the sinks go, in Catan, the sink creates a permanent (at least in the original game) terrain control, which itself helps to generate more resources in the future. In the RPG, the fireball solves an immediate problem, but does not otherwise impact the game further.

For each of the aspects of a game economy you therefore have design choices about how a particular resource is created, including what the source is called, or represents, narratively, how it functions (in terms of a single or group of connected game mechanism – with an effectively unlimited number of combinations possible), and how that source responds e.g. in its rate of production in the context of a game situation or character/player trait. You have an almost infinite number of choices of what to call the resource and what it represents in the game. Finally, in terms of the sink(s), you have the same kind of freedom you have in designing the sources.

This gives considerable scope for creating narrative and supporting a game theme, and facilitating meaningful player decisions and gameplay.

Given the almost infinite possibilities, it would be impossible to list all of them, but here are a few possibilities you could implement in your game design using exchangeable points.

Key takeaways on in-game economies

• Even games which, on the surface, do not appear to be about money or Economics, usually have some underlying system for creation, exchange and destruction of value.
• Value is created by ‘Sources’ and destroyed or exchanged by ‘Sinks’.
• Poor balanced in-game economies can cause inflation and deflation and adversely affect engagement.
• Design of in-game economies also provides opportunities to create strong narratives and themes, and foster player engagement by allowing players to exercise autonomy and make meaningful choices.
• The combination of design choices for sources, sinks and the resource created by them is effectively unlimited and gives the game designer massive scope for originality and creativity.

The post Focus on… In-game Economies first appeared on Ludogogy.

One of the most characteristic things about today’s crop of digital games is the gamer grind. The grind, grindyness, or grinding aspect of some games is an aspect that most gamers have experienced at one time or another.  But what does that mean? How do players experience it? How can designers and educators of games-based learning address the grind in our designs?

What is the grind?

The grind is the actions that players spent doing repetitive tasks in a game. This is usually done to unlock a particular game item or to gain experience points necessary to continue playing. Usually this activity is something boring, repetitive, and doesn’t add anything new to the player experience. Rather the grind is an activity that is done in order to get something. Quid pro quo.

Most modern gamers will know the grind in MMO titles like World of Warcraft where continually killing the same creatures over and over again rewards the player with currency, experience, or sometimes items.

In fact the South Park episode Make Love, Not Warcraft specifically lampoons the grind in modern MMO.  In the episode the characters play World of Warcraft 21 hours a day killing a bunch of low level boars to gain enough experience points to level up their characters.

What does the grind mean for players?

Sometimes the grind is just something that players enjoy doing. But if players DO enjoy the grind, then does it mean that activity is not really a grind? An intrinsically motivating action in a game is a cornerstone for good design. But does that mean that the player has to particularly like that action? If they don’t like performing that action in the game, then does it become a grind for those players but not for others?

These are questions that designers address in game design. Asking these questions, in addition to the level of player commitment, as well as the amount of time they invest in the game are important considerations to make.

An action shouldn’t really be a grind if a mechanic is engaging and it helps the player achieve objectives in the game. But when players are doing the same repetitive tasks over and over again is when we stray into the grind territory of games.

Why do players grind?

Sometimes players choose to grind for a host of various reasons. Some of them are evidenced by the player actions.  Some of them are purposely made by the designer.  However, there are some instances when the player does not really have a “good choice” and the grind is something that they pursue in the absence of that good choice.

The grind becomes a comparison between being bored with the game and being bored with the inability to progress in the game.

From another perspective, the grind for gamers is them exercising their basic abilities and agencies. The grind could be one optimized way of attaining something in the game that the designer intended. While the designer would have wanted the player to attempt to defeat 3 hard bosses in order to reach the next level, the player could may also be able to find a way to defeat 100 easy bosses in order to achieve the same thing.

Eric, Kyle, Kenny, and Stan did the same. For 21 hours a day they kept slaying those boars in World of Warcraft.

In this way, the players have optimized the actions they’ve taken.

Addressing gamer grind from a design perspective

Because players engage in the grind (often as a last resort) to achieve some sort of in-game win or achievement, it is often hailed as a characteristic of bad game design.

But this doesn’t need to be the case. Especially when we approach game design form a games-based learning prescriptive.  Sometimes the activities of our students need to address a grind in some form.

I think back to my elementary school days when I was part of a reading club. Whenever you read through 10 books you earned a free personal pan pizza. Now the objective of the designers of this program was to get more students to read. But from the students’ perspective reading 10 books would have been a serious grind. But students still did it – myself included. In this situation, their ideal players continued on towards meeting the program’s outcome which was to get students to read more. Despite the grind.

Another means of including a grind in the game addresses some of the achiever aspects of player design. It may be the designer’s intent to have the player slay 3 bosses instead of 100 smaller bosses to achieve something. But they can often incentivize different methods of play by awarding special “titles” to players who achieve a specific set of circumstances in a game like killing those 100 smaller bosses.

Think about those Steam achievements that pop up during your play when you accomplish something you weren’t event shooting for.

Getting the Gamer Grind on YOUR Side

Designers can find ways to mitigate the gamer grind; ways to incorporate it; and ways to avoid it. If you are interested in avoiding the grind, then you can address it through the use of player agency.

The more ways that there are for players to progress in the game, earn points, do this thing, or accomplish something that allows them to progress, then the less likely they are do something ad nauseam in order to achieve that goal. Giving the player agency in this circumstance allows them to pursue the goal according to their own plans.

Good games also involve some engaging elements such as achievements for elements that could be considered grinds. Think about my personal pan pizza example from earlier. Reading those books as a kid was a grind for me.  But you better believe that getting that delicious pizza was worth it in the end.

The last way to address the grind is to continue to make player actions varied, challenging, and fun. Failing to do so ensures that your game will be a slog no matter what your players do.

Takeaways on Gamer Grind

Sometimes grinding out a game is something that players look forward to. Other times players do it because they don’t have another (or a better way) to achieve the goals that the designer set out for them.

Address these grinding aspects in your game design by providing your players agency to achieve the objectives that you’ve designed. Otherwise, create intrinsic and positive feedback for your players’ actions that make it so that the experience is not so grindy after all.

This article address the gamer grind in games-based learning. TO learn more about how the grind affects players in gamification, check out the free course on Gamification Explained.

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

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The post Gamer Grind first appeared on Ludogogy.

What does that mean?

It means that my 12-year-old self can stay up late on Thursday with my cousins to play boardgames (specifically Risk, Diplomacy, Timbuktu & Monopoly) – games that can last for 6 hours straight with an endless line up of sandwiches, snacks, and fizzy drinks. Time passes by as if there is no end to it – a peculiar behavior for a kid with ADHD that had extreme focus issues in the classroom and in finishing homework.

My only analysis is that I was an addict to the scheme. Yes, an addict. I was addicted to the “incentive scheme”.

Let’s take the boardgame (Risk) as an example:

The objective is very straightforward: to conquer the world by controlling all the countries on the board. You do this by attacking other players and taking over new territories on the board. All the while, you need to make sure that your own territories are well-defended.

The more countries you conquer, the more armies you acquire and the further you can expand territories across the board.

My kick was in building bigger armies, increasing my chances of winning and possibilities of strategizing against my older cousins. It was an absolute thrill to earn, earn & earn.

Do you know why?

Because human beings are very susceptible.

During boardgames & video games, we can be easily influenced by rewards. We notice the hint of a stimulus in the game environment, we perform an action based on that stimulus, and then a reward is earned.

And obviously when we get a reward, we are on the lookout for that same stimulus (or another) in the future. That’s basic psychology 101 classical conditioning where behaviors are increased by rewarding them and decreased by punishing them.

Going deeper, most games (if not all games) work by triggering the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS). The system that controls our cells in the background automatically, typically without conscious thought. Simultaneously, any thought can trigger the ANS without us even being aware of it.

The ANS is composed of two competing systems called the Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) and the Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS). Competition here means that when one system is stimulated, the other system is suppressed. Normal natural humans have these systems in balance automatically thanks to evolutionary processes.

The SNS is often called the “Fight or Flight” system. Activation of this system causes increased alertness, strength, and mobility at the cost of tunnel vision and impaired ability to think beyond the present. When the PNS is most dominant (usually during periods of rest, or just after eating) the body takes available nutrients (from whatever you ate recently, if available) and rebuilds damaged tissues, grows new hair/nails/skin, and stores leftover nutrients as fat. Appetite is increased by PNS activation.

Insulin, dopamine, and oxytocin are primary PNS chemicals and SNS counter-chemicals. They affect your interactions in social situations and even affects your decision making in a multitude of situations.

Meaning, that during incentivized game environments seeing a loot box/possibility of winning/conquest can cause us to release dopamine even before opening the box or winning the game. Tasting a strong sweetener, even if it has no calories or we don’t swallow it, triggers a strong insulin response. Seeing a tiger, gun, or any other threat can trigger the SNS without us actually being harmed. Our body in most cases can react to a stimulus without us even having the stimulus. In other words, if we can imagine it, then it is real.

When you think about it, our brains are several pounds of meat floating in cerebrospinal fluid. It’s dark in there. There’s no sound, feel, smell, or any other form of stimulation other than nerve impulses. We have no ability to directly see “reality” during games. All those nerve impulses are processed through the filter of our ideology, beliefs, previous experiences, competing nerve impulses, and world view. This means I can let ten individuals engage with the same game and have them tell me ten different stories about what is going on. Putting it a different way, reality is extremely personal, or perhaps does not exist at all.

Games (our eternal metaverse) are the reality of its players. They are the reality of anyone who goes through them, and this includes any game in which you can get hooked on incentives & rewards. Any game that offers us satisfying feedback pushes our curiosity forward…hooks & anchors us. It’s a scientific fact.

Game designers that create learning games are well-aware of those parameters and work on utilizing game mechanics that allow for such behavioral dynamics to flow continuously. The main purpose is for the learners to reach the final mile of learning a specific knowledge context or practicing a certain skill and behavior of a technique/model.

Let’s list some of those mechanics that come into play:

1. Fixed Rewards Mechanic:
   As predictable as harvest is, fixed rewards should be what everyone gets after acquiring a specified prerequisite. The reward is the same for all players, but a separate scoring mechanic is required to differentiate between their standings and statuses in the game. Usually, fixed rewards are utilized to enforce a precise behavior that you want the learners to practice or a piece of knowledge that must be non-refutable to them by the end of the game.
2. Random Rewards Mechanic:
   A four-leaf clover is a sign of good luck, once we find it, we are destined for fortune. Random rewards produce a persistent behavior of exploration & surprises in a designed structure because they can be competitive or non-competitive, and certainty or uncertainty based. It’s interesting to find out. Believe it or not, randomized rewards are particularly enticing because it ties into the survivalist mentality of our ancient ancestors. Jamie Madigan, operator of the Psychology of Games website, uses the example of a primitive “adaptive feature”. As our predecessors continued to search for food in certain bushes, even though other similar bushes didn’t reap the same reward. This means that the reward schedule becomes unexpected: we lose more often than we win, and we never know when the next triumph will come. Rather than discouraging us from playing, this actually makes the game even more enticing than if we won easily.

This strategy is known as a variable ratio schedule of reinforcement and is the same tactic used in slot machines; you can never predict when you’re going to win, but you win just often enough to keep you coming back for more.

It’s completely random (in games), but we are not really built to deal with randomness in that way, so we’re still inherently fixated on getting that reward. Every time we see something that we think might help us get that reward, we’re all the more interested. It’s a super-charged feedback loop.

3. Lottery/Chance Mechanic:
   People love winning & better if their prize is double or more than the effort put; learning game designers use this mechanic to induce a sense of devotion to the design by placing those rare chances.
4. Virtual Goods Mechanic:
   They allow us to spend our virtual currency on actions & factions in the game designed in order for us to level up, earn specific tools or even utilize a distinct game strategy. It’s a force to be reckoned with. Collecting goods, resources, etc and trade using virtual or/and actual currency in your design increases the learners’ belonging & cooperation or/and competition. It also fuels the illusion of control by the player (learner) that they can actually affect the actions of the game using trade/wit/scheme to win the game over the other opponent or even over a computer, if it’s a video game. Learning game designers capitalize on using this mechanic to invoke the feelings of possession & ownership. This could be used in game-based learning to teach learners about project management, change management, adaptability, or any other type of strategy you are planning on educating them about.
5. Investment Mechanic:
   It’s only natural that we mention this mechanic now, as people value outcomes when they sacrifice effort, time, or even emotions. This mechanic is utilized to let learners appreciate & cultivate an intended behavior in your design or to educate them about persisting through an intended plan or even through practicing a daunting skill.
6. Social Status Mechanic:
   We can’t really be talking about dopamine rushes without mentioning the most social mechanic of them all, the one that fuels greater visibility for people, creating opportunities to create new relationships. It also feels good (like physically good) & produces a high sense of achievement. This mechanic is used in concordance with other mechanics such as PBL & victory condition mechanics.

It’s easy to consider games to be something frivolous, although from what has been mentioned so far we can agree that rigorous economical concepts such as loss aversion, sunk-cost/gain and resource scarcity are evident in most of the mechanics we have mentioned. Game-design bridges between the understanding of psychology, economics & behavioral sciences using game mechanics and clear design purpose.

When I was 12-years of age, I knew nothing about all of this, but I knew the meaning of losing an opportunity. I knew the meaning of sorting my resources and considering correct decisions. I learned much about long-term planning and enjoying a good competition.

Games taught me about economy when I was too young to even understand what I wanted to be when I grew up to be 35.

The post A Quintessential Scheme for Engagement first appeared on Ludogogy.

You can also read more about Utopoly at his website.

“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make, and could just as easily make differently” David Graeber

The world is facing catastrophes of pandemics, ecosystem collapse and climate change. The dominant economic ideology endorses individualism and greed over society and community whilst consumerism, perpetual growth and inequality are promoted with damaging consequences for the majority of people and the planet. It should be clear that a new economy is needed together with societal and cultural change. Utopoly is a method to explore and reinvigorate the radical imagination where people can re-imagine a different society where values, forms of exchange and social relations can be reconsidered and reconfigured.

A ‘hack’ of Monopoly

Utopoly started out as a ‘hack’ of Monopoly but has evolved to become much more.

Monopoly in its original form The Landlords Game (1904), was an early form of games-based learning, its inventor Elizabeth Magie intended to show how landlords accumulate wealth and impoverish society. Magie was later airbrushed out of history by the games manufacturer preferring the version adapted by Charles Darrow who claimed it as his own invention. This version is what most people know, and Monopoly has since become a cultural artefact that provides a subtle propaganda reinforcing dominant cultural norms. It celebrates some of the worst aspects of our economy and normalises activities, such as competitive property accumulation and rentier behaviour – teaching value extraction rather than value creation. In hacking Monopoly, we challenge the narrative it propagates and reprise Magie’s pedagogic function. However, Utopoly is not primarily about game-based learning (although knowledge is created through the process) but rather game-based creativity and game-based utopian-practice. Each time Utopoly is played players collectively take part in the hacking via a Future Workshop to produce utopia.

Robert Jungk developed the Future Workshop (1962) in response to concerns that cultural conditioning through education, work and consumerism meant people had become receivers of the ideology of the elites, and their natural creativity was suppressed. There was also clear democratic deficiency in public policy making. He had a fundamental belief that all people had the potential for genius, a creative imagination that he believed would be necessary to solve some of the world’s problems, and that this should be directed towards social and humane goals.

Populating the Board

Utopoly starts with a Future Workshop to collectively develop and conceptualise utopian values, ideas and desires and populate the Utopoly board. Through the process many discussions, stories and hopeful narratives of the future emerge. In the Critique phase participants are invited to question and critique a situation, the features of an economy or society that troubles them and this process opens the possibility of change. Items and concerns are written as notes, and these drive the direction of the next phases. The Fantasy phase is about responding to these critiques with imaginative solutions. It is the utopian space where the magic happens, where the creative radical imagination can play out producing fantasies of a utopian nature, unconstrained by whether they can be realized or not. The final phase is Implementation where the utopian ideas are transcribed onto the Utopoly board (with the property spaces now termed domains). The game part of the method is then ready to begin.

A feature of Utopoly is that participants can invent their own rules for the game stage. The rules that participants develop are predicated on the discussions from the Future Workshop, such that the ideas and values produced can find expression and be interpreted into the rules of play. However, understanding that playable rules are not easily formed a set of guidelines are used as a starting point. They are framed as guidelines, being optional and changeable rather than fixed rules – much like cultural norms and laws of a society. Utopoly is an encouragement to move beyond the fixed ideology of the status-quo and to anticipate cultural change. This concept of utopian-practice is not to produce a fixed flawless blue-print but recognises that the future holds possibilities and different requirements, it is a horizon that is moved towards but never reached, however in the process life is improved.

Beginning at the End

The game proceeds much like Monopoly with features that have been introduced to encourage certain behaviours and alternative economic thinking. The game begins at the normal end-point of Monopoly where a majority of domains are already controlled and players enter the game in a state of monopoly control. This monopoly is held by an oppositional entity (often a corporate or financial entity – that can be an autonomous or played by one of the participants). Their role is to act as reactionary force preventing utopian ideas from being realised by keeping and extending control of domains. The utopian players then collaborate with the aim to release their utopian ideas (domains). The oppositional entity and the utopian players make up two sides who are differentiated in several ways and one of these is their use of different currencies.

Most modern economies use a debt-based mono-currency which is a basic flaw. This causes multiple problems such as artificial scarcity and therefore competition which skews societal values towards individualism and creates an economy that only values what can be priced in the market. It creates periods of boom and bust with the resulting economic depression preventing economies from functioning effectively. Whereas having multiple currencies available at levels of sufficiency allows economies to flourish. There is also a general misconception of how money is created (i.e. it is not reliant on people depositing money in banks). Private banks can effectively create money at will by simultaneously expanding both sides of their balance sheets with assets and liabilities. They therefore effectively have a magic-money tree (also available for national banks as ‘fiat’ money). This feature is present in the game, so the oppositional figure has limitless access to credit and each time this is a used debt is also created which the utopian players must deal with. The utopian players use different currencies, these are suggested as Time, Wellbeing, Knowledge and Creativity (although players can choose others). Domains are then controlled by the placing one of each currency type on them, setting up an ecosystem of value exchange and suggestion that different economies both exist and can be possible.

Different Economic Modes

The two sides also have distinctly different modes of economic behaviour. The oppositional entity represents a financialised and fossil-fuel based market economy based on extraction, exploitation, and growth. Landing on their domains requires rent to be paid but also creates Carbon (this is indicated by blocks placed in the middle of the board). The utopian players have an alternative economic process based on regeneration, recycling, and natural abundance. This is facilitated by the concept of the commons (or another economic sphere). When they land on their domains instead of rent being charged value is created for the commons. The utopian players have a reciprocal and regenerative relationship with the commons – they access value from it and return value to it.

There is a major flaw in traditional economic theory which considers human behaviour to be selfish, individualistic, and rational (homo-economicus). This is a false conception of human qualities, and we now know that people cooperate not just for self-interest but out of genuine concern for others’ wellbeing, even beyond members of their own family. The natural and socially-constructed environments in which our ancestors evolved produced a prosocial nature that promotes positive feelings of satisfaction, pride and elation when engaged in cooperative projects. Collaboration is a common feature of human experience and in Utopoly features are included to reactivate these qualities. Firstly, the utopian players work together against the oppositional entity. Then there is a ‘wicked’ problem of complex, interwoven social, political and economic interests posed by the current status-quo resulting in catastrophic climate change and unsustainable debt (via constant growth). A limit or tipping point is set (players decide) to the amount of carbon and debt that is allowed to build up on the board – if this is reached the players lose. This provides a sense of urgency and further incentive for cooperation to ensure the utopian economy (as a stable symbiotic regenerative ecosystem) is formed.

Creating Temporary Utopias

Whilst the end point of Utopoly is to create and play an entertaining game the real purpose of to bring people together to discuss and explore their utopian thoughts, engage them in utopian practice and, in doing so educate their utopian desires – creating temporary utopians. The participants engage with and express their desires, discuss issues, and form new hopeful narratives of the future. In so doing there is a transformative aspect relating to Ernst Bloch’s autopoietic utopia, whereby engaging in the process of utopian-practice creates utopia and utopians. The games philosopher Christopher Yorke interprets the last chapter of Bernard Suits’ work The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia (2014) as a ‘utopian game design thesis’ where utopian game-play could be purposed to transform people into more fully realised utopian individuals. Suggesting such games would be played “not as a pastime, but as a means for individual (and ultimately cultural) transformation – the Suitsian formulation of ludic alchemy. The right kind of gameplay, for Suits, terraforms Earth into Utopia“ (2018, p. 11).

My thesis titled Utopoly – a utopian research method is waiting to be examined and so is not yet available for public readership (hopefully in a few months). The thesis is an account of how the method was developed and played over several iterations and now includes a condensed 2 page set of guidelines. I have just touched on some of the content of the thesis however, for further reading there are two articles which explain Utopoly in its earlier iterations:

http://publicseminar.org/2017/12/utopoly/

When this article was written, Neil was still completing his PhD thesis. This is now complete. It contains guidance on how to run a session of Utopoly, and can be read at 16 November 2021 Economics edition: Utopoly – Game and Utopian Research Method

You can also read more about Utopoly at his website.

The post Utopoly – Game and Utopian Research Method first appeared on Ludogogy.

“Hi, I’m Tyler. I make spreadsheets for fun.”

I always say it with a twinge of guilt, because I know I’m not supposed to enjoy spreadsheets the way I do. They’re tools, used for managing your finances, or sorting customer data, or cataloging large swathes of information in one go. It’s not supposed to be fun.

And, perhaps, that’s why I’m drawn to it. As a person with very few instincts that would be called “rebellious”, turning a spreadsheet into something fun is my own small act of revolution, in an otherwise milquetoast life of office computing.

I should start with an example: towards the start of this year, I was (as many of us were) working from home, bored, looking for a way to pass the time between Zoom meetings. I started poking around for those mindless office games we all used to play, like Solitaire or Minesweeper. Not finding any versions I liked, and figuring that installing games on my work laptop would look “unproductive”, I opted to make my own.

I’m a decent enough programmer, and could have opened up something like PICO-8 to whip up something that would sate my office ennui in a few hours (after, most likely, a lot of StackOverflow searches). But what was right in front of me, a part of that same job that I was supposed to be paying attention to, was Google Sheets. I was using it to track some Very Boring Metrics (VBMs) at the time, but the tools were all there: it could make squares, it had checkboxes to click, and I could get it to track where I’d clicked to see if a “mine” was there. With a little bit of conditional formatting, a game suddenly emerged, where once there was only business.

(If you’d like to learn more about that specific project, you can check out my step-by-step instructions.)

Why would you do this?

Getting one over on “the man” is only one of the benefits of making a game in a spreadsheet. It’s also a great, low-cost way to prototype a game idea, or find a new way to think about a particular mechanic.

For example, a while back I wanted to learn more about how chess games process valid moves, and the constrictions of a spreadsheet forced me to think about the order in which operations took place, in addition to the operations themselves. You can play the result and read my full write-up all in Google Sheets. Thanks to starting that process with a spreadsheet, I have a better understanding of what pitfalls to avoid, what functions I can simplify, and what benefits a more robust programming language might afford me. Whereas if I had started with something like Lua or Python, my penchant for feature creep might have taken me down unnecessary rabbit holes, and prevented the project from getting finished.

It’s also a great way to learn about how fundamental video game mechanics can boil down to simple math, such as plotting a player’s position as they move, or adjusting a character’s attributes (health, stamina, etc.) when something else happens. One of my favorite party tricks is whipping out a game of Snake in under 10 minutes (you can tell I’m great at parties), to show the basics of transposing a game concept onto a spreadsheet. (You can check out a copy of that spreadsheet here.)

Lastly, and this is the big one for me, it’s fun. Deciding to make a spreadsheet do something it wasn’t designed to do is like creating—then solving—a 50,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. Working within the constraints of a spreadsheet scratches the same itch as hands-on crafts (I’m an on-again-off-again crochet and chainmail hobbyist), while stretching the same muscles as programming or playing an intense puzzle game. Then even if the end result is totally useless, I can feel satisfied knowing that I solved something complex and weird. And, (so far) I’ve never felt like that time was wasted.

How do I get started?

I’m so glad you asked! The first step would be to pick which spreadsheet app you’d like to use—my weapon of choice is Google Sheets, but I’ve seen similar approaches taken in Microsoft Excel, Apple Numbers, or web apps like Smartsheet or Rows. To make a game in a spreadsheet, you’re going to need three things:

1. Something to click on

Games rely on interaction, and spreadsheets usually give us at least one option for that besides manually entering text and numbers. Google Sheets, for example, has checkboxes that can be turned off and on (and turned into buttons with a little trickery), or apps like Excel let you create buttons that trigger formulas and macros.

Adding something clickable to your spreadsheet helps bring it a little closer to what most players will recognize as a video game, and create a more intuitive experience for them. So even though they won’t have seen Frogger in a spreadsheet before, they’ll probably have a good idea of how to start playing.

2. Circular referencing

When moving a character left or right on a screen, what you’re typically doing is adjusting their position along the X axis by a certain amount. In most cases, if you dig into the code of a game, you’ll see that each object has its own “X” and “Y” values, which get adjusted any time that object needs to move. If I wanted a character to walk to the right, for example, I might write a function like this, which tells them to add 1 to their current X position while I press the right arrow on my keyboard:

actor.onKeyPress("right", {
this.x = this.x + 1;
});

In spreadsheets, it’s sometimes difficult to achieve the same result, because cells will actively resist adjusting their own values. That process is called “circular referencing”, and a spreadsheet will usually disable it by default, because things can get really messy if it happens by accident (adding your quarterly budget to itself by mistake, for instance).

To check to see if your spreadsheet supports circular referencing, start a new spreadsheet and head to cell A1. There, type in =A1+1 and see what happens! If you’re in Google Sheets, you’ll get some instructions to turn it on, otherwise you might get a recommendation for what to try instead. Rows, for instance, doesn’t support circular references, but does have an interesting “EXECUTE” command to help make up for it.

With circular referencing turned on, you can now have cells that keep track of your character’s X and Y coordinates (and a myriad of other things), which update themselves when needed. Example: If you have a checkbox in cell C3 which a player can click to move their character to the right, the cell that stores the X value (let’s say it’s cell A1) can look like this:

=IF(C3=TRUE,A1+1,A1)

That’s saying that if the conditions are met (clicking the button), increase this cell’s current value by one. Otherwise, leave it as-is. Now you’ve got the start of a game!

3. Conditional formatting

This last thing is, if I’m being honest, completely optional. But it is nice.

When you change the background or font color in a cell, that’s formatting. Conditional formatting allows you to change the look and feel of a cell dynamically based on its content, or the content of other cells. That lets you gesture at information without having to show all of the behind-the-scenes numbers, making your game much more approachable.

One last example, then I’m done: when I experimented with making a turn-based strategy game a-la Into the Breach, I used conditional formatting to show where each character was on an 8-by-8 grid.

There, I’m using checkboxes to let the player select which piece they want to move, and which space to move them to. Because a cell with a checkbox can only have a value of “TRUE” or “FALSE”, I use conditional formatting to display other information to the player, such as where the friendly (blue) and enemy (red) characters are, where the enemies are targeting (light red), and where the selected character can move to (light blue). All of that information is actually calculated in other cells that I’ve hidden from the player, but conditional formatting lets me gesture to it in a way that players who have seen a turn-based strategy game before will understand.

Conditional formatting can also do things like hide text until it needs to be displayed, or help create the illusion of movement. While games like Rogue prove that graphics aren’t strictly necessary, I highly recommend taking advantage of the feature if you have it.

What else can spreadsheets do?

Turns out, the answer is “quite a bit!” While spreadsheets come with some constraints that you wouldn’t see in game engines like Unity or Unreal Engine, the capabilities go far beyond tracking your expenses.

If you’re interested in seeing other games and weird uses for spreadsheets, you can check out my portfolio, which is, yes, a spreadsheet.

Happy spreadsheeting. ?

Tyler Robertson is a writer and maker based in London, England. When he’s not writing about automation or pushing spreadsheets to their limits, he can be found roaming the English countryside with this partner and their miniature dachshund. You can follow him on Twitter for more of both: @aTylerRobertson

The post That’s no spreadsheet… that’s a game engine! first appeared on Ludogogy.

In our globalized and urban world, cities have a unique role and responsibility to ensure that people and nature alike can thrive.

However, when thinking about this monumental undertaking, we turn to city governments to develop and execute a vision of the future. As cities take cautious steps to launch their post-covid economic recovery plans, securing community engagement will be critical to achieving important global targets set out by the SDGs and the Paris Agreement. Applying game-design elements to real-world scenarios can increase community engagement by responding to some of our most basic social instincts, including our search for purposeful work and our need to create strong social bonds.

Cities matter a lot. Here’s why

Home to 55% of the world’s population — cities account for over 60% of global energy use and more than 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, there are vast inequalities in city residents’ experience of urban life, ranging from health, housing, and political representation to access to essential services, employment, and wider opportunities. COVID-19 recovery efforts are a chance to reinvent city infrastructure and incentives to create better lives for everyone in the context of increasingly complex global issues.

Getting our cities into the safe and just space of the Doughnut

C40’s Thriving Cities initiative is being piloted in Amsterdam, Portland, and Philadelphia to help transform cities’ economies into thriving systems. Their point of departure is Kate Raworth’s theory of Doughnut Economics. In short, the Doughnut’s social foundation sets out the minimum standard of living to which every human being has a claim based on the UN’s sustainable development goals.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist is available from Amazon 

The Doughnut’s ecological ceiling identifies Earth’s critical life-supporting systems and the pressure limits they can safely endure based on Rockstrom’s 9 planetary boundaries. Between the social foundation and the ecological ceiling lies a doughnut-shaped space in which it is possible to meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet — an ecologically safe and socially just space in which humanity can thrive.

The Amsterdam city government is a good example of how these insights are being applied. They launched Structural Vision Amsterdam 2040 in 2014, putting economic stability and resilience at the heart of their economic recovery plan. They’ve identified 9 ways to turn the Doughnut economics framework into transformative action. A few of these are strategically important:

1. Vision: Create a compelling vision of what it means to become a thriving city.
2. Mobilize: bring together the city stakeholders needed to bring about change.
3. Mindset: Embrace the values, ways of working, and new narratives needed to bring about change.

The first barrier to citizen engagement many municipalities face is translating their vision into a clear goal and actionable steps that people can engage with. The second one is how to mobilize stakeholder’s towards achieving a common goal. Lastly, incentivizing people to adopt a certain mindset and values is not easy when people are constantly exposed to pervasive environmental primes. Understanding how people react to their environment is the first step towards solving these three issues.

People are at the center of urban life

Residents are the dynamic and creative heartbeat of any urban center in the world. It isn’t enough to create regenerative and fair economies to develop a series of policies and trillion-euro budgets to overhaul current infrastructure flaws. City planners need to understand what makes a city tick. This means intimately understanding how the built environment permeates and shapes human experience.

Architecture critic Sara Goldhagen explains that our built environment experience results from what behavioral economists call primes.

A prime is a nonconsciously perceived environmental stimulus that can influence a person’s thoughts, feelings, and actions by activating memories, emotions, and other cognitive associations. — Goldhagen, Welcome to Your World.

In short, a prime refers to the influencing of thought or action by a physical object in our environment.

For example, a famous experiment led by Kathleen Vohs in 2006 tested how a group of students would react to collaborative problem-solving scenarios when shown money-related primes. The first group of students was placed in a room with a stack of monopoly money. As a result, relative to non-primed participants primed, group 1 preferred to play alone, work alone, and put more physical distance between themselves and a new acquaintance.

Take a moment to let that sink in. Money-related objects prime individualistic behaviors. Upscale that to the city level, and think about the effects of seeing an atm every two blocks. Our entire urban infrastructure is designed to prime individualistic behaviors.

How can we create equitable and resilient cities when our entire urban framework motivates us to go in the oppostive direction?

Gamifying social action towards thriving cities

Games are the quintessential autotelic activity, we only ever play because we want to. Understanding how games can prime social, collaborative action can help us develop strategies that make the most of community action in post-covid economic recoveries. Drawing from revolutionary game designer Jane McGonigal’s insights, here are a few ways in which games can harness community engagement towards social change:

Turning urban visions into clear goals and actionable steps

Having a clear goal motivates us to act: we know what we’re supposed to do. But the language used in urban planning alienates the average person. The vision outlined by municipal planners lacks clarity in lay terms, and the actionable items are usually reserved for an elite group of technocrats in charge of leading the implementation process. On the other hand, games outline a clear goal that players work to achieve and layout actionable next steps towards achieving this goal. Gamifying Amsterdam’s structural vision 2040 would turn its goal of achieving an economically stable and resilient recovery into clear goals and actionable steps that people can engage with on their own time to win the game. Equally important, devising an immediate feedback system would keep people engaged by seeing how their actions translate into results in real-time. A simple app or leader board could be enough to activate engagement.

Mobilize

We are social animals before we are economic ones. We crave strong social bonds and active connections with people we care about. But bringing stakeholders together to achieve a common goal is hard when money primers in our urban setting encourage isolation. Games create an immediate sense of community by creating a shared game reality. Players recognize each other because they have a common understanding of what they’re doing and why. Furthermore, the more time we spend interacting within a social game space, the more likely we will generate prosocial emotions like compassion, pride, and complicity that are critical for activating collaborative action. Gamifying Amsterdam’s structural vision would require creating a simple digital community platform to host these engagements, allowing people to seek opportunities to engage and collaborate in the real world. They could also pinpoint key game spaces throughout the city where people can interact with their gamer community outside the digital space.

Mindset

Norms and behaviors are generated during early childhood years and become instincitve later in life. One of the most difficult things to achieve is to re-pattern thoughts and behaviors. According to behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman, 95% of the time, we are intuitive decision-makers. This means that we make decisions based on automatic cognitive associations that become mental shortcuts in our daily lives. The less we have to think about our actions, the better, according to our brain’s hippocampus. This is bad news for policymakers seeking to communicate the importance of sustainable behaviors through traditional educations tools. Education tools like curriculums activate effortful thinking, which we only really use 5% of the time when writing articles like this one or attempting to solve complicated math problems like the one below:

57 x 124

Attempting to communicating the complexities of climate change through education curriculums will always fail to achieve behavior change. It’s simply activating the wrong part of our brains. Instead, games activate system 1 intuitive thinking. By staying in the realm of intuition, players exit current behavioral paradigms and are open to engaging with different behaviors that will enable them to win the game. If the game rewards collaborative action, players will be intrinsically motivated to act collaboratively. Gamifying Amsterdam’s structural vision would take community stakeholders out of the boardroom and into the game space, where their effortful cognition is less likely to kick in in pervasive ways.

Final Thoughts

If cities stand a chance of attaining the goals outlined in their economic recovery plans, they need to transform the city into a game that everyone can play. A few key ways to do this include:

1. Transforming structural visions into actionable steps. Games can turn unclear structural visions into clear goals with actionable items. They can also help people engage with the key milestones by giving them a feedback system to track their progress.
2. Creating a gaming community. Increasing a sense of collective action by creating a game space and mission that everyone understands and feels involved in.
3. Activating collaborative mindsets. Games are great behavioral primers because they rely on intuitive thinking processes rather than effortful cognition. A well-designed game can prime collaborative and regenerative behaviors by creating rewards and winning strategies that incentivize them.

Lastly, a well-designed game has an immersive game space. Luckily, cities are exactly this. Policymakers can contribute to changing the game’s rules by thinking about which behaviors their city is currently rewarding and designing creative ways to streamline the behaviors that would exist in the thriving city of the future.

The post Gamifying Social Action Towards Thriving Cities. first appeared on Ludogogy.

When an economy grows, its financial sector grows faster. In the financial services segment, financial markets grow disproportionately. As in all emerging economies, in India too, stock markets are making rapid strides. Stocks, in the long run, have outperformed all other asset classes. The Sensex (100 in 1979 is now above 60000) has delivered around 16 percent CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) during the last 42 years, beating all other asset classes by a wide margin.

In spite of this impressive performance, only a small minority of Indians have invested in the stock market. Even though the number of Demat accounts is growing impressively, even now only around 5 % of population (70 million Demat accounts in September 2021- source NSDL & CDSL) have invested in stocks. Indian households have been reluctant to invest in stocks. The basic reason for the under-investment in stocks is the lack of financial literacy.

Ajay Lakhotia, Founder of StockGro, decided that this has to change. More people have to enter the capital market and start investing. But then, stock market investing needs expertise. Therefore, investors have to be trained in the art and science of stock investing.

Why aren’t people investing in stocks?

The main reasons as sited by market research done by experts in the field are:

1. Most people are unaware of the potential of stocks as an asset class.
2. People are afraid of losing money. Since stock market is highly volatile, they feel stock market investment is very risky.
3. Majority of retail stock market investors have lost money due to excessive trading and speculation. Stories of these losses restrain potential investors.

In brief, investors have to be made financially literate and trained in trading and investing.

StockGro an Indian startup based out of Bangalore, decided to address this issue through a gamified app. Let’s explore how they leveraged gamification to teach stock trading basics to beginners and empower them to make wise investment decisions to grow their wealth.

Gamifying Learning

Interestingly, the USP of StockGro is that it does not participate in actual buying or selling of stocks, but helps users understand what the stock market is all about: like the terms, fundamentals that determine stock prices, trading strategies etc. So, the gamified app is primarily used to impart the knowledge and skills needed to be a smart investor/trader and, most importantly, to give opportunities to users to put these skills to practice through the gamified platform.

Removing the Fear factor

As stated earlier, a strong deterrent to people entering stock investments and trading was the fear of losing money. What StockGro did through gamification was to remove that fear through a game like environment. The interactive platform gives each user a virtual money of 10 Lakh rupees to buy and trade stocks without having the fear of losing your hard-earned money.

Autonomy and Choice

User engagement is key to the success of any app-based venture, and one way to bring out this engagement is through autonomy and choices. Millennials and Generation Z love to be in control of every aspect of their life, and this reflects strongly in the way they engage with any tech medium.

StockGro has beautifully leveraged this insight into their game design by allowing autonomy and choice through the app UI. They have various leagues that users can enter, based on their confidence and experience in trading. The leagues have many interesting contests and competitions that can fetch them rewards. There is an immediate impact and feedback on every choice you make in this platform and this proves to be an effective way to learn – making informed choices and calculated risks.

Rewards, Recognitions and Incentives

The StockGro app does not charge the user for using the app. However, a fee is charged for entering the contests for which you can win cash price (real money). The start-up claims to be dispensing 6 Lakh rupees in price money per day through the platform.

A maximum of 20,000 users and a minimum of 10,000 users can participate in the challenges, for which they get reward based on ranks.

The home page of the app also features the top winners of the day.

Social and Peer Learning

The app also allows users to chat with each other, check their investment strategies, seek advise from experts and influencers on the platform etc. In short, the gamified app is doing more than enabling learning the basics of stock market investments; rather it is building a community of stock market enthusiasts who are helping each other build and grow their wealth!

As a game designer, I have drawn inspiration from many such exceptional applications of gamification for learning. Here are few questions that might help you do the same:

1. How can I help people learn better through gamification?

It is not about some jazzy UI/UX, rather about bringing a game-like safe and fun environment that would help people put their knowledge and skills into practice.

Example: We allow our learners to pick a fictional character/avatar for the course of the workshop which creates a safe and fun environment for learning.

2.  What ‘fear factor’ can I remove through gamification?

I believe that a game, especially when designed for learning, should start with the end in mind (you need to work backwards).  The fear factor that StockGro removed was ‘the fear of losing money’. What is the deterrent that you have to remove to create a safe space for your learners?

Example: We removed ‘the fear of failure’ (which is the biggest deterrent to experimentation) through a prototyping game we do as a part of our Design Thinking workshop.

3. How can I gift people the power of autonomy while learning?

Learning is powerful when people learn through the choices they make. Thus autonomy is a pertinent part of game design while using gamification for learning.

Example: a game we recently developed, empowers leaders to manage the VUCA world. The game is themed around a ship journey and the volatilities and uncertainties that come along with the expedition. The players were given choices to decide the route of travel, the money they could spend, the resources they can raise, the roles they would play etc. This gives them a sense of control and accountability, which helps me as a facilitator to powerfully debrief the learning from the game play. (Feel free get in touch if you would like to know more about this game)

I hope these questions inspire you to unleash the power of games to positively impact lives of people you work with!

Images from : www.stockgro.club

The post Gamenomics – Gamifying Stock Investments first appeared on Ludogogy.

Business journals and companies worldwide are dealing with the ever changing demands of a workforce, struggling with the changing world of a pandemic, deciding that the way work has been done is no longer acceptable. Employers are clamoring for answers to an aging and dwindling workforce that is demanding a caring, flexible and sustainable work environment.

As a teacher of business, entrepreneurship and gaming, the end of the 2019-2020 school year was one that was unlike any in my 30+ year career. Moving through the 2020-2021 and now into the 2021-2022 school year, with remote and in-person learning methods, synchronous and asynchronous lessons, as Bob Dylan famously sang, “the times, they are a changin,” and in my view, for the better.

Students are not “resigning themselves” to the same old tired worksheets and paper tests and teacher-led methods of education of the past prior to the pandemic. Students, some working job(s) on the front lines to help their families while balancing their academics, and other relationships in the world during a pandemic, and their responsibilities to family and friends, wanted – no needed – projects and assessments of their knowledge that allowed them to express their feelings while receiving educationally
robust and engaging lessons.

What is unique and exhilarating about my teaching position is that not only do I teach (in person) at a small rural high school in the upper Hudson Valley of NYS, I utilize distance learning technologies for those with medical or other needs that prevent them from in person instruction. During the 2019-2020 and 2020-21 school years I taught students via distance learning technologies in eight different school districts up to 100 miles away.

Skills for teaching, building rapport, trust and engagement between all of my students is vitally  important when presenting learning to students that are not all physically in the same room. Presenting to those in person students who have dealt with life altering events unprecedented in our lifetimes  provides us with the ability to make education better.

Connections between work and school

Students needed (need) to see the deep and long lasting connections between work and school. These methods needed to deepen the cognitive connections, decrease the stressors of life and bring some fun and meaningful new ways of learning into their lives.

They needed games to take away some of monotony while learning concepts in new robust ways. Teaching a varied course load from college computer informatics, to college accounting, college business math and accounting to entrepreneurship and social media, game and game theory, my brain has to think in creative ways.

So why not use my love and passion for weaving gaming, digital storytelling and business together through the use of games, in tabletop or video versions, to enhance team building, social emotional skills and creativity?

During this and last school years, our entrepreneurship class utilizes the INCubatoredu curriculum from Uncharted Learning. Taking 9th – 12th graders from ideation to pitch, this curriculum builds the foundations of lean entrepreneurship concepts. However, getting a 9th grader to stay focused with this complex material and a 12th grader with Senioritis to show up and care can be daunting tasks for even the most experienced of teachers.

Introducing concepts such as sustainable development goals, local sourcing, responsible economic practices through role playing games and teamwork activities, brings a depth and breadth of knowledge to these young entrepreneurs. With a growing number of community mentors, we strive to not only learn, but give back to our local community.

Students are engaging in a paper tower building contest modeled on the Fluor Challenge  https://www.sciencebuddies.org/fluor-challenge , and we are incorporating the units on ideation and team building to do social good in our community. This models donut economic theories, and introduces students to the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. They work cooperatively and compete for the betterment of their world.

Thanksgiving is a time where those who have food insecurities can find additional stressors, so by collecting canned goods in which to accomplish this activity, students will learn about ideation and creation with limited resources, whilst helping those in our community and competing for good. (Prize is a donation to the community food bank in their name.)

Students will be using paper that is being recycled to accomplish this goal and the prize will be a write up on social media (done by students in the social media marketing class) and our school’s website with an additional donation made by a mentor in the community. Students will then be reflecting on this experience to help develop a business model canvas for their own business concept.

Games for Learning

College Accounting students complete “The Accounting Game – Basic Accounting Fresh from the Lemonade Stand” by Darrell Mullis and Judith Orloff to review the basics of financial accounting. By completing tasks in the creation of a fictional lemonade stand, students get to have fun and see the real world connections for their decision making.

Enhancing this game, students watch the Shark Tank episode and articles featuring young entrepreneur Mikaila Ulmer. This develops this game scenario into a discussion of social entrepreneurship, environmental science and taking an idea to fruition. Diverse voices are represented and students also make connections with our school’s environmental science class that has a working honey bee colony and produces consumer goods for our community.

In College Business Math, playing The Jackson 5’s song ABC and allowing students to play musical chairs to demonstrate permutations and combinations brought fun, movement and connections for students both in the physical classroom space or attending remotely. Playing bingo to reinforce combinations and permutation work as well as playing a dice rolling game can easily take rote skills and transform them into fun learning activities that “stick.” Creating budgets through playing the board game Life and researching the true cost of the financial decisions made through playing the game choices develops real world skills.

Students also play charades in Social Media Marketing and will be creating QR codes with links to games to reinforce community building, collaboration and kindness within our school and community at large. They often create jeopardy like games to reinforce vocabulary and utilize TikTok dance and song challenges to create school community social media posts on topics of importance; strengthening their skills in social media.

In 2019, I learned about the work that my friend and mentor, Paul Davarsi, Ph.D was engaged with in partnership with iThrive Games, a non-profit organization committed to “teens, games, and social and emotional learning” on the game-based humanities unit, Museum of Me , I soon realized that Museum of Me had rigorous content along with the social emotional learning supports embedded within, and immediately I knew that I wanted to utilize this with my Video Game Design Essentials students.

Our teamwork and the ability to collaborate was put to the test while thrust into the emergency remote learning situation brought on by COVID-19 in March 2019 as this course is a half-year course that normally runs from the end of January to June.

My job to support my students’ learning took on a whole new meaning, and making sure that they were ok became my first priority. Virtual classroom meetings were challenging due to scheduling conflicts, so personal outreach by me and my colleagues at the other schools became more important than ever.

Students truly needed to know that we cared before they cared about what we knew. The Museum of Me curricular unit is built on a model that has the students play through the video game “What Remains of Edith Finch.” The unit guides teachers to use a “hot seat” model where one student at a time plays while the rest of the class observes. That was tricky in our time-compressed virtual learning environment, but I was determined to find a way to use it. I knew that asking students to purchase individual copies of the game was a deal-breaker for most of my students struggling financially during this time.

How can I deliver this content? My students deserve the very best, and the solution came to me while watching my then 13-year-old son view YouTube videos of gameplay! Playthrough videos! (For those of you unfamiliar with the term playthrough – it is a video gamer recording a video game being played live with a running commentary by the player.)

So I searched for playthroughs of “What Remains of Edith Finch” and hit a treasure trove of video content. Once I figured out access, I moved onto making sure students had choices for demonstrating learning. Choice is a vital portion of the students’ capstone of their learning and most learning assessments that I undertake with my students involve learner choice.

Their choices (along with other recommended readings and questions from the Museum
of Me unit), were as follows:

1. Analyze What Remains of Edith Finch playthroughs from the standpoint of the technical elements of video game design. Research other reviews. Locate one positive and one negative review and come up with your own conclusions about the quality of the game based on current and prior learning.
2. Create your own version of a storyboard (template and instruction provided to students in presentation software MS PowerPoint/Google Slides) based on the What Remains of Edith Finch introduction playthroughs. Include the game elements, motions, mechanics, and flow. Attach your storyboard template to the main project assignment.
3. Read the poem We Wear the Mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar and watch the playthroughs, then write YOUR version of an introductory game narrative in the style of What Remains of Edith Finch using one or more of the following as inspiration: an object in your home, your thoughts on the COVID-19 lockdown mask requirements, your feelings about quarantine, how video games have kept you connected, and/or your experiences doing your classes online through video conference. This may be completed as a word processed document or as a video recording.

Some quotes from student work:

“My object important to me would be any picture of my family.”
“Going outside with masks, I feel a strange presence like we don’t fit in like the characters in the game.”
“It’s a game about what it feels like to be humbled. We all feel this now.”
“Some (parts of the game) are quite dark and others very calm and peaceful but it still gives you a sense of mystery and makes you crave to see the ending of each one.”

Wow! These direct responses from student work show engaged, thoughtful and mature commentary from a cross-section of students from very different socio-economic, racial and geographic backgrounds. They not only demonstrate a deep understanding of their knowledge of the concepts, but also a personal connection.

Students shared with me privately that using the playthroughs was helpful because if they had had to analyze the gameplay of a new game it would have been very stressful at that time. Most students had never played a video game in the creative style of What Remains of Edith Finch, so the exposure intrigued them and made them want to explore more games of this type.

Hoping to use the Museum of Me curriculum and other game-based lessons with my students this year in more detail, I strongly suggest that teachers think about not only using direct game play to engage learners, but also using video game playthroughs to involve and create an atmosphere of enrichment and deeper levels of social and emotional engagement with your content.

Today’s students are used to watching videos of others playing games as a way to learn and be exposed to new concepts, and tapping into that learning approach will bring great results. Playthroughs are a great way to get students analyzing and writing, while making personal connections to their lives and experiences.

So be it a traditional well known board game, a fun building challenge, a physical game, or video game playthroughs; games enhance students’ emotional connectedness to the content, deepen cognitive and social emotional learning and just make learning fun.

As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’

Shall we play a game?

The post Games, Business and Changing Times first appeared on Ludogogy.