O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.

A pile of random game-making materials. Two hour time slot. “Go! Make a game!”

For some, this is oxygen to their designer’s brain, feeding the spark that generates interesting games, but for other game designers like me, this type of game design jam doesn’t work. It’s akin to the blinking cursor on a document when it’s time to write a big paper for school. You know so much about your subject, and you’ve been working so hard to research and compile your ideas, but when it comes to actually starting the work–you blank. You have so many ideas, but which to pick and where to start?

There’s something about the temporary momentousness that can arise in game design jams–the time to design is NOW, with these materials, so procrastination and inaction cannot be entertained.  Game design jams are, in the words of Adrienne Ezell, graphic and game designer, “a great way to spark ideation and fast iteration.” Tim Blank, designer, says, “Game jams force us to use a different side of our creative brains that we don’t often use much as designers. We often do a lot of thinking when we iterate on a game, but game jams don’t give us the time to do that. They force us to design by trial and error, which is at the heart of experience design. They also require us to listen to what the game wants to be, as opposed to using our pre-set parameters for it.” Sen-Foong Lim, designer, says, “I thrive under pressure and work well with constraints, so jams are my… jam. I find the pressure cooker of a game jam so refreshing. My brain needs the strict deadline to force it to work on things.” Game design jams, just by existing, can launch designers from ideation to prototyping quickly.

Game design jams shove designers into the heart of the design process, but outcomes are not guaranteed.

Game design jams can have the opposite effect of sparking ideas; they can confound or even stymie them. The pressure of producing a working game in that time frame, whether it’s an hour or eight, coupled with the performative aspect of designing in front of strangers, is productive for some designers, not for others. Elizabeth Hargrave, designer, says, “My personal experience at the one game jam I have participated in was that it confirmed that I hate being forced to be creative in front of people, with time pressure. I’m glad other people enjoy them, am happy to watch, but my brain freezes and nothing comes out.” So how to create a design jam where designers can be successful?

When I was invited to present at Tabletop Network in 2019, I decided to run a game jam, a very specific kind of game jam. I had taught game design to middle school students for 17 years at that point, so I had a good sense of what worked to help others design games. As a teacher and designer, I had undertaken transformative professional development experiences that informed my thinking. The two guiding ideas that shaped my jam were “Bias Towards Action,” and “Fast and Cheap” from the productivity triangle. First, the design mindset “Bias Towards Action,” from the Stanford d.school method of design thinking, means that if you have a choice between thinking and doing, start doing, because you’ll be thinking as you do the work, and you will progress much faster. The second key idea is to avoid preciousness in design by iterating extraordinarily rapidly. Out of Good, Fast, and Cheap, designers can only choose two, and this jam embraces the concept of Fast and Cheap. In such a short amount of time, games won’t be Good, so designers don’t have to worry about that. They just have to make something testable, in any small part, so that they can work towards it being good later. When we spend a lot of time on ideas, they become precious, and often we don’t want to throw out an idea that has had a lot of investment, even with a low amount of payoff. When we develop the ability to toss out non-functional ideas, we get better at developing the ideas that have actual promise. With these ideas in mind, time became the determining factor in shaping the jam.

In a 45 minute session, designers were presented with three game design challenges, ten minutes each. They were provided the specific materials to use for each challenge, and could choose to collaborate or not with other designers. I presented the challenge, distributed resources, and set them off; and then I did it again, and again. I announced the time several times during each challenge to help with pacing throughout. There was no sharing of results afterwards, unless designers chose to do so outside of the session with me or others. I called this event “A Lightning Multi-Game Design Jam.”

Several key decisions guided my design process for the LMGDJ.

1. Design and material constraints remove some decision-making from the process to allow focus on other specific aspects of design.
2. Ten minutes is not enough time to design a full game, but it can spark an idea that could turn into a full game later.
3. If a designer hates any of the challenges or the format itself, at least it’s quick.

Design and material constraints remove some decision-making from the process to allow focus on other specific aspects of design. The first challenge was called, “This Race Game Is in the Bag.” Designers were given a paper bag with sets of bits inside. They could only use the paper bag itself and the bits. Limiting the resources is obvious; I removed choices about what to use, so they could focus just on what was given, not what was possible for components. The race game concept is one of the best I’ve found for helping anyone to design a game for the first time. First, most of the common kid and family games (Candyland, Chutes and Ladders, Sorry, etc) are race games in some way (moving around a track controlled by a randomizer) so it’s familiar structure. Second, race games have the same objective and victory condition–be the first player to cross the line. In providing the objective and victory condition, designers needed only to start with HOW players would move their pieces. By providing specific components and game outcome, designers can focus on the key aspects of the design challenge to iterate quickly workable ideas.

Ten minutes is not enough time to design a full game, but it can spark an idea that could turn into a full game later. The ten minute limitation is the most divisive choice in the design of this event, but in a sneaky way, it also serves to help people succeed. The reality of a game design jam, even for much longer jams, is that creating a full, working game is very difficult to do; and when you don’t create a full workable game in that time, it can really feel like failure.  Success in ten minutes isn’t a full game, but is the start of what could be a full game. Success is creating something that might be worthwhile to keep pursuing. Jay Bell, designer, says, “It blows my mind that 10 months after a game jam prompt, I’ve created a solid game outside of my normal genre. Sometimes jams can produce fantastic nuggets, diamonds even.” If designers came away with one really cool idea from each challenge, or even from one challenge, that can be enough to call it successful.

If a designer hates any of the challenges or the format itself, at least it’s quick. If you hate what you are doing in a longer game design jam, you have to spend much longer with that game idea than you might if you were working on something at home on your own terms. The ten-minute limitation allows you a very short tunnel before the light appears to free you from a non-functional challenge. The ten-minute constraint did not work for designer Cat Drayer, who says, “The very short game jams don’t work for me at all, because my brain isn’t ready. If I am inspired in the wild, I can kick out a game idea in seconds, and have done so over and over with loose prompts, but with very tight time pressure, nothing happens.” Cat continues, “A game jam is meant to make you uncomfortable in some way. It should push you out of your normal design zone to try new things. The challenge for me personally is to find how far outside my space I can operate, and the go/no go is currently time. If I haven’t got enough time to digest the prompt, nothing happens.” The time constraint can simply limit designers too much, based on their personal preferences and style.

Designers make choices, and in the Lightning Multi-Game Design Jam, I made specific choices that impacted designers differently. At best, the jam has sparked ideas that became published games; at worst, its format has been too limiting for some designers to generate meaningful game ideas. This format was chosen with very specific goals and outcomes in mind, and certainly there are many other possibilities for design jam spaces. If you are considering designing and running a game jam, the lessons learned from this style of jam can help you to see how employing different ways to use time, resources, and specific design constraints will impact the outcomes for designers.

May the muse of fire ascend your game inventions (and design jams) ever higher.

Appendix:

Since 2019, I have run the LMGDJ online during covid and in person close to ten times, and I’ve adapted the different challenges each time for each audience and setting, while usually keeping the race game challenge as the first. Here is an incomplete list of design challenges that I have used.

Design Challenges

The Race Game is in the Bag

As described above; this challenge was about focusing on HOW a race could be won using provided materials.

The IP Challenge

A real company’s set of characters was to be the basis of a buzzworthy, social-media-friendly game. Designers were given two pieces of cardstock that were the entirety of resources for a flatpack giveaway, so space for rules meant less space for components, and each designer was given a two page dossier on the IP characters for them to use.

The Player Experience Challenge

Designers called out emotions and I picked “Rage.” Using paper and additional components, designers had to create a game that elicited rage from their players.

Happy Valentine’s Day

Make a two-player game based on Valentine’s Day using pennies and index cards. Two player games  have great potential for complete interaction between players, and Valentine’s Day can generate a wide range of narratives for games.

Push It!

Designers had to come up with their “entrance song” if they were a professional wrestler or other sports player, and had to design a press your luck game using dice and other components to make a game based on that song. Since entrance songs can generate strong feelings, the idea is to match that feeling to a game that elicits the same, or to draw some other inspiration.

Pick a Direction

Using dice, toothpicks, and meeples, create a game where “Direction” is the driving theme. This was used at an academic conference with a wide variety of audiences from education to corporate, so the theme “Direction” was intentionally chosen to allow a wide range of interpretations, and the components were specifically limited to facilitate quick design ideas.

Think Outside the Box

Using game components and an empty game box, create a game where players must integrate the box into the design itself.  I just think game boxes are an underutilized resource.

The post Lightning Multi-Game Design Jams first appeared on Ludogogy.

The key to designing board games is to set the core mechanism which will provide the fun in the game,  and then connect the sub-mechanisms to make various interesting interactions.

When we design a board game, the core mechanisms, and paper prototypes are the key to continuously providing feedback and improving the game, and to ensuring that the experience of play will be fun.

I will explain what the core mechanism and paper prototype are, and provide a way to structure the core mechanism, and the checklist of the paper prototype.

Core mechanism

In board game design, the core mechanism is the most simple and yet most complex one which the designer will have to think deeply about. This will be the part of the game they will consider most, even when, and probably especially, when several mechanisms are applied.

The core mechanism is what the player recognizes as the most notable feature among the structured systems in the board game, and the most frequent driver of behavior from the start to the end of the game. This is the heart of the game, and all players will get the opportunity to continue the play as new information becomes available to them through the game narrative.

The core mechanism is a model for implementing the major behaviors and progress activities in the game, as well as providing the fun. We can see this is in the core mechanic diagram model which Charmie Kim published in Gamasutra, which is a useful guide to design. In the early stages of board game design, this diagram is useful for communicating the key ideas of the game to others, and for defining the interaction and complexity in the play mechanisms.

The center of this model is the core mechanism which is the key of the game. There is a layer of secondary mechanics, and then progression around the core, and the narrative is outside of that. This comprises the system through which the core mechanism interacts with the game. So, we can easily understand how players can communicate with the game through the interaction.

• The core mechanism is the key to the game and the system through which players interact most frequently in an intentional way. It’s an expression of the game theme or genre. Also, it should be selected to be effective in achieving the game objectives.
• Sub-mechanisms are optional or infrequent interactions. They need to be selected and designed to support the core mechanism.
• The progress system is the source of change in the game. This could be achieved by using events or hidden information.
• Narrative must be designed to be consistent with every other internal layer and to provide a way of eliciting emotion from the player.

Paper prototype

A paper prototype is a tool to use at the early stages of game design to test ideas and check that the experience is fun. It’s necessary for developing board games.

And not only in board games, but in digital game development, the paper prototype is very useful in the early stages of game design to ensure the success of the project and minimize losses through development cost and wasted time. Paper prototype has become very popular in many companies because the many variables in development projects can be immediately analysed, redesigned, and iteratively modified. Also, there are many other positive aspects of the paper prototype.

• Flexibility – Expression of interaction can be quickly confirmed and modified.
• Quickness – Ideas and fun are quickly tested.
• Economical – Development cost is low because only paper and pen are required.
• Accessibility – Everybody can make the prototype because purchasing the materials and developing are easy.
• Scalability – Ideas are freely modified and developed.
• Mobility – It can be implemented anytime and anywhere.

The board game designer has to select the core mechanism for the fun of play and connect the sub-mechanisms for various interactions in game design.

Questions to ask when using paper prototypes

When using paper prototypes to test game concepts, checking whether the game components function well together to create fun experiences is very important.

1. Who is the player? Is this a playable game from that player’s perspective?
2. Are the rules clear? Are they understandable and how easy is it to arbitrarily change and break them?
3. To what extent is the prototype complete? Can others play the prototype?
4. What kind of fun can this game provide? Does this fun have the power to attract people?
5. Is play duration appropriate? Is it too long or short?
6. What games are similar to this one? Are those too rare or similar?
7. Does the player need to prepare a lot for playing the game? Can player easily participate without difficult preparation?
8. What meaning does this game provide to individuals, organizations, or society? What is the balance of Fun and Meaning?

Everybody wants to make a fun board game, but many people fail to do this because they ignore the importance of appropriate mechanism design, and the prototyping and testing to ensure these work well.

To make a good game, we have to experience various games, analyze the original games, and correctly select the ideas and mechanisms that work for our game idea. In addition, making a prototype and getting external feedback through play tests is most important. So, repeating this is the most important task.

The post Core Game Mechanisms and the Paper Prototype first appeared on Ludogogy.

The number of tools available is growing at an amazing rate, but this article will focus on real-life prompt examples in two popular tools – ChatGPT for text output and Midjourney for image creation.  These prompt examples should provide you with some ideas for using AI at every stage of game design and production, but the only real limit in how you can prompt these tools is your own imagination.

The below also assumes, for the most part, that we are looking at designing and creating an analogue, tabletop game. A broader overview of tools and capabilities will follow soon, as well as details about how AI can be used in digital games.

AI for Developing Game Concepts

During the concept phase, AI can help designers generate new ideas by analysing existing games and user preferences, and by rapidly trying out different tweaks to prompts.

Existing games – ChatGPT is very ‘well-read’, so you will probably discover that it ’knows’ about well-known games. If you want to draw on an existing game you could simply prompt “Create a description for a game, based on Terraforming Mars, but with a theme of building a new town”

But prompts like this are generally less likely to achieve what you want, because they have little guidance from you.  The result is really just a description of Terraforming Mars with the word ‘Town’ substituted.

:Click here for Terraforming Mars prompt – click again to close

Successful prompts are generally longer, and contain carefully chosen detail. Create a description of what it is you want to bring from ’Terraforming Mars’ (and omit what you don’t). Add your own needs and ideas. Be very specific.

:Click here for better prompt

Take advantage of ChatGPT’s ‘memory’ for what has gone before in the Chat to build on ideas, or ask for more detail on a specific piece of output. Here I have asked for new ideas on the game, based on who will be playing it. I have prompted with Bartle’s Player Types, but could have just as well in put job titles, demographic information such as age or location.

:Click here for Player Types prompt

It’s never too early to start working on game visuals, and if you get compelling images from Midjourney, they may well inspire your text prompts too. Try creating some concept art. Two useful prompts here are ‘character design sheet’ and ‘multiple item sprite sheet’.  Although these two things are usually generated for digital games, they are also great for producing small images to be used on things like counters and tiles.

For larger, more ‘complete’ images, if you want to be able to (potentially) separate them from their backgrounds later, make sure to include ‘concept art’ and ‘plain white background’ (or whatever colour is appropriate) in your prompts – the ‘character design sheet’ and ‘spritesheet’ prompts do this as a matter of course.

The prompts for these were

• “character design sheet, woman in her forties, short grey hair, jeans, long sleeved teeshirt, slim, different poses and expressions, full colour, flat colour, childrens book illustration style, –no text –v 5”
• ” multiple item spritesheet, household and office items, full colour, flat colour, childrens book illustration style, –no text –v 5″
• “multiple items sprite sheet, isometric view, tiles for a game, landscape, trees, flowers, grass –v 5”

From scratch – although I recommend being lengthy and specific with prompts to get anything really useful, if you just want to do some low-level brainstorming (at very early concept stage) feel free to play with shorter prompts to get ChatGPT to produce large numbers of ideas around single concepts.

Such prompts will inevitably produce generic and derivative responses, but they can form the basis for further explorations.

:Click here for generic prompt

One very useful technique is to take one suggestion, and ask ChatGPT to elaborate.  It is a good idea to give it more input in the form of your own ideas. This approach can be iterated as many times as you like until you get useful responses.

:Click here for extended German Games prompt

In a similar way you could try out different styles for the same idea in Midjourney. This might also be a good time to experiment with what prompts give you and refine your prompting so that when you come to the design stage you have a good idea of how to prompt to get the images you need.

Generic prompts will get generic output, and it is best to be specific about what the image should look like rather than what it represents conceptually. Midjourney will get less out of the idea of ‘Settlers of Diversity’ than it will out of a clear description of the desired image.

Using AI in Game Design

During the design phase, AI can help designers generate new game content, such as levels, puzzles, and characters. Remember that if you are developing the same concept from the concept stage into the design stage, it is a good idea to remain in the same chat, to take advantage of what ChatGPT will ’remember’ of what has gone before.

You can prompt using well known game mechanisms and components, confident that ChatGPT will ‘know’ about them.

:Click here for Terraforming Card prompt

ChatGPT can also use well-known ‘content’, although you should always check carefully that what it produces is correct, as Large Language Models (LLMs) can be prone to ’hallucination’. The following was a follow-on prompt after ChatGTP had ideated a set-collection game called ‘Dickensian Tales’.

:Click here for Dickensian Tales Locations prompt

It is highly recommended that you create and use ‘templates’ to get the output you want from ChatGPT. This is done by creating prompts which have ‘placeholders’ for content that will be populated by ChatGPT. Such prompts are usually quite generic, and you instruct ChatGPT to process them with specific content or subject requests. For example, here is what it produced when given part of a template for ‘Wretched and Alone’ games

(This work is based on The Wretched, product of Chris Bissette and Loot The Room, and licensed for our use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.)

It was given the description of how cards work in Wretched and Alone games, having been asked to populate the Hearts suit, in a game about being a shelf stacker in a supermarket.

:Click here for ‘Wretched and Alone’ prompt

Prototyping using AI

During the prototyping phase, AI can rapidly try out widely, or narrowly, differing ideas for games, and producing new content and materials based on those models.

As well as refining ChatGPT’s output, by further prompting and feeding it additional ideas, or asking it to amend or delete aspects of its responses, it is also useful to feed its own input back in.

:Click here for Sustainable Towns Cards prompt

Once you have working ‘templates’ of a game, for example, card formats, it is pretty simple to generate new versions for different entities in the game and / or indeed, different subject matter to create as similar game on a different topic. Here it was prompted create part ofa ‘Orwell’ version of the Dickensian Tales game.

:Click here for 1984 prompt

In Midjourney, a really useful feature to create new images with the same characteristics but with some differing topic, focus or style is the Remix functionality, which can be turned on in Settings. This means that prompts can be edited when using the Variation buttons.

The greatest power that AI has as these stages of design, is the ability to ‘try out’ many different concepts or different versions of materials. This is a way of working that previously would not have been feasible without a great deal of time and a large team of people. Now this capability is available to small teams and individuals, and many of the tasks involved in ideation, design and prototyping can be carried out in a fraction of the time it took previously.

If you are interested in exploring how the above can be used for you to achieve a functional design for a learning game in under two hours – please sign up for my course – and don’t forget to use the code GPT10 for a 10% discount if booking before 19^th April.

The post Create Games Faster and Smarter with Generative AI first appeared on Ludogogy.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in learning and gaming design has revolutionized the way content creators approach their craft. AI-powered tools provide game and learning designers with efficient and effective ways to produce high-quality content that engages learners and gamers alike. In this article, we will focus on two AI-powered tools – Midjourney and ChatGPT – that can be used to create game and learning content. We will also look at the burgeoning development of third-party apps and tools which utilise, in particular, the various GPT models, and which provided highly-focused resources.

Check out Ludogogy Learning’s offerings around AI for Learning and Games Design

Midjourney is an AI-powered image creation tool that can produce various types of visuals which can be used in game and learning materials. ChatGPT, on the other hand, is an AI text generation tool that can produce text-based content in a huge variety of formats and contexts. Both these tools are capable of creating high-quality content in less time and with less effort. This post will explore the features and applications of these two tools in detail and discuss how they can be used to create personalized and immersive games and learning experiences.

First – The Pictures – Midjourney

Midjourney is an AI-powered platform that can create high-quality images for games and learning materials. The platform employs machine learning algorithms that can generate images based on specific parameters. Midjourney’s algorithms go beyond mere image manipulation by creating new, original images in different styles and formats.

Like most of the well-known AI tools, Midjourney is moving fast, and is constantly being updated with new modes and capabilities. In the last few months, for example, we have seen the addition of version 4 of the image generation algorithm, which generates images without many of the problems (long necks, double faces, general distortion) of the previous algorithms.

And where particular styles of artwork have proved to be popular, Midjourney has sought to smooth the path to creating quality images in those styles. The new Niji mode, for example, is especially designed for creating images with a Manga feel.

There are some limitations on size; a Midjourney image currently has a maximum size of 2048 x 2048 pixels. You can change the aspect ratio to make something of a different shape but still subject to the same size limit. Different versions have different limitations on size and which aspect ratios will work properly. But once you have a grip on that, the only other limitations are your imagination and your skill in creating prompts.

Midjourney can be used create different background images, icons, characters, and more. These images can be used in a variety of applications, including games, educational videos, e-learning courses, and instructional materials. My own experience of using Midjourney in learning game design includes:

• Realistic photographic images of people of various ethnicities, genders and ages for a diversity and inclusion game.
• Creation of photorealistic but ‘impossible’ exhibits for ‘:The Museum of Impossible Objects’.
• A tarot style deck of cards with illustrations which look like they have all been created by the same artist
• Illustrations for a high-fantasy style RPG game
• Cartoon style illustrations of modern office life
• Creation of an :asemic ‘alien’ script

Particularly useful in the context of game and learning design are the following capabilities:

• Being able to apply a consistent aesthetic across a large number of images – ideal for creating card decks
• Create images based on existing images, such as using a photograph for the basis of a new image of the same subject with a different theme
• Merging two or more images together to create a new image containing elements of all of them.
• Creating variations on a preferred image – for example dressing a character in styles of dress from different historical eras.

Midjourney allows you to choose from a dazzling array of art styles, image subjects and even replicates photography down to the level of camera and lighting settings.

It takes some effort to learn to use it really well, but the savings in both time and money in sourcing appropriate images for your projects will be well worth it.

Then – the Words – GPT and ChatGPT

ChatGPT is an AI-powered tool that can generate pretty much any kind of text-based content you require. The platform is built on the GPT3 family of large language models, developed by OpenAI, and seeks to create human-like text output.

Like Midjourney, there is a requirement to get to know the platform, and spend some time  learning to create effective prompts if you are to use it well, but the potential returns in automating ideation and content creation are life-changing for people working in learning and game design.

GPT3 is not connected to the Internet (GPT4, underlying the Bing bot, is, but is outside the scope of this article), but nevertheless, its training datasets were massive, even though it ‘knows’ little about anything since 2021.

So you can, for example, be reasonably confident that it will have read most well-known books, which underlies this great set of tips on creating lesson plans for English Literature classes.

One thing you do need to do carefully, when asking ChatGPT to output material you are going to use with learners, is to check for errors. Because of the way that ChatGPT ,and the underlying models work, which is basically like a very sophisticated predictive text model, it simply decides what word to write next, one word at a time. It is an illusion that ChatGPT deals in anything larger than words. It certainly does not have ’facts’ at its disposal, and will frequently produce factually incorrect information.

For example, this is (part of) what it output about the year 1974 in British politics:

The year 1974 was also marked by tragedy. In the four and a half years leading up to the next general election, a total of 17 members of parliament died. This included some of the most prominent figures in British politics, such as former Prime Minister Edward Heath and Labour politician George Brown. The loss of these individuals had a significant impact on the political landscape, as it meant that new leaders had to step up and take their place.

Although most of the rest of the output was just what was required, it incorrectly claimed that Edward Heath and George Brown died during the years 1974-79.

GPT and Games Design

In games design, this ’hallucination’ is maybe less concerning, as we are frequently creating output which is fictional in nature. However, the hallucination aspect of this tool should always be borne in mind.

ChatGPT can be used in many parts of games design and production, right from initial ideation to playtesting, and there is pretty much no limit to the formats and types of output it will produce, from outlines, to finished prose, poetry, dialogue and stage direction, computer code, and even knitting patterns in both text and chart format.

One obvious application is to produce text-based components for games including:

• Narrative such as backstory and scenarios
• Character sheets and playbooks for RPGs
• Plot summaries
• Rulebooks
• Card rubric
• Etc

You can even play games directly in ChatGPT, such as text based adventure games, narrative games, including shared storytelling between the bot and a human, and even more complex games with dice throwing and tokens involved – if you get the prompt right.

ChatGPT’s ability to ’remember’ what has gone before in a chat means that played games can then be re-output in alternative forms, and I have done this previously, getting such output as a third person re-telling of a first person RPG, a screenplay with dialogue and even a report on how the player displayed leadership.

As the captain of the Star Explorer, the player has shown effective leadership throughout the game. They were quick to take action when the ship’s sensors detected a strange object, displaying a sense of curiosity and adventure. They also demonstrated effective decision-making skills when faced with the situation of the abandoned spaceship and the critical state of its reactor. The player immediately calls their second in command to discuss the situation and then ask their own ship’s AI to produce a risk assessment and to suggest appropriate personnel to send over if the risks were acceptable.

The player also displayed a sense of caution and safety when they decided to tow the ship back to the nearest space station instead of simply continuing the mission. This shows that the player is willing to prioritize the safety of their crew and the ship.

In terms of areas for improvement, the player could have been more proactive in communicating with other ships in the vicinity for assistance before attempting to repair the reactor. This could have been an opportunity to seek help from other ships and potentially prevent the high-pressure situation.

Overall, the player has displayed excellent leadership skills and judgement and has effectively navigated through the challenges faced during the mission.

…or code to play the game from a command line

…or code which can be copied and pasted into Twine to make a branching scenario game

Where ChatGPT really excels is being given templates to work with and then being asked to complete those based on a theme or particular content. Here is what it produced when given part of a template for ‘Wretched and Alone’ games (This work is based on The Wretched, product of Chris Bissette and Loot The Room, and licensed for our use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.)

And then given the prompt:

Using the following template can you write the ‘Who’ and ‘What’ sections of a Wretched and Alone game about working as a shelf-stacker in a supermarket:

This is what it output:

Who?

You are a shelf-stacker at a local supermarket, working long hours for minimum wage in order to make ends meet. You’re not sure how you ended up in this dead-end job, but you know you need to keep it in order to pay the bills. You have a few friends among your co-workers, but most of them are just as miserable as you are. The store is located in a rundown part of town, and you often deal with shoplifters, angry customers, and other hazards of working in a low-income area.

What?

This is a solo GM-less journaling game in which you will document your attempts to survive your job as a shelf-stacker at the supermarket. You will face a variety of challenges, from dealing with difficult customers to avoiding the wrath of your boss.

During the game, you will roll dice, draw cards from the deck and read their associated events, pull blocks from the jenga tower, place or remove tokens from cards, and write about your experiences in character.

Failure is the most likely outcome of this game. If the jenga tower falls, you’ll be fired from your job and will have to find another way to make ends meet. If you draw all four Kings, you’ll be caught stealing from the store and will be arrested; the last King you draw will tell you how.

To win, you must draw the Ace of Hearts and complete the task that it specifies by removing tokens from it over subsequent days. For a shorter, easier game, place the Ace of Hearts on the top of the deck after you’ve shuffled it, so it’s the first card you’ll draw. The task specified by the Ace of Hearts will give you a chance to improve your situation, whether that means getting a promotion at work, finding a new job, or escaping the grind of retail life altogether.

What’s Next – Third Party Integrations

The use of AI in game and learning design has many benefits. For one, it allows for personalized and immersive experiences, enhancing the overall learning or gaming experience. Midjourney and ChatGPT both play important roles in this process.

Because of the speed of production and the ease with which many slightly differing versions of something can be made, this really opens up the options for creating differentiated learning – which was well demonstrated in the video at the beginning of the article.

This personalization can lead to increased engagement and motivation, ultimately leading to better retention of information.

One of the most frequent criticisms levelled at the use of AI in creative work is that what is produced is derivative and not very creative – lacking the human ‘spark’. While this is true to a certain extent, it is also true that AI has the potential to increase creativity. The actual production of text-based content may be the least creative part of the learning or game design and creation process, and if that can be automated and speeded up, it frees human designers to focus on the experiences they want to create, and indeed in coming up with yet more creative ways of using the tools to come out with innovative output

And nowhere has this creativity been seen more than in the 300+ third party applications which have integrated with the GPT API to produce targeted tools which further enhance capability in very specific tasks. A sample of these which might be of particular interest to learning and games designers are:

• GPT for Sheets and Docs  an extension for Google Sheets and Docs which allows you pull input directly from GPT into your spreadsheets and documents.
• AI Dungeon – Play in AI-enabled worlds-now enhanced with Stable Diffusion images.
• Charisma – Storytelling powered by artifical intelligence
• AIChannels – a social network platform which allows collaboration with AI agents
• Debuild – Generative AI to build wep apps

Takeaways and Next Steps

Midjourney and ChatGPT are powerful AI tools that have the potential to revolutionise both the game and learning design process. This article has necessarily just scratched the surface of what is possible. If you want to know more, and attend some short course that are specifically targeted on AI for learning and game design, then check out Ludogogy Learning’s selection of upcoming courses which include all new material on using Midjourney and ChatGPT in your design process.

The post The Bots Are Coming – Let’s Have Some Fun! first appeared on Ludogogy.

I often spend ages tweaking the stats and using them to create a backstory in my imagination of how this character has become who they have, how they have pitched up in the location they are in, what drives them to adventure.

I favour magic users (at least when I am playing Dungeons and Dragons style games), so I will usually find that the stats profile of my characters are quite similar. They are low on Strength and Constitution usually, because all the available points have been allocated heavily towards Intelligence, to ensure a healthy number of spell points. A low-level magic user will need some strong allies who are willing to front the party and shield him or her, to ensure some chance of survival to be a higher-level magic user.

We roleplay in real life

And so it is in real life, we have our strengths and weaknesses, our specific skillsets, allies and competencies, which taken together, paint a picture of someone who is fit (or not so fit) to act in specific roles, or to carry out particular pieces of work. In life, this idea is often expressed as a ‘job description’.

The Job Description is actually a pretty one-dimensional way of describing what somebody is, as it only captures a narrow set of characteristics, which are usually (unless you are very lucky), desired by a third party to execute specific tasks.

As a (whole) person, you have many more characteristics and skills which are not relevant to this ‘job description’. In (the game of) real life you may often play with your ‘Project Manager’ avatar or character, but at other times you play your ‘Parent’ character or your ‘Drummer in a Ska Band’ character. Each of them prioritise different characteristics, skills, allies and activities. And you can ‘grow’ in each of those roles at different rates.

There is often friction because of the demands of the different characters on your time and energy. For example, the ‘Parent’ might not be able to develop as she wishes because the ‘Project Manager’ is impinging on her time.

The featured image of this article shows part of a character sheet from ‘The Game of You’ compiled by a 15 year old. The Character she wants to play is ‘In-demand Babysitter’. She is currently at Level 7 in her progress towards becoming the fully-realised babysitter she wants to become over the summer holidays – Level 20 in this game represents ‘the best you can be’.

It should not be assumed from this that the  ‘Game of You’ is only suitable for young people – just that I tend to use my nearest and dearest for trying out game ideas!!

The different characters which make up ‘You’

In an RPG, a player can have as many characters playing in different games and campaigns as s/he pleases

The ‘Game of You’ encourages you to play a game of personal and professional development, in which you can also play any of the characters that are significant to you, track their progress towards important development goals and (which is not usually a feature of ‘for fun’ RPGs), use what you discover about these ‘characters’ to explore balance and priorities in your life and growth.

The Character Sheet is the basis of ‘The Game of You’, as it allows players to create their own ‘character’ (or set of characters) in the style of an RPG. A pen and paper version is available, and a fully-functioning automatically calculating version will be posted on itch.io soon.

Today, I started to add the functionality of the ‘Quest’ sheet. The idea behind Quests is to reflect on the value of ‘learning’ activities to the development of your characters.

In an RPG we can experience from all sorts of activities, quests, combat, even ‘grinding’. From each of these we will gain experience points (XP), which are recorded for your character, and contribute to their levelling up.

RPGs (objectively) measure experience

In life, we similarly learn from everything we do, each project, each social interaction, every win (or failure) and yes – even the grinding. Learning does not only happen from ‘special purpose’ learning activities. The only difference between real life and an RPG, in this respect, is the enumeration. We do not, usually and habitually, enumerate our learning from experience.

Sometimes however, we are called upon to do so. When applying for a job, one of the purposes of a CV (resume), is to inform others about what we have learned from the experiences we have had, and how it might match to a potential role. Often that is expressed through length of experience, or through qualifications.

Roleplaying your CV

If you’re anything like me, updating your CV can be a bit of a feat of memory, and what you end up with never really describes all the nuances of how you have developed. Also, given that CVs need to be customised to each new opportunity, they are far from representative of your ‘whole self’

If real life were more like an RPG, each new experience would reflect in your ‘stats’, AND you would gather a ’quest log’ along the way, which would be a permanent record of the ‘value’ of any given experience to your permanent and professional development.

Quest Sheet attached to Character Sheet ‘In-demand Babysitter’ – by a 15 year old girlThe ‘Game of You’ Quest sheet links with the Character Sheet and updates your stats on the completion of your quest. It writes the ‘story’ of your quest to a quest log, and then clears itself, so that you can use it to record your next quest.

And because we never only have one quest on the go, or indeed, only have one character’s game underway, you can have multiple quest sheets attached to each ‘character’, and indeed multiple characters in play in the ‘Game of You’.

Your ‘Whole Self’ is more than your CV

But what about your ‘whole self’? In an RPG I can be playing several different characters in different games, and they can all have very different ‘levels’. In life, my experience in my different roles, works in much the same way.  I am a high-level Learning Professional, but a low level (at the moment) Plasterer and Bridge Player. Ongoing house renovation will ensure I level up pretty quickly in plastering (I may take a course to speed up that process), and I am hoping that I will soon get the chance to play at the Bridge club I have joined to polish up skills including ‘bidding’ and ‘finessing’, as well as adding some new allies to my ‘Socialiser’ character sheet.

Just like the variety of CVs you have to produce to satisfy the requirement of different job applications, your different character sheets will reflect ‘how well’ you are doing in developing growing in different important ‘character’ areas of your life.

The Future of the Game of You

The ‘Game of You’ is a work in progress, and is developing as an idea as each new component is added.

At the moment, there is an MVP (minimum viable product) of the Character Sheet. This will soon be joined by an auto-calculating version of the character sheet and linked Quest Sheet and Quest Log.

In time, it is envisaged that the full game will include:

• Spells /power ups – strategies and hacks that may not actually be magic, but feel like they might be as they impact your resilience, productivity and well-being
• Player dashboard – a summary of your characters, which can be used as an overview of balance in different life areas
• Quests which update more than one character
• CV (resume) templates based on character sheets
• Pre-loaded quests – pre-populated quests sheets, that for example, represent the XP and skills value of undertaking an accredited learning programme.
• Aspirational character sheets – representing the ‘gap’ between the ‘stats’ of a person you would like to model, and your own character, so you can work on that gap.

If you would like to get involved in developing this idea, maybe as a resource you could use with Coaching Clients, learning cohorts or for your own personal / professional development-get in touch at sarah@ludogogy.co.uk

The post The Game of You – Quests 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.

As many of you already know, I work as an Agile Coach for a large organisation, and I am a creator of agile serious games. In fact, I deeply believe that playing a game can be often more effective than a classical lecture or presentation, particularly when we are talking about a soft skill (which an agile mindset definitely is).

Creating games is also a way to apply the agile approach in different contexts. If you are thinking if agile is just for IT, you are wrong!

I already successfully applied agile in marketing, HR, finance and, obviously, in game creation. If you are wondering what agile is; this is too long to summarise here. Just to give a clue – agile is a way of building great products in uncertain scenarios: based on values, principles and practices. This successful (and fun) way of working requires a different mindset, and this is why you (or your company) need coaching (and not training). For more details Google is your friend, on the web you can find zillion of articles, or maybe you can follow me on Linkedin because I often write article on agile topics.

In this article, I will try to describe the process of creating a game, using agile. In the next three chapters I will introduce a basic agile process (Design, Build, Improve) and I will present in each of the sections one practice directly derived from agile practices, showing also a specific real example.

Keep in mind, that today, there are hundreds of agile practices, and very probably all of them could fit in your work. However remember that applying a practice without the proper mindset (values and principles) is only a mechanic and is not really effective.

To help in this r-evolution Agile Game Factory is working on a specific game on the connection between Mindset/Principles/Practices in agile. Stay tuned!.

Update : You can see this game in action in Corrado’s live playsession of The Agile Mind

Designing a game

When you start designing a new game you have to keep in mind very clearly WHY you are building the game. To help in this process, I have developed a Game Vision Board. This is directly derived from the  Product Vision Board by Roman Pichler and is adapted to the specific context of game design.
This canvas is composed by 5 areas where creators can put main the attributes of the game and, at the end, the Vision statement that will guide them in all decisions. These attributes are:
1) TARGET: who are the players? (think of personas, how many, interactions, …)
2) NEEDS: why players want to play it? (think of what is motivating players to play it)
3) FEATURE: what makes the game stand out? (think of unique/new and imported/improved mechanics, components,… you would like to have)
4) GOAL: why this is useful for us? (think of what is motivating us to build it)
4+) How do we MEASURE success? (think of some metrics and how to measure them)
5) VISION in a sentence (think of a tweet)

FOR EXAMPLE, recently, I worked with a team of serious game designers on a possible new game about sustainability. We spent a couple of sessions to understand and share our ideas around this game and we put everything in the canvas below

Clearly we could have had an open conversation, but the canvas gave us a few rules and helped us to have a well-defined outcome to be used in the future.

Building a game

To build a game you can use Kanban or Scrum. These are the most used agile frameworks which are also PERFECT for gaming. First, you have to identify the parts of the game to build; then organise them into small pieces and prioritise them. Later you can build starting from the most relevant piece. Prioritisation is very important because this lets you create MVPs (Minimal Viable Product) of the game at different levels and test them following an iterative and incremental approach, collecting more and more information around your game.

Note that you can use this approach also for more complex activities like designing a mechanic or writing an instruction manual / rulebook. Furthermore, the fact that you have designed the game starting with a vision, helps you to keep the right direction. Finally agile frameworks are great if you are working alone, but they are much better if you are a team.

FOR EXAMPLE, I am currently working together with a team of six people distributed across Europe to build a new narrative RPG. The image below is a section of the scrum board.

The board is a visualisation of the process to build stuff, and each stage has “cards” that represent activities, mostly directly related to the players’ experience.

Improving a game

To understand if a game is working or maybe how you could improve it, you need to collect feedback.
Feedback is one of the core attributes of the agile mindset and, for a game, comes mainly in two modes: from play-testers and from actual players.

To collect feedback for a game, I have created a dedicated model called TARGET from the initial letters of the six dimensions:

• Theme: Is the theme enjoyable and close to reality? Is information on which the game is based  realistic? Is the goal of the game consistent with the theme?
• Aesthetics: How are the materials of the game? How is the iconography of the artefacts? What about readability of the information (cards, rulebook,…)?
• Replay-ability: How can knowledge of the game change the game experience? How many variants can you play? How many player combinations can be used?
• Game length: Is the game length consistent with theme? Are there some moments where some players are only watching? Is the flow of the mechanic fluent or start & stop?
• Ease of play: Are rules clear and straightforward? Are there some weird exceptions to normal flow? Is  there support to explain the game?
• Tactics & strategy: What is the role of luck? Can players predict, monitor and control different phases of the games? Are players able to adopt different working behaviours?

Note. The TARGET model has been presented in this article.

You can measure each of these with a score 1 to 5 (or stars) and with open text to ask the players how you might improve the actual score.

As you can imagine, this can be easily automated using an online form.

FOR EXAMPLE, at the following link you can find the Google form I have created for Agile Game Factory’s customers.

Here a link to an article showing how impactful feedback from real players can be.

Final thoughts

Sometimes, you may want to check if a hypothesis can work in a multi-layer context.

I can show an example strongly related to this connection between agile and games. At the moment, I am working in agile on a agile serious game on the core concepts of the agile mindset. This is a three-time spiralling logic and it is probably a tough use case to check an idea. however apparently it is working. So the final thought is that agile works.

The post Applying Agile Practices to Create an Agile Serious Game first appeared on Ludogogy.

For example, the ‘Apply in Stages’ card suggests that you break down your content into stages and ask learners to apply it one step at a time to a scenario. The ‘Branching Paths’ card suggests that you create a series of choices, each of which leads to more choices, for the learners to navigate.

Each card has more info about how, why and where you could do this, together with some useful extra tips including other cards it combines well with. There are also seven ‘guide’ cards that offer different techniques to use the deck to inspire your learning designs (including a game you can play with the cards).

I created the deck to distil my experience of designing interactive learning into a tool to inspire learning professionals with new ways to bring content to life. It’s not specifically about gamifying learning, just making it more engaging and effective. But you could call it a toy, or a playful learning tool, and it has many key features that mean that, when it came to transforming the Transform Deck from an initial draft to a market-ready product, I needed to prototype and playtest in much the same way I prototype and playtest learning games.

Jesse Schell is a vastly experienced game designer and author of the Art of Game Design. His six questions for playtesting—the why, who, when, where, what and how of playtesting—were invaluable to me in this process. I’d like to show you how.

Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design is available on Amazon

The Deck of Lenses (card deck version of the book) is also available

Why are you playtesting?

This is all about the questions your playtest should answer, and the risks you are looking to investigate and mitigate. Playtests without specific questions in mind get less useful information.

In this case, I wasn’t sure if people would understand how to use the cards. I wasn’t sure if people would be able to use them with content types I’m less familiar with. I didn’t know if I’d included the best selection of activities, or organised them perfectly. I didn’t know if the ways I thought the cards should be arranged and laid out included all of the best ways to inspire.

Each of these don’t-knows can be thought of as a risk. My playtests were designed to investigate and suggest mitigation for these risks, by posing them as questions:

• Do users understand how to use the cards?
• Do they work with different types of content?
• Are any activities less appropriate or useful?

Note that posing these as questions to be answered doesn’t necessarily mean asking the direct question to playtesters. Sometimes it’s better to observe what they do or how they do it. Ask yourself: who is best placed to answer this question, the person experiencing the experience, or me as observer and data gatherer?

By being clear on the questions I wanted answered, I gave myself a solid foundation to design playtests. And I got some great answers to these questions. I dropped, replaced, refocused and merged some cards. I changed the instructions multiple times. I found new ways to use the cards that worked better to inspire users.

Take the time to be clear on your aims in playtesting: the clearer you are, the clearer the useful information you’ll get.

Who should you playtest with?

There are pros and cons to various groups, often centred around convenient people (e.g. coworkers) versus relevant people (your likely audience) versus insightful people (experts).

In this case, in particular, the product is not very relevant to anybody not designing or running learning experiences, and I have convenient access to such people through my work. So, I was able to take advantage of this to observe the intended audience using the product, and glean some incredibly useful insight. I was also able to get insight from games-based learning experts that helped spark ideas to improve the product.

If you aren’t the beneficiary of such a happy accident, you may want to conduct multiple playtests to get different perspectives.

When should you playtest?

The key question here is really at what stage should you playtest, and the answer is often: at every stage. You can test a concept, a rough paper prototype, a ‘full’ prototype with placeholder art, and a fully working draft.

My first prototype was a spreadsheet of activities versus useful fields for each, divided into categories/suits. I discussed this with some sample users, and this helped me clarify the suit divisions, as well as weed out some less appropriate activities. Each stage after this—rough paper cards, cards with placeholder art, draft versions—helped me on the journey, including giving me insights I hadn’t expected. Earlier versions helped with card selection and which fields were more or less useful. Later versions helped with colour choices.

Most importantly, by playtesting early and ‘ugly’, I was able to change things before I became too attached to them.

Where should you playtest?

The key divisions here are effectively ‘your place or theirs’, as well as online versus offline. Again there are convenience considerations, but the more realistic you can make it to how the experience will be in practice, the better the feedback.

In practice, I developed much of this product during a pandemic, so most of my playtesting was online. But I noticed that one early playtest with a client designer team at their offices had a relaxed feel to it, and I was able to record some striking observations about how they reacted and how they used the cards. The richness of face-to-face communication means you can pick up on more subtle cues from playtesters. I probably got more useful info from that one face-to-face playtest than from twice as much time spent online testing.

What should you look for?

There is some overlap with the ‘why’ question here, but whereas that focuses on what you know you want answers for, this question in Jesse Schell’s sextet also cautions us to be on the lookout for the ‘unknowns’—things we weren’t expecting, but that help us.

By observing as keenly as possible during playtesting of my cards, I caught all kinds of unexpected reactions including a tendency to skip the instructions, misunderstandings about the card layouts and how people intuitively used the cards. In one case I saw one person lay out the cards in an interesting and innovative way, and adapted it as an ‘official’ method.

How should you conduct the playtest?

The answers to the other five questions set you well on the way to the sixth, but there are some further key considerations:

• To what extent should you be present?—you want to get great data, but real players won’t always have access to you, and your presence is a source of bias
• How should you introduce/explain things?—this can be a great proving ground for briefings and instructions, but again you want to minimise bias
• Where should you look?—while your instinct may be to observe the game itself, people’s faces can often offer more useful feedback
• What data should you collect?—as well as doing things qualitatively, should you count and time how long, how many, how much?
• Should you pause mid-game to review?—this can break the flow, but if you don’t, people will be subject to recency bias, and you may lose insight on early stages

In my case, I addressed these by, among other things:

• Being present, but hanging back and letting people play rather than getting too involved, and observing keenly as well as asking questions
• Letting them ‘unbox’ the cards themselves and explore before any explanations
• Looking at faces and what they did with the cards
• Noting what cards they used first, in what ways, and what went un-done
• Pausing after each ‘use’ to explore responses

As noted above, the results of this considered approach to prototyping and playtesting were far-reaching for the details of the Transform Deck.

Jesse Schell talks about the ‘rule of the loop’: “the more times you test and improve your design, the better your game will be”. The Transform Deck went through four main iterations with several adjustments within each. I playtested these on a huge variety of groups over a long period of time, remaining open to changes and making them frequently.

The result is further away than I could have imagined from my initial prototype—visually, in terms of content, organisation, phrasing, and most noticeably in the user guide. But it’s closer than I could have hoped to the intent of my initial vision—an intuitive, delightful deck to inspire people to transform learning experiences.

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

The post Jesse Schell’s Six Questions for Playtesting first appeared on Ludogogy.

0: Here we go

Day Number Zero

It all started one day with one of our corporate clients asking us, “Can you do something different next month?” There was vagueness in the request and desperation in the tone.

They had done enough PowerPoint-driven sessions. L&D was frustrated, business managers were bored and participants were mutinous. They were all at the end of their tether. All they wanted was something different. Anything different. We had an idea.

Game-based Learning is what we felt we should try. We thought we could design a quick game to facilitate a session on Change Management. This is the story of how it came to life – from Idea to Prototype and finally to Finished Product.

1, 2, 3, 4: The Storm before the Calm

One office. Two people. Three hours a day. Four days.

All we did was brainstorm ideas and eat pizzas – lots of both. Beyond the discussions at the office, we were on calls throughout these four days.

Some themes that stand out in my memory involved space travel, sailing across a pirate-infested sea, building a settlement on an island, war prep against a tyrant, building a startup, running a restaurant, and a race to the North Pole.

Somewhere there, we had thought of a game about Running an Organic Farm too. In all fairness, it felt like a very (how do you say) “uninspiring” game. All the other theme ideas seemed much more epic in their scope as well as meaning. I still have no idea why, then, we were drawn to the Farming theme.

In hindsight, I am glad we were. The idea provided so many possibilities and so many real-life inspirations. I can’t think of any of the other themes which could have given us so many facets to work with.

5, 6, 7, 8: Let’s dance

To the tunes of every constraint

The next four days went in interviewing a wide variety of people and making tons of notes. We spoke to L&D and IT departments. We spoke to potential participants and their managers. We spoke to game designers and graphic artists. We spoke to coders and database designers.

Each conversation took us farther from any form of consensus. There were new constraints, contradictions and conflicts unearthed at each step. We had to keep in mind, among other things, the requirements put forth by L&D, participant interest (or sometimes lack thereof), shortcomings of the platforms approved by IT, and worst of all, Internet bandwidth issues due to participants spread all across the world during the pandemic.

This is what the requirement document looked like. (It was enough to make grownups cry):

1. The game has to be played collaboratively – but must have some competitive elements
2. The game has to be played strategically – but must have some elements of chance
3. The game must include all participants who are present – but not mandate their presence
4. There must be clearly assigned roles – but the game shouldn’t stop if someone drops out

9 to 11: Run away? Or run with it?

In India, 9-2-11 is a colloquialism that literally means to run away. Don’t ask why!

For a while, we seriously considered declining the project. After investing so much time and energy in it, the roadblocks seemed too many to deliver anything worthwhile. We agree that “Creativity stems from Constraints”, but surely there has to be a limit after which they just become a hindrance and not worthwhile anymore.

Good sense prevailed though. A little because it was a long term relationship with this client, and a little because we had come to love the hundreds of hand-sketches and notes enough to want to see the game in action. But, mostly because we got on board a wonderful game designer. Shoutout to Psy Sai.

With her creative input and long hours of discussion, we found an answer to pretty much every question that was troubling us.

12, 13, 14, 15: The Grind

The days are a blur, but the game becomes clearer

After much discussion, making, testing, breaking, remaking, here’s how our erstwhile hopeless requirement document had become. Some aspect of the game addressed every constraint and turned it into a strength.

1. A team of 4-5 people will manage a farm each. There will be multiple teams simultaneously managing their own farms. They’ll play collaboratively within their farm, while competing with other teams. Collaborative & Competitive: Check
2. The game has decisions to make about cost of sowing, duration of harvest, revenue from the yield, matching vegetables to soil types – all strategic decisions. Investment decisions are to be made to improve profits, protect against disasters, get intel about weather and general consultation/advice – still very much strategic. Market demands fluctuate, and weather and other disasters wreak havoc – all of which depend on chance/randomness. Some you can plan to mitigate, others are out of your control. Strategy & Chance: Check
3. Due to obvious internet bandwidth issues, we decided to not make the game turn-based. Instead the game time keeps running in the background. Every 10 seconds represent one game day, and if even one player in the team is online, the clock keeps ticking (and the calendar keeps flipping). Everyone can play, but no one is missed if they are missing. The game goes on. Everyone Involved & Everyone Not Mandatory: Check
4. Everyone can discuss and decide. Everyone can sow and harvest. Everyone can invest and liaise. Clear roles can be picked from a list and adhered to as an agreement between the teammates. But the game puts no restrictions on who can do what. Roles are suggested, even encouraged, but never imposed. That way, if someone with a specific role drops out, the game doesn’t come to a standstill awaiting that person to join back. Role & No role: Check

 A game was born. Those four days of work had created a game so well-rounded that even after nine months of continuous tinkering, it has retained much of its original essence.

16: Bittersweet emotional day

You win some, you lose some

One of our big advantages is that we have a solid tech background as I have run a software development company for a decade. Our prototypes aren’t built on Miro or Google Docs or other collaborative tools. Instead, we code them as standalone software. The benefit here is that when the game is done, it’s done. Nowhere else to go. No one else to talk to. Nothing else to do.

The prototype is ready to use – pretty much right away. In the past, this approach used to take us a little longer than using publicly available platforms, but now we have enough pieces of the puzzle ready that we can assemble our software in days and weeks, rather than months.

Anyway, we present the product to the client. They absolutely love it: the attention to detail, the turnaround time, the debrief possibilities. They love everything about the game. We have a deal.

This felt too good to be true. And, it was.

Last week, their IT department decided to ban Zoom. Unfortunately, MS Teams didn’t have breakout rooms (at that time). How the hell do you play this game without putting people into breakout rooms? We felt… well I can’t put in words what we felt – not in print at least.

17, 18, 19, 20: The Grind (Again)

Communication is the Lock!

The most amazing game we had created to date could potentially not get used by the client who commissioned (and loved) it because their IT department made some decision. In hindsight, 20/20 as it is, I can’t thank the IT department enough for their contribution in the form of this new constraint. While it pushed us to our limits, it made the product that much better.

Our two-week timeline was now shot to smithereens. We were back to the drawing table. We tried and tested dozens of options, while the most obvious solution to the “No Breakout Rooms Allowed” problem patiently awaited discovery right under our noses.

Two days later, after discarding one hare-brained idea after the other, we finally saw it. We had to create our own chat system – deeply integrated into the game. The actual work itself was pretty simple – once the idea was approved. We added text and voice chat into the game. People could now communicate with their own team as well as with the facilitator using it.

We tested it over the next few days, and found it worked like a charm. Due to a few other IT constraints, we have now put audio chat on hold, but the text chat has proven adequate to scale the last, seemingly insurmountable mountain.

21, …, Today: Here we are

The Home Stretch and WIP forever

We have a game that is fun for the players to play, even more fun for the facilitators to facilitate and different (and more impactful) for the L&D Department. We have a win-win-win product which is creating quite a buzz wherever it goes, and we can’t be prouder of it.

This is how the Player View looks with some portions trimmed for brevity.

There is also a robust back-end Facilitator View to manage the game. It can be used to change market demands, bring disasters on demand, see everyone’s chat, move people around in teams, allow/block investments, pause/speed up/slow down the game and many more things.

More changes are on the way, the next one is code-named The Four Seasons and deals with automations relevant to Seasons. So Farm So Good (SFSG)  is an agile game – not just in the way it is played or facilitated – but also in the continuous improvements we are making to it.

Creativity does stem from Constraints. The more the better. Also, #WIPForever

A live play session of So Farm So Good featured in our Make and Break sessions. Watch it there.

The post So Farm So Good – from zero to ‘done’ in 21 days first appeared on Ludogogy.

Playtesting

Playtesting is the moment of truth, the moment that you or other players try your prototype and you record the feedback and reactions and try to understand what works and what needs to be changed in the game. Playtesting can be useful to improve game design even if one person plays your game. You still gain loads of interesting feedback that can help improve it. Don Norman (2013), one of the most famous researchers of cognitive design and usability that helped Apple design some of their most iconic products, suggests that testing your product with five users helps identify 85% of the problems the design has at that stage of development.

Prototyping and playtesting are a coupled iterative process that can happen again and again until you feel you have a game that can go into the final design and production phase. Fullerton (2018) presents the below model conceptualising the relationship between prototyping and playtesting and how the process helps you test and narrow down your game’s details the further you go into the design and development process.

The Iterative Game Design Model demonstrates the process of going from your initial prototype to the final version of the game with play testing sessions providing data that are evaluated and then enable revisions of the game. Playtesting helps identify what game elements are working and which ones need some tweaking, always keeping in mind that game designers should be serving the game’s end users.

HOW TO RUN A PLAYTESTING SESSION

You and your team can be the first play testers and many times there are a lot of insights that you can draw from playing your own game but there are limitations to how much you can learn from people that are close to the game. After you make sure you have a playable prototype you can give it to your close friends and family to try out but again do not forget that these people are close to you and they might be biased towards liking your game or might have a hard time giving you honest feedback because of your personal relationship. The best play testers are people you do not know that can be considered potential end users.

If you are making an educational game for elementary school kids for example, testing your game out with children or their teachers can be very useful. The first thing you need to avoid when playtesting is to defend your game. Ideally, someone else should be facilitating the playtesting sessions and game designers should be just observing or watching a video of the playtesting session afterwards. The point of playtesting is not for the designers to pitch the game to anyone but to identify which elements of the game work and which elements need to be tweaked or even taken out. Listen to everything the testers say and write it down or record it with your phone or on video if possible. There will be plenty of time to analyse the data your testers give you. Do not answer a lot of critique during playtesting. Just make sure you write everything down. Before you start playtesting do not pitch your game to your testers, there is no need for a 15 minute presentation of why you built this game and what the goal is and what your aspirations for it are. A 2-3 minute intro to the game and a brief explanation of its rules are enough. Ideally you should have written all the rules on a piece of paper and players should be able to play without your help.

If you are part of the game design team, I would advise that every member of the team be present at the playtesting session if possible. If you have a team of twenty people or some similar large number, make sure to record the session on video and share it with everyone. It is normal for a designer to get defensive about their game. If the feedback is visible to all though then there can be no disagreements about the changes that should be made to improve the game.

Check out the review of Vasilis’ book ‘Designing Games and Gamification for Learning here

The post Adding Playtesting to your Game Design Process first appeared on Ludogogy.