The Great Christmas Deck has two types of cards. The first contains a series of light-hearted festive-themed questions to get your players talking and getting to know one another a little bit better. Find out who thinks that Christmas presents should all be homemade, or which members of your team love, or hate, marzipan. Perfect for getting the fun started at your office end-of-year get-together. And once the conversation is flowing abit you can throw in some ‘Warm and Fuzzy’ conversational interludes, inviting folk to share their favourite memories of this special time of year.

The second deck recreates the fun, and maybe frustrating, experience of solving a sliding tile puzzle. With a suitably Christmassy image as your target, you have to slide your cards around the Ipsodeckso table (no cheating by lifting and dropping, please) utilising the single space to manoeuvre all the card into their correct places to complete the picture. Don’t forget that you can duplicate the URL of your Ipsodeckso window as many times as you like – to get the same card selection and layout – so why not run this as a competitive team challenge.

To coincide with each Show and Tell episode, Darren will be making the featured deck FREE for 30 days (in this case, BOTH decks until the festivities are over, early in the New Year). So don’t forget to keep coming back to see what the featured deck of the month can do for you.

Free to use as often as you wish from the date this Show ‘n’ Tell drops, until early New Year (access via the ipsodeckso.com free membership option).

Ipsodeckso is a platform which is going to be of considerable interest to facilitators and coaches. It contains a number of great decks already, but also includes the capability for you to upload and use your own cards, for use on the same platform.

Show & Tell videos will all accumulate at the Show & Tell Page as they are published. You can also check out one of Darren’s games, ‘The Walking Dead’ which featured in a Ludogogy live play session.

If you would like to appear in a Show & Tell episode, get in touch at info@ludogogy.co.uk

The post Ipsodeckso – Double Festive Gift for You first appeared on Ludogogy.

Memory Lane is a deck made up of ‘Experience’ and ‘Timeline’ cards. Experiences are a number of different everday occurences or activities which all players will be familiar with, such as ‘Listening to Music’ or ‘Finding a Job’. The Timeline cards encourage conversations about how those experiences have changed over the lifetime of the players/learners. For example, they ask about your earliest personal encounter with the experience, or how you think it might look in the future.

Memory Lane is a great tool for facilitators to explore people’s readiness to accept change, and to make a start on helping an organisation to create a tailored approach to any particular change initiative,with consideration of their people’s attitudes and needs.

To coincide with each Show and Tell episode, Darren will be making the featured deck FREE for 30 days. So don’t forget to keep coming back to see what the featured deck of the month can do for you.

Free to use as often as you wish for 30 days from the date this Show ‘n’ Tell drops (until 24th November) (access via the ipsodeckso.com free membership option).

Ipsodeckso is a platform which is going to be of considerable interest to facilitators and coaches. It contains a number of great decks already, but also includes the capability for you to upload and use your own cards, for use on the same platform.

Show & Tell videos will all accumulate at the Show & Tell Page as they are published. You can also check out one of Darren’s games, ‘The Walking Dead’ which featured in a Ludogogy live play session.

If you would like to appear in a Show & Tell episode, get in touch at info@ludogogy.co.uk

The post Ipsodeckso – Memory Lane Deck first appeared on Ludogogy.

[ Download “Design Thinking - One Card Game” DesignThinking.zip – Downloaded 971 times – 102.55 KB

You can download Design Thinking for free, but making a small donation via Kofi will help to support Ludogogy, and make it possible for us to develop more games for download.

Design Thinking is a game about taking, and responding to a brief from a clent, which only requires the single card – and a few commonly found resources for your ‘design team’ – pens, yarn or string, beads and counters. Play it with your learners to sharpen their active listening skills, and as an introduction to an important aspect of Design Thinking.

The post Design Thinking One-card Game Download first appeared on Ludogogy.

You can download Meander for free, but making a small donation via Kofi will help to support Ludogogy, and make it possible for us to develop more games for download.

Meander is a game about Mindful Walking, which only requires the single card – and your imagination and willingness to play. You can play it in two modes. Question mode invites you to use the card and your walk to answer a question of significance for you, whereas Meander mode simply invites you to enjoy the experience of having your attention pulled from one thing to another as you walk.

The post Meander Download first appeared on Ludogogy.

Splatman is a social card game blending the visual essence of the Iconic arcade game Pacman with a game mechanic very similar to Poker. Each player is a bug exterminator with a mission to splat as many mutant cockroaches and ticks as possible, while clearing out bug eggs. This game is highly competitive while helping to develop a forward thinking, strategic mindset.

It’s also a great workout for everyone’s memory and an interesting test of communication skills! “I’m going up to the left of the tick!” “The bottom tick?” “No, the other tick!”

To coincide with each Show and Tell episode, Darren will be making the featured deck FREE for 30 days. So don’t forget to keep coming back to see what the featured deck of the month can do for you.

Free to use as often as you wish for 30 days from the date this Show ‘n’ Tell drops (until 24th August) (access via the ipsodeckso.com free membership option).

Ipsodeckso is a platform which is going to be of considerable interest to facilitators and coaches. It contains a number of great decks already, but also includes the capability for you to upload and use your own cards, for use on the same platform.

Show & Tell videos will all accumulate at the Show & Tell Page as they are published. You can also check out one of Darren’s games, ‘The Walking Dead’ which featured in a Ludogogy live play session.

If you would like to appear in a Show & Tell episode, get in touch at info@ludogogy.co.uk

The post Ipsodeckso – Splatman Deck first appeared on Ludogogy.

This quote from Salman Rushdie sums up really well why stories are so engaging to us, but more than that, there is a deeper idea that we tell story not just because they are fun, or because we like them, but because we need stories to explore who and what we are – in other words stories are tools for learning

Even bad stories grip us. How many times have you sat through a terrible film, just because you needed to know what happened in the end (I’m hoping the answer to that is ‘at least once’, otherwise I’m going to have to face the possibility that it’s only me who does this – and that I’m maybe the only person on the planet who knows what happens at the end of Thor: The Dark World.)

In this article I want to explore the Fantastic and Fabulous in Learning and Facilitation and by the end of this I’m hoping you will have the answer to the most important question of all

“And then what happened”

As well as being ‘the storytelling animal’ it’s also often claimed that humans are ‘Wired for God’ – that we are genetically and neurologically predisposed to spirituality

The jury is still out on this one, but it is certainly notable that the magical, religious and supernatural do seem to have a special place in the history of humanity’s attempts to understand, and explain the world, and explore our collective dreams and anxieties – from creation myths, to natural philosophy and alchemy, to the preponderance of UFO invasion movies in McCarthy era America, or radioactive monster movies in post-Hiroshima Japan.

While I was preparing for a recent session on this very topic, I was struggling a bit to find the right words to explain the power for learning that I have found in fairytales, sci-fi, fantasy and tales of the supernatural. And then I bought a book, in my local charity shop – a collection of short stories, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio. When I got it home, I read Gaiman’s introduction to the book

“It seemed to us that the fantastic can be, can do, so much more than its detractors assume: it can illuminate the real, it can distort it, it can mask it, it can hide it. It can show you the world you know in a way that makes you realise that you’ve never looked at it, not looked at it. G. K. Chesterton compared fantastic fiction to going on holiday – that the importance of your holiday is the moment you return, and you see the place you live through fresh eyes.”

Finding this was perfect, not just because it gave me the words I wanted, but because the way this incident made me feel, makes, very well, the ‘wired for god’ argument.

I’ve read up on the neuroscience of coincidence. I know which cognitive biases are in play – but it still feels like magic when just the right thing turns up at just the right time.

Stories: All New Tales is available on Amazon

To our initial storytelling question, the fantastic and fabulous add a second – “What If..?”

Most of you are reading this article, in this magazine, I imagine, because you believe that games and play have something special to offer in the arena of human learning.

There are obvious links between games and narrative – pretty much every game, except the most abstract will have narrative elements.

I am here to argue that among the already ‘special’ characteristics of games and play, story stands as something even more special, and that furthermore, that the fantastic and fabulous deserves special attention even within that already noteworthy realm of story.

Both stories and games are engines for experience. They both require the participation of a human or humans in order to come into being. Although someone reading a book or listening to the telling of a tale, may outwardly look like a passive consumer – that is far from the truth – they are exercising their imagination, bringing previous experience to bear, and constructing cognitive artefacts for sensemaking – sounds a bit like learning, right?.

If you are involved in games-based learning, and particularly in the design of games and play  experiences, you are probably well used to analysing and implementing play in a mechanical way. That is, mapping the mechanics of games to experiences that will effect learning. I think we can view and use narrative (without or without a game structure), in the same way.

So what do I mean by Storytelling ‘mechanics’?

First of all there are Narrative structures – you may have heard, for example of  The Heros Journey, or the Touchstone.

Narrative structures drive us down well-worn paths – in learning terms we can use them to guide learners in the directions we want them to go – they create expectations – the ‘threeness’ of fairytales, the beginning middle and end, the alternation of high points and low points in a narrative. Even people who have never heard the term ‘narrative structure’ will be consciously or subconsciously aware of ‘where the story is going’ because they have have been repeatedly exposed to this structures, in books, in fims, in TV.

Then there are various building blocks of story experience which as learning designers, we can use to draw (or obscure) attention, create flow, encourage participation or decision making, elicit emotion and so on. Here are a few:

The McGuffin (the object that explains why the characters do what they do, even though it has no intrinsic plot value), the foreshadowing of Chekhov’s Gun, the happy or sad ending, the twist in the tale, the ghost in the machine, exposition or lack of it – there are 1000s of these mechanics we can employ.

And together they build experiences – obviously there are similarly 1000s of these, but with reference to the fantastic and fabulous – the following are very notable.

• Allegory (including satire)– stories which have more than one level of meaning, most often religious or political. A famous example of this is Animal Farm, which is very different experience when one reads it as a child
• Metaphor (and analogy) – Exploring one idea as if it were (or were like) something else – the Dementors in the Harry Potter books are famously a metaphorical exploration of J K Rowling’s own struggles with depression.
• Archetypes – simplified representations of concepts, often in the form of characters. Fairytales, again, are stuffed with these – the wicked stepmother, the wise woman, the benevolent (or cruel) master, the innocent, the wolf.

From a learning perspective,in the areas that I work, (systemic wicked problems, sustainability and regeneration, diversity and inequality), there are three characteristics of the fantastic and fabulous which I find consistently useful:

Using magic – inviting learners to act as if magic really exists, frees the imagination, gives permission to be really ‘out there’ and reduces the negative impact of reality or ‘what we do now’ on ideation

Asking learners to explore difficult question, particularly when it might ask them to discover truths about themselves they might not want to face – can be largely defused if the conversations can take place outside of reality. For example, a conversation about racism, privilege and unconscious bias is much safer if it takes place in the context of society’s issue with ghosts who have not passed over, rather than a real scenario.

The TARDIS works really well as a representation of the point of this article. Not only is a well-known symbol of the one of the genres I’m recommending for you to play with, but it has one very important characteristic.

Like stories themselves it is bigger on the inside. And I remember on at least one occasion, the Doctor admitting, that he (he was a he at the time), had never been able to fully explore it.

Stories invite their participants to expand their boundaries to their own needs; to colour in the details with their own experiences. But as learning designers we have an even more expansive tool at our disposal – one that provides learners with an effectively infinite playground.

It is often said that you can gauge how well a writer (or filmmaker) has conjured the world in which their stories exist, by looking at the quality of (at least the best of) the fan fiction. Middle Earth, for example, or the United Federation of Planets is so rich with the potential of stories not yet told, that people feel compelled to add their own.

Through Worldbuilding we can invite our learners to tell stories of their own, and like the TARDIS, we will find that we now have something which is far too large to ever be completely explored.

The mechanism I use most often is fantastic and fabulous bottom-up world building; providing small details of a larger world which invite speculation about the larger culture, history, and systems and so on – as relevant to whatever learning is desired. The alternative would be top-down world building – which is a somewhat more time-consuming approach. It’s what happens, for example, when writers on long-running TV series work with a Bible, to ensure they don’t err from the established truths of the fictional world.

If you want to know about Worldbuilding – and particularly top-down WB, there’s no better place to start than Chapter 13 in Volume 2 of Design Unbound by Anne Pendleton-Jones and John Seeley Brown. The story of the Worldbuilding that preceded the making of the film Minority Report is just astounding.

Design Unbound is available on Amazon

We now have a third question to ask our learners. I usually find that my games and gameful activities ask these questions in the reverse order that I have introduced them here.

Introducing learners to the world you have built for them to play in first asks “If this is true, then what else does that tell us?”
Framing the learning in the context of that world then asks “What if…”
And finally, the invitation to exercise their own imagination and creativity “And then what happened?”

I have developed two decks of cards recently which use many of the principles detailed above

These two decks are very much an invitation to tell stories rather than being narratives in themselves. The first – The Museum of Impossible Objects represents some of the exhibits in a mysterious museum. Each card has an image, a label explaining the object, and on the other side of the card, some questions about the object – although your own questions (and answers) are also encouraged. The museum exists in a world where magic exists, where humans are not the only sentient species, where ghosts are an everyday reality and human technology and Fae magic sit side by side, sometimes within single products.

The second is a deck which was allegedly discovered in an architectural dig near Area 51. As nothing is known about the either the images or the text the cards contain, there are several theories as to what the cards might represent and they thus seem to be very versatile in use. Often teams get together to test popular theories about how the cards might work

You are invited to explore these decks (very briefly) now. Please feel free to pause the video at whatever point suits you to try out these two sample activities of how the cards can be used in learning settings.

Activity One (uses 4 cards out of the 52 in the Museum of Impossible Objects deck)

You are the curator of exhibitions. These four exhibits represent your potential choices for a central exhibit for the room you are curating. Pick one. What are the other exhibits which would complement it (either pick from here or from your imagination). What is the story your curated exhibition tells?

Activity Two (uses 4 cards out of the 54 in the Mystery deck)

One popular current theory about these cards is that they represent some kind of tool for using intuition and systems thinking for innovation. A ‘Tarot for Design’ if you like.

As a team you have been tasked with exploring this theory. There are 54 of them – here are a few for you to start with.

Think about the characteristics of the cards (colours, sides, markings, dots etc.) and the possible ways that they could be used (position, orientation, number, connections, number, stacking, turning, instructions, inclusion or exclusion etc.)

Maybe other resources are needed to use them – dice, counters, a board

What ideas do you about how the cards might work in this context?

The post Learning with the Fantastic and Fabulous first appeared on Ludogogy.

With a myriad of hypothetical problems faced by all businesses and a holistic exploration of the internal and external environment, Leadership Chronicles serves up a valuable opportunity for leadership teams to develop their team dynamic while proactively solving problems they will almost certainly face together at some point or another during the natural course of their business journey.

So, get ahead of the game, grow as a team, and future proof your business with a regular serving of Leadership Chronicles.

To coincide with each Show and Tell episode, Darren will be making the featured deck FREE for 30 days. So don’t forget to keep coming back to see what the featured deck of the month can do for you.

Free to use as often as you wish for 30 days from the date this Show ‘n’ Tell drops (until 30th June) (access via the ipsodeckso.com free membership option).

This month (June) only – this offer also includes the previous decks featured on Show & Tell too – The Coaching Spectrum Deck, The Sanctuary Deck and the Johari Go! Deck.

Ipsodeckso is a platform which is going to be of considerable interest to facilitators and coaches. It contains a number of great decks already, but also includes the capability for you to upload and use your own cards, for use on the same platform.

Show & Tell videos will all accumulate at the Show & Tell Page as they are published. You can also check out one of Darren’s games, ‘The Walking Dead’ which featured in a Ludogogy live play session.

If you would like to appear in a Show & Tell episode, get in touch at info@ludogogy.co.uk

The post Ipsodeckso – Leadership Chronicles Deck first appeared on Ludogogy.

Ipsodeckso is a platform which is going to be of considerable interest to facilitators and coaches. It contains a number of great decks already, but also includes the capability for you to upload and use your own cards, for use on the same platform.

SPECIAL OFFER – This deck is free to use as often as you wish until 30th June 2023 (access via the ipsodeckso.com free membership option).

Even better, Darren has agreed to return to Show & Tell regularly because, as once you know how to use the platform, you’ll want to get some insights into all the great decks already in the Library and how you might use them in your coaching and facilitation paractice.

Show & Tell videos will all accumulate at the Show & Tell Page as they are published. You can also check out one of Darren’s games, ‘The Walking Dead’ which featured in a Ludogogy live play session.

If you would like to appear in a Show & Tell episode, get in touch at info@ludogogy.co.uk

The post Ipsodeckso – Coaching Spectrum Deck first appeared on Ludogogy.

Ipsodeckso is a platform which is going to be of considerable interest to facilitators and coaches. It contains a number of great decks already, but also includes the capability for you to upload and use your own cards, for use on the same platform.

SPECIAL OFFER – This deck is free to use as often as you wish until 30th June 2023 (access via the ipsodeckso.com free membership option).

This Diversity and Inclusion deck disguises itself as a social activity for groups. A conversational glimpse into a possible future where humanity has failed to preserve our beautiful planet and in a desperate bid for survival, has sought sanctuary amongst the stars.

That’s right folks, the year is 2127 and Sanctuary players are the last vestiges of humanity, throwing themselves at the mercy of other worldly species who have kindly agreed to offer a fresh start on their precious, life sustaining planets!

The cards hold a bio of each alien species and provide details about their respective culture and home worlds (each drawing on one or more parallels to areas directly related to the diversity and inclusion conversation). Players are encouraged to imagine how their life as the handful of refugees might look and feel as they try to integrate into each alien civilisation.

After this fun, visioning experience, players will be asked to place the shoe on the other foot and imagine if each alien species had lost their home world and Earth was their sanctuary.

• How would they be welcomed?
• How would they fit into our society?
• How might we view and treat them?
• How might we adjust to accommodate and include them?

This deck removes participants from our immediate reality, creating a safe space to venture into an unguarded, exploratory conversation from the perspective of a minority group, while holding up a mirror to the myriad of issues impacting so many people, on Earth, today.

As a bonus, because Show & Tell is a nice relaxed ‘chatty’ format, Darren and I also got to talk about my project too. The Museum of Impossible Objects already exists as a virtual deck on Deckible, but now I want to bring it to life as a physical deck – by running a Kickstarter – you can sign up for updates here.

And if you want to know more about the origin story of the deck, there’s an article about that too.

Even better, Darren has agreed to return to Show & Tell regularly because, as once you know how to use the platform, you’ll want to get some insights into all the great decks already in the Library and how you might use them in your coaching and facilitation paractice.

Show & Tell videos will all accumulate at the Show & Tell Page as they are published. You can also check out one of Darren’s games, ‘The Walking Dead’ which featured in a Ludogogy live play session.

If you would like to appear in a Show & Tell episode, get in touch at info@ludogogy.co.uk

The post Ipsodeckso – The Sanctuary Deck first appeared on Ludogogy.

Ipsodeckso is a platform which is going to be of considerable interest to facilitators and coaches. It contains a number of great decks already, but also includes the capability for you to upload and use your own cards, for use on the same platform.

SPECIAL OFFER – This deck is free to use as often as you wish until 30th June 2023 (access via the ipsodeckso.com free membership option).

Even better, Darren has agreed to return to Show & Tell regularly because, as once you know how to use the platform, you’ll want to get some insights into all the great decks already in the Library and how you might use them in your coaching and facilitation paractice.

Show & Tell videos will all accumulate at the Show & Tell Page as they are published. You can also check out one of Darren’s games, ‘The Walking Dead’ which featured in a Ludogogy live play session.

If you would like to appear in a Show & Tell episode, get in touch at info@ludogogy.co.uk

The post Ipsodeckso – The Johari Go! Deck first appeared on Ludogogy.