With several different businesses to choose from as you play through the game, players can gain insights into the differing impacts that an attack might have, and the various approaches that organisations might take to minimising the cost of an attack, and regaining access to their own data.

The Chat GPT component of the game gives players the opportunity to enter into negotiation with a ‘real’ (or real-time, at any rate), ransomeware organisation, while the cards are used to let players decide what actions they will take to resolve the situation, and how to spend their available cybersecurity budget.

James can come and facilitate this game in your organisation, as part of your security training provision. There are advantages to having an expert like James there to debrief the game, obviously, but mechnically, the game is simple enough to be run internally (subject to having a pro GPT account), once you know how to play. Get in touch with James via LinkedIn or check out his other services at the Bores Group Ltd website.

Also, don’t forget to book your place for the upcoming Play Secure Conference on the 21st and 22nd June, 2024. James has been running this for four years now, and it was this event which inspired the creation of this game. This year’s event is also dear to Ludogogy’s heart, as I’ll be speaking there on the use of ‘Keepsake’ Games for Wellness.

Show & Tell videos will all accumulate at the Show & Tell Page as they are published.

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

The post James Bore – The Ransomeware Game first appeared on Ludogogy.

This deck has been carefully crafted to enable facilitators and business leaders to pick through specifi business objectives and evaluate any inherent risk.

Guided by the cards, you will facilitate an holistic conversation around all aspects of the objective, while drilling into the potential impacts of going ahead. The group will consider the implications of a range of universal risk categories as outlined on the ‘Risky Business’ cards to fully understand, measure and mitigate the risks.

The process will help the group to identify the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats contained within the objective and enable a confident transition to purposeful action.

Put simply, ‘Risky Business’ provides peace of mind when making those all important business decisions.

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 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 – Risky Business first appeared on Ludogogy.

Luma World’s approach to learning through play aligns with contemporary educational theories that emphasize active engagement, problem-solving, and hands-on experiences as effective learning methods. Their games are designed to be age-appropriate, culturally relevant, and engaging for children, potentially making them a popular choice for parents and educators seeking to supplement traditional education methods with interactive learning tools.

Ludogogy has had the opportunity to play six of Luma World’s most popular titles, so here is a mammoth-sized review of all six.

Galaxy Raiders

for age 9+, 30mins, 2 – 4 players – A space-based game where players are trying to capture new planets and moons, while stopping other players from doing the same.

Teaches: Number operations, mental maths, resource management, long-term planning, reverse engineering and problem solving.

Galaxy Raiders consists of a number of hexagonal ‘planet boards’, marker pegs in four colours, an operation die, which shows all four basic maths operators and wildcard, cards with numbers on, ‘power cards’, which allow you to take actions which influence the game, and player console mats.

One more planet board than the number of players is used, and the winner is the first player to win two planet boards.

Players win a planet board by first ‘capturing’ the moons and then the planet. Each board has four moons and one planet, each with a target number on them.

On their go, a player rolls the die and uses that operator, and two of the number cards on their (openly displayed) player console, to achieve the target number on a moon or a planet (only after all four moons have been captured). They may then place a peg on that number position.

Power cards can be used to ‘Evict’ another player’s peg, ‘Replace’ another player’s peg with their own or to be able to use the ‘Any Number’ wild card in their calculation.

There are several additional rules around placing pegs and using power cards, which are dependent on game state (e.g. you can only replace someone in a planet if you have captured one of its moons), and it is these additional rules that make this more than just a game of mental arithmetic, and into one that requires strategic planning. This provides enough challenge for the older target age group, and will be fun also for adults.

The combination of the requirement for some quite complex thinking skills and a competitive ‘battleground’ will ensure that this game is replayable for some time to come.

The game is pitched at the 9+ age group and is very suitable for children at that age.  The planning and problem solving are the more complex aspects of the game, so it could be also be played in a ‘team’ format with younger children, with the younger child doing the calculations, and maybe an adult or older child taking the strategic planning role.

Overall an excellent game for school or home, to polish up those mental maths skills.

Crafty Puggles

for age 6+, 30mins, 2 – 4 players – Cute mole-like creatures attempt to be the first to reach hidden treasure by burrowing under the grounds of a stately home. A tile-placement and path-building game.

Teaches: Basic fractions, mental maths, pattern recognition, critical thinking, motor skills, creativity, planning & strategy

Crafty Puggles consists of a treasure game board on which square tiles are laid to create a path to the treasure. The square tiles are split into quadrants which are either mud (passable path) or grass (which block the path),and therefore also represent the fractions ¼, (a quarter mud, three quarters grass), ½ (50/50 mud and grass) and ¾ (a quarter mud, three quarters grass).

Each player also has their own ‘den mat’ where they can ‘bank’ tiles, and grow and use a ‘Puggle Boost’ feature, which allows them to play actions which affect their own or their opponent’s progress.

A fraction die is thrown to indicate which tile a player will take from the fraction. Each player is attempting to navigate from one corner of the board to the centre, and is therefore working within a quarter of the game.

An action die is also rolled and allows the player to; place a tile on an empty space on the game board (to, hopefully, extend your path), rotate a tile, either your own to improve, or your opponent’s to block their progress, move your puggle one step along the ‘Boost’, or move a ‘Hound’ playing piece (a blocker) to any blank space on the board, or to a tile showing the fraction you also threw.

The different mechanics of this game combine to provide a fun, engaging experience for young players, with just the right balance of acting to progress your own position and being able to use ‘take-that’ actions to mess with your opponent’s plans.

Playing this game will definitely flex skills in patterns recognition and in planning and strategy. The possible combinations of the two dice mean that players have to consider carefully from a large number of different play options, what will best move them towards their goal, encouraging critical and creative thinking.

The fractions offered in this game are quite limited, but that is appropriate for the target age group, and is more than made up for by the opportunities for strategic planning.

The fact that there are many combinations of possible actions, e.g. from the dice, and from the five possible options when you activate a Puggle Boost means that there is considerable replayability in this game, and it will keep young players coming back.

The ‘take that’ aspects of the game are a considerable source of fun and interaction, and will also be useful in teaching children how to deal with disappointment at having their plans spoiled.

Overall, I would recommend this game for 5 – 7 year olds, as a fun experience which also reinforces skills in planning to reach a specific goals through pattern matching. As a gateway game, it could be useful to teach the skills that could lead youngsters on to commercial tile-laying games such as Tsuro and Carcassonne.

Tsuro is available on Amazon

Carcassonne is available on Amazon

Guess the Fence

for age 8+, 30mins, 2 players – A game which uses the ‘Battleships’ mechanic of hiding your actions from your opponent, which you then have to deduce. Whoever first guesses correctly the shapes and positions of the fences built by their opponent, wins.

Teaches: Geometry, patterns, data interpretation and planning, imagination and creativity, taking calculated risks, visual reasoning, problem solving, communication, motor skills.

In Guess the Fence, each player has a board, which is hidden from their opponent’s view by a screen. Much like battleships, each player must position a set number of specific shapes on their board, and then attempt to find (by informed guessing) all their opponents shapes first, to win.

The shapes used are one each of: large triangle, square, small triangle and rectangle

In this case, the shapes are constructed from three different lengths of plastic ‘fence’, consisting of a straight length and a ‘vertex’ (a small round hoop). The shapes are built by laying the fences on the board with the vertices corresponding to numbered circles on the board.

There are rules for construction e.g. only two fences can join at a vertex, a fence must start and end at a vertex etc.

Again, like Battleships, a player can mark whether their guess has ‘Hit’ or ‘Miss’ on a wipe clean marking sheet, and use the information gained from that to inform further guesses.

Battleships is available on Amazon

Unlike Battleships, the player can choose to make one of two kinds of guess on a turn. They may call out a numbered vertex. If it is a hit, they mark that in green. If a miss, in red. Or they may choose to guess a whole shape, by calling out all its vertices ‘Do you have a triangle at 3, 4 and 9?’. A hit here will give them 3 points and they can colour the shape in green on the marking board. A miss attracts a -1 score.

The jeopardy created by the possibility of losing points for a wrong shape guess introduces a interesting twist on the standard Battleship game, further emphasising the need to discover and correctly analyse information as well as simply scoring lucky hits.

This is a great game for developing visual reasoning, and data interpretation, including the pretty high order skill of extrapolating general principles from rules and applying them in differing situations. The geometry involved may be a little simple for the target age group but the overall experience provides opportunities for a pretty complex sessions of planning and problem solving, in order to play well..

At first glance, this game does not appear to have as much replayability as, say, Crafty Puggles.  But then I remember how playing Battleships with my dad kept me engrossed for years worth of summer camping holidays. It’s the intense competition that does it. And for the same reason it’s a game which parents can quite happily play with their kids too.

As the communication is deliberately kept to a minimum in a game of hidden information such as this, it is not an obviously ‘social’ game, but it does require clear and concise communication – in itself, a very important skill for youngsters.

Overall, I would recommend this game for parents and children who relish the opportunity to compete directly, and that it is very suitable for developing the spatial and visual reasoning skills of children between 7 and 10 years.

Lord of the Bins

for age 6+, 30mins, 2 – 6 players – Find hidden value in garbage. A game about sorting and recycling rubbish

Teaches about: Different kinds of waste, segregation and sorting, caring for the environment, sustainable cities and communities, responsible consumption.

Where my wider family comes from in the North of England, there’s a saying. “Where there’s muck, there’s brass”, meaning that there’s value in what usually gets thrown away. This is the premise behind this game. Junkland, where the game is set, is buried under a stinky heap of garbage, but the Lords of Junkland have realised there’s treasure to be found.

The major components of Lord of the Bins are cards; four different bin cards, eight Trump Trash Cards (yes, I know, I was thinking that too), and 60 trash cards representing different kinds of rubbish. Each trash card is numbered 1 to 9, where 1 is easy to compost or recycle, and 9 is difficult to do so.  Additionally, there are 25 yellow gems, 6 green gems (and a bag to keep them in),a key card token, a table listing all the different trash in the same four categories of the bin cards and a rather fetching raccoon hat.

Players hold hands dealt from a main deck of trash cards and trump trash cards shuffled together and each turn they take one more card from a ’marketplace’ of face-up trash cards. Depending on how many cards they choose to take and the current state of cards in the marketplace, they may also end up placing gems of marketplace cards, of picking up gems along with the cards they take.

Players then either play a single card (place it in its appropriate bin) or play a gem; an action which unlocks powerful strategic actions in the game, such as being able to play extra cards into bins.

Getting rid of cards is an important part of the game, as the winner is the player who has the lowest score when the game ends. A player’s score is the total of the numbers on all the cards still in hand.

The Raccoon hat comes into play as a punishment for being incorrect during a challenge. One player may challenge another if they feel that the first player has incorrectly placed garbage in a bin. The trash table is consulted to discover the truth of the matter, and whichever player was incorrect has to don the racoon hat and imitate a garbage eating animal.

Clearly, a player is likely to do better in this game, if they have a firm grasp on which garbage goes in which bin, and one of the main educational aims of this game is to get youngsters very familiar with these concepts. The raccoon hat provides an amusing way to inject some negative reinforcement into the game and discourage mistakes.

The rules of how cards can be placed into bins will also develop number sequencing skills, as players cannot place a card which does not ‘follow’ from one already placed.

This game has enough different combinations of components and therefore paths through the game, that it will remain replayable for some time, and I imagine that for the target age group of 6+, the raccoon hat itself will provide a sufficient to play this repeatedly even with, and maybe especially with, parents.

The strong narrative element of this game is also appealing to the target age group, with the winner being the victorious ‘Lord’ of Junkland, who has not only become rich, but done their bit to clean up the place they live.

The ‘challenge’ aspect of the game gives opportunities for considerable social interaction and will delight children, as there is always going to be someone who comes out of that looking silly in a raccoon hat.

Overall, as this game can be played by between 2 – 6players, I would recommend it both for home and the classroom for 6 – 10 y-o, where it could be used to support conversations around recycling and even housework responsibilities, and maybe for older end of the age group, around sustainability frameworks such as the SDGs.

Mystic Arts

for age 10+, 30mins, 3 – 4 players. A spell-casting game where players have to mix ingredients in the appropriate amounts and proportions to become the best wizard, or witch,  and win.

Teaches: Measurements, decimals, operations, conversion of units, mental maths, critical thinking, planning & strategy, decision making, focus

The theme of Mystic Arts will be very appealing to children drawn to Harry Potter and similar wizarding themed films and books. The aim of the game is to win by becoming the best potion maker. And as any witch or wizard knows, the key to great potions is accurate weights and measures.

The compact game is mostly card-based, and consists of three kinds. The first is ingredient cards – each ingredient also features a weight or measure (e.g. 1,800 ml of Honey Mead, or 2,300 mm of the Great Horn of the Dwarves). Spell cards endow actions that can affect the game, particularly to help you to win a potion by, for example manipulating a weight or measure. Potion cards come in two varieties, good potions and bad potions. Players must try to collect good potions while avoiding the bad ones.

When a potion is revealed, it will have a weight, a length and a volume. If it is good potion players will want to win it. They do so by selecting (in secret) one ingredient card from their hand which they hope will be CLOSEST to the same measurement unit on the potion card. If it is a bad potion, they will, conversely, choose an ingredient which they hope to be furthest away from the equivalent measurement on the potion card.

Players then reveal their choices, at the same time calling out the difference between their ingredient and the measurement on the potion card.

Spell cards can then be played to influence the outcome. For example a player who wants to win the potion may use a spell which exchanges their card with an opponent’s or changes the magnitude of their ingredient.

Play proceeds like this with the player who is the first to collect two good potions being the winner.

This game is very engaging – even for adults and older children. Due to limited access to very young children, my first playtest was with a 16 y-o, and we did choose to play it several times. The competitiveness and strategic aspects from the combination of using ingredients and spells to achieve your purpose, make it a balanced and fun experience.

The need to do conversion between different magnitudes of units (e.g. kilos and grams), in some cases, and to do rapid mental arithmetic, offer a good level of challenge to players, even those older than the target age. And the potential different combinations of cards that will come out in play, offering different experiences, mean that this game has considerable replayability.

Like all of the games reviewed here, (with the possible exception of Fracto), these games feel far more like commercial games that are intended for fun, rather than educational exercises which just happen to be games.

That is not meant to mean that they are not excellent educational tools – they are. It is rather a reflection of the skill of the designers to make great games, which children will want to play again and again, and which they will not see as ‘different’ from the other games that they play just for fun.

Playing Mystic Arts is a very sociable experience, because of the to-and-fro of trying to beat each other at winning (or losing) a potion, by using spell cards, if your initial ‘bid’ has not been successful. I would recommend for play both in the classroom, and at home, where it very well might become a family favourite.

Fracto

for age 8+, 15mins, 2 – 4 players. A game with 3 different variants, which focus on accuracy, speed and memory respectively. A card game of resource management in the jungle.

Teaches: Identifying fractions, operations with fractions, mental maths, visual reasoning, communication, strategy

Fracto offers three different card games in one compact box, containing 80 fraction cards, with the fractions shown in four different ways, as vulgar fractions (e.g. ⅔), in words (e.g. two thirds), as pictograms (e.g. one lion outlines and two full-colour lions, indicating ⅔) or pie chart or similar diagram.

In the first game WHOLE-IN-1, and in  DECK OF FORTUNE players win by discarding their whole hand. Cards can only be discarded in whole pairs (i.e both cards together add up to a whole 1). There are slight variations in the way the two games are played, so some players might find one more fun than the other.

MEMORY HERO is a variation on the whole pair theme, by incorporating a memory game too. Players have to make whole pairs but also have to remember cards that have been previously turned over in order to make more pairs than their opponents.

The game play of the suggested games is quite simple but appropriate for the 8+ target age, although they could be played with younger players too.

However the real value in these cards, I feel, is that they are a versatile set of components, which teachers, parents, and even children themselves could use to devise their own fraction based games, opening up possibilities, to not just become familiar with different ways of expressing fractions (which all these games do very well), but to explore higher order thinking skills of system design and critical thinking which games design requires.

Quality of Materials

The components of these games are visually appealing, and generally of high quality. The boards, in particular, are  and sturdy and durable. Tiles are likewise. Some playing pieces are made of cardboard, where they could have been more durable if made of wood, and the paper used in manuals can be a bit flimsy (but they are packaged in envelopes for protection). However, this is reflected in the very reasonable price points for these games, and on balance, it is better that the games are more widely accessible than that they are made of luxury materials.

The boxes are well designed. Everything has a place to be packed away neatly and there are smaller boxes to contain game pieces and components.

Many of the game guides also contain a QR code to access extremely well put together and informative video how to play guides

All in all, these games would be a high quality addition to your school or home educational game cupboard.

Check out reviews of other games, books and other game-related stuff.

The post Review – Luma World Games first appeared on Ludogogy.

The earliest simulations with a focus on learning and improvement were wargames, and it could be argued that modern learning simulations, or even games-based learning as a field, has grown out the need for combatants to understand past strategies, and to develop and test new ones.

The term ‘simulation’ is also used to describe a subset of learning tools which enable ‘learning through doing’ in the sense of practising skills – including flight simulators, patient simulators, and the like. These will not be considered in this article, mainly because realism, which is considered below, is a requirement for these tools, not a question for consideration.

What is a Simulation?

In the context of learning games, a simulation is designed to replicate situations that occur in real life for the purposes of analysis, planning or experimenting with options. Common examples include business simulations, resource management simulations and role-playing.

An air of respectability

Given the definition above, it could be argued that games incorporating role-play or games that have a ‘real-life’ theme, could be called ‘simulation’. Indeed, in the earlier days of games-based learning, it was a common strategy to call a game a ‘simulation’ to mitigate any potential objection from clients about games being ‘childish’ or trivial, or not being appropriate in a professional learning setting.

‘Simulation’, it was believed, had an air of respectability, that ‘game’ did not. Something that was actually little more than a marketing strategy has coloured how games for learning are not only seen, but also how they are designed, to this day. Where other types of games are used, but are called ‘simulations’, this only muddies the waters about how games work as an effective pedagogy, about the mechanisms that are actually in play, and how they link to the construction of knowledge by learners.

It also means that simulations become a ‘preferred’ genre where other game or play experiences might be more appropriate in a specific learning setting or in the context of particular desired outcomes.

The Benefits of Simulation-based learning…

In some situations, of course, a simulation is the best solution to a learning challenge. Some of the best-known benefits of games-based experiential learning include:

• Trying and failing safely
• Compressing time in the decision – action – outcome cycle
• Encountering situations that are unusual in real-life
• Cost (and time) effective exposure to situations that are infrequent or hard to organise in real life

And these are all aspects in which simulations perform particularly well.

If the learning you are trying to facilitate is congruent with the above, then a simulation may very well be the way to go. So, what should be included in your design to ensure that your learners can take full advantage?

Failure is a great teacher, and the conditions can be optimised for learning by providing timely and comprehensive feedback on in-game decisions and actions. One really effective way to learn from failure is to be able to try again, and experiment with new decisions and actions. The greatest flexibility for learners is facilitated where the game allows a total ‘wind-back’ to the starting position, as well as the capability to build on previous round on round decisions.

There should be a balance between complexity (and realism) and the time required to create meaningful experiences through the game. It is not necessary that all situations encountered in the game should be modelled with the same degree of realism. Those with mostly thematic value can be simplified to allow extra time for those which are actually the focus of the learning outcomes. For example, a game designed to create learning on making decisions with limited information uses financial results as a measure of ‘success’, but should not necessarily require the players/learners to dwell on ‘real’ financial documents (Profit and loss, balance sheet), unless reading and interpreting financial documents is actually a focus of the learning.

Be clear on what situations need to be simulated in your game and what do not, and be informed in that by direct reference to learning outcomes. A modular design which allows for the inclusion and exclusion of different simulated aspects, or which allows the use of different scenarios with a vanilla ‘engine’ is the ideal way to create a product which can be widely implemented with a variety of learning settings and outcomes. This is also, potentially, the most cost effective model for both learning provider and client.

…and the Drawbacks

Compared to other types of game experiences, simulations can be expensive. Even a simple representation of ‘reality’ requires several parameters and with each added parameter the complexity of interactions between all the moving parts increases exponentially. For example, if we were to simulate a predator/prey interaction (e.g. fox and rabbits), modelling the rate of (rabbit) population would decline over a single generation, requires only starting population of both species and a predation rate. Even very simple realism, requires that you add some sort of ‘fox starvation’ mechanism, and adding more generations needs birth and (non-predation) death rates of both species. Our model still only assumes that foxes need a food source, and so we then need to implement grass… and so on. All this complexity eats up design and development time.

Pushback on realism and ‘correctness’

Simulations, wherever they sit on the continuum between simple and complex (or abstraction and realism) do intend to replicate some aspects of real life. This incurs a risk in relation to the perception of learners. If a learner is very familiar with the simulated situations and they perceive them to be ‘lacking’ in some way, either because they are not ‘accurate’ enough or that they lack proper detail, this may have an adverse impact on how receptive they are to the outcomes from the simulation, and any learning they might derive.

Complexity

As the rabbit/fox example illustrates designing for learning through a simulation can get very complex, very quickly, and depending on your desired outcome, that can include designing in complexity (with its associated overhead) that is not actually needed to meet your outcomes. Thematic authenticity can do this. For example, a simulation which is supposed to support outcomes around  dealing with a VUCA world uses ‘running a utilities business’ as a thematic setting, and requires that aspects of that theme are simulated, even when learners have no need to learn anything about that.

Hard to isolate from wider context

A related problem, which may actually be the cause for unneeded complexity is the difficulty in isolating the required learning experiences from wider context when you are using simulation as the medium. Generally speaking, the more call that there is for demonstrating and practising context specific skills and behaviours during a learning programme, the more likely it is that a relatively authentic simulation would be suitable.

As an example, if a specific learning programme focused on leadership competencies, within the context of a retail environment, it would make sense to simulate much of the retail environment, because learning would be achieved by enacting relevant behaviours. If, instead, the focus was on leadership mindset (learning in the affective domain rather than skills domain), context would be less important, as it would also be if the focus was on generally applicable, rather than context specific, competencies.

The Case for Realism

The decision to use a simulation to support a particular set of learning outcomes implies that there is some advantage to be had, in including some level of ‘realism’ in the experience. If that is not there, it might be wise to reconsider why you should use a simulation over some other form of game.

The questions to ask would be:

• Is there advantage in situating the learning in a specific context (type of business, set of specific activities)?
• Are there aspects of the real setting that can be excluded while still satisfying the learning requirement?
• Can the resultant experience be made sufficiently ‘accurate’ that it will not distract/alienate learners?

The Case for Abstraction

Abstraction – removing specificity, or even setting the simulation in a completely non-realistic setting can be helpful in many circumstances:

• It can be a cheaper option to reduce specificity because it reduces the overhead of complexity.
• It is hard for learners to be distracted / alienated by ‘lack of accuracy’ if the simulation is set in a fictional Martian colony, for example.
• Less specific, abstracted simulations can be suited to a much broader set of learning applications.

Simulations provide us with a useful set of tools for modelling behaviours, practising skills and experimenting with scenarios, but they are by no means the only option, and we should be cautious of relying on the ‘respectability’ of the genre, when in many cases, simpler, cheaper and more generic solutions can provide us with outcomes which are just as effective.

The post Why, and Why Not to use Simulations in Learning first appeared on Ludogogy.

This particular instance of the game was based in the oil and gas sector, which caused some level of controversy in the group, but the game is fully customisable to your own needs to provide a tailored experience – including translation into English. You can contact Youssef at youssefk.jbel@gmail.com or connect with him on LinkedIn

If you would like more of a ‘demo’ and spoken intro to the game, you can just watch the first third or so of the video. In the middle, you will be able to see a team playing the game, while the end shows debrief and the group’s  feedback on the game experience.

If you would like to run your own live play session for your game with Ludogogy, get in touch at info@ludogogy.co.uk . The Ludogogy community is composed of keen and knowledgable people who really know their games-based learning, so you can look forward to getting some useful and actionable feedback, as well as having a recording of your game in action which you can refer to. See recordings of other live play sessions through the Live Sessions category link.

The post StratEdge Strategy Simulation – Live Play Session first appeared on Ludogogy.

Arguably, all games which have a win state (which is the vast majority), require players to adopt some form of strategy, in order to beat either an opponent or the game itself, but not all games will be suitable for learning around Strategy in its real-world sense, which is usually about achieving some outcome through a set of coherent policies, decisions and processes.

What level of strategic thinking is needed?

At the very low end of the strategy (learning) spectrum, games (and puzzles) allow players to create and use ‘strategies’ which are little more than algorithms to be followed. A literal example of this can be found in the solution to the Rubik’s cube, where a prescribed series of steps will always have you arriving at a position of success.

At the other extreme are games where there are potentially as many win states as there are instances of the game being played, or where there is no win state at all. Heavily narrative-based games where the desired outcome is to share a satisfying story-telling experience rather than ‘achieve’ some specific goal, probably fall into this category.

There will so much emergent complexity in terms of what the players will do, and the outcomes of those actions, that it would be extremely difficult for a facilitator (or anyone else) to frame the experience to match a set of desired pre-decided learning outcomes around strategic decision-making or strategic implementation or whatever.

It is not that these behaviours will not have taken place in the game; they very well may have done. It is just that because of the total freedom given to players, they may not ‘teach the lessons’ the outcomes demand.

In between these two extremes is a very wide range of game experiences which can be used to create learning experiences around strategic thinking, and strategic planning and implementation.

What kind of learning do you need?

In an organisational learning setting, ‘Strategy’ learning often comes in one of two flavours. It is either in response to a known strategic challenge (Marketing Strategy, Supply Chain vs Climate Change), where the learning intervention will be more about ideating and innovating strategies to meet that challenge, or it is about capability building, exposing learners to various stimuli to build competence in ‘strategic thinking skills’, for example.

Sometimes, it is not clear which of the above is being attempted, and often learning programmes attempt to do both simultaneously, but it is important to be clear about which of these is the dominant theme of the learning, when selecting a games-based learning route, because it will heavily inform what games are chosen / created.

In the former case, it is often necessary that the game experience should be strongly thematically (and/or mechanically) linked to the desired outcome. If you want players to reach conclusions about the comparative merits of different climate change mitigation measures, they need to get the opportunity to play with different options and to experience the outcomes of these.

Half Earth Socialism is a free-to-play single-player game.

Experiences to support strategic ideation

Simulations are a strong choice for games which look at Strategy in a specific context. However, there are other options, and depending on the context, the theme does not need to be as ‘fitting’ in all cases.

The challenge with simulations is that if you want a simulation which is as close as possible to your situation, it is generally going to mean a custom build, which is an expensive option, unless you are able to reuse the experience very widely.

If you are able to tolerate some level of ‘slack’ e.g. my organisation is in passenger transport, but I am happy to use a simulation about retail toy sales, because ‘customers are customers’, then that opens up your options.

You can even use ‘off the shelf’ game experiences, if you are satisfied that they will allow the testing of sufficiently relevant strategic ‘experiments’. This is what I meant above when I mentioned ‘mechanically’ linked. For example, if your strategic challenge is around ‘resource management’ – as they very often are, there is a rich seam of resource management games, which do not necessarily have to thematically / narratively themed match your challenge.

Terraforming Mars is a game which has considerable promise for strategic ideation and innovation learning (it has a LOT of different strategic decisions you can make, increasing the likelihood it will gel with your specific desired outcome), but also in ‘general’ strategic thinking learning, without requiring your organisation to be in the business of terraforming planets.

Terraforming Mars is available on Amazon

Finally, there are experiences of ‘play’ which do not necessarily count as ‘games’ at all. Lego® Serious Play®, at the higher application levels (for which you will need a certified facilitator, who has been trained in these), is specifically designed to ideate strategies and to ‘stress test’ how they will perform in the presence of systemic influences such as external factors or organisational structures.

Skills-building games

When your learning requirement is more ‘general’, i.e you want your learners to have applicable ‘strategic thinking’ skills, which will be used in different applications throught their careers, it is much less important that you have thematic, or mechanical, congruence with your organisational setting. As mentioned previously, nearly all games require you to apply ‘strategy’ to reach a win-state. What is most important in this ‘general’ learning is that you select / create games with a similar level of complexity (in decisions to be made) and breadth of outcomes, as the setting you are training for (this also applies to the above, in addition to the thematic requirements).

To explain this further, typical learning outcomes for ‘Strategic Thinking’ or ‘Strategic Planning’ programmes include:

• Planning under uncertainty
• Strategy in a VUCA world
• Analysing Risks and Opportunities
• Decision-making with limited information
• Gathering and using data
• Etc.

If you were selecting /creating a game to support these outcomes, it would need to include uncertainty, unforeseeable events that will potentially mess up your planning, both risks and opportunities, and the need to evaluate these to inform decision-making, some way of gathering data, and some urgency in making decisions that will prevent you from waiting until you are fully informed.

It would not really matter if this game was set in Industrial Revolution era Birmingham or 25^th century Mars. The presence, or not, of dinosaurs, or magic, or sentient machines, would make no difference (other than potentially adding some fun and excitement).

Brass: Birmingham is available on Amazon

Recommended skill-building experiences

There are game experiences which are specifically designed to meet these kinds of outcomes. One I have been involved in facilitating recently, and can highly recommend is Evivve the Leadership Game, an online experience where a team of players have to work together to evolve to live in a heavily damaged Earth – the alternative is perishing – so about as high stakes as strategic decision-making can get.

The advantage of plumping for a specialist learning game such as Evivve, is that you often (and this is the case with Evivve), get access to qualified facilitators too – or if you are a facilitator, you can get some excellent facilitation training, benefitting from the experience of all those who have gone before.

However, the off-the-shelf route is also available here, and the best advice I can give in selecting a game, is to play, as often as you can, to get a feel for what a game can do in your learning setting.

Of course, the proof of any strategy can only be found in the results of its implementation. What ALL games that qualify as being ‘good’ for learning around strategy require, is that there is scope for learners to exercise autonomy in decision-making and that they will receive useful and timely feedback from the game, which they can feed into further decision-making and evaluation of the strategy they are employing.

Although ‘Luck’ can play a part in such games – the VUCA outcome more or less requires that – a too heavy reliance on luck as a play mechanic, will usually render a game less useful for learning purposes, because there should be some reasonable correlation between ‘skill’ in strategic decision-making and the success of outcomes, so as not to make players too frustrated, and to demonstrate the benefits of good practice.

Keep it fresh with new experiences

It is also interesting to note that repeated play of even complex experiences, will tend to slide those experiences down towards the lower ‘algorithmic’ end of the experience spectrum, as the ‘moves’ to win become better known and practised. To return to the Rubik’s Cube, at some point, someone had to start the process of finding out how to solve the Cube, without a guide on how to do that. If the Strategic Goal was a solved cube, then various strategies can be envisaged – one face at a time, all corners correct and then match faces, etc., eventually, trying all these will have resulted in the best (possibly only, for all I know) strategy being recognised, solve one face, then top two rows, then bottom cross etc.. Different tactics (sequences of moves) are tried to achieve the strategy and eventually a set of operational steps is all that is required to make the thing work – every time.

This is a pretty good analogue of the way Strategic decision-making filters down, via Tactical decision-making to Operational tasks – the algorithms which get the strategy implemented. And by the time that all becomes well-worn BAU, it’s time for a new strategy. Time to pick a new game.

As a certified facilitator in both methodologies, I can create and run strategy learning experiences using Lego® Serious Play® or Evivve, The Leadership Game. I’m also happy to build a programme around an off-the-shelf game, or indeed create a custom game / learning programme for your needs. Get in touch at sarah@ludogogy.co.uk

The post What Makes a Good Strategic Game? first appeared on Ludogogy.

Actionable Gamification by Yu-kai Chou is available from Amazon

In RPG game worlds, success and progress are usually measured in two ways – money and other ‘stuff’ and, more importantly, experience. Unlike real life, ‘experience’ is mostly a quantitative not qualitative measure, and is at the heart of the game dynamic. Through ‘experience’ you gain status and capability. Experience points allow you to level up, which often comes with new titles reflecting your game reputation. Additionally, levelling up increases your competence. As (usually) a magic user, this meant that my character would have more (and more powerful) spells, with each new level.

Numbers which drive narrative

So, ‘Level’ is one part of how a character can be described. There are many others, including race (human, elf, halfling etc.) and class (fighter, mage, cleric etc.). Another main quantitative part of a character is their ‘stats’ – numeric measures of characteristics such as Strength or Wisdom – which also usually improve with level, and which work within the game to inform how well a character will perform in situations which require them to use that characteristic, for example, trying to pick a lock in the game, would require a test of one’s Dexterity.

Picking a lock is an ability or skill, and another numeric measure applied to characters is their level of skill. In some games you can list very specific skills (e.g. Archery), which can be improved by experience or training, and in any given situation, can be ‘modified’ up or down by one’s stats.

Outside of characters, other beings and even objects also have numeric measures – stats, modifiers and so on. Effectively, within a game, these are mechanisms which resolve narrative. There are lots of calculations in, a game of, say Dungeons and Dragons, (which is often a criticism levelled against these kinds of games), but they are only there to decide what happens, narratively, in a given game situation.

RPGs for Learning Games

I have returned to this idea, of real-life RPGs, in earnest, more recently, for designing learning games in organisational settings. In the meantime, RPGs themselves have moved on, and there are many games now which are much more qualitative in nature, which do not contain the ideas of levels, or stats or experience at all. But that is the topic of another article. In this one, I shall concentrate on those links that I see between the quantitative measures in more traditional RPGs and what has come to be known as the ‘Quantified Self’.

Yu-kai Chou suggested that these features of RPGs could be usefully applied to your real life in four steps (later refined to six).

Determine the game you are playing

What do you want to achieve? What are the goals and milestones along the way? In games, I love collecting gold, mainly because of the cool magic artifacts I can get with it, but in life, money is not a key motivator for me. Make sure that your goal is congruent with your values and that you are motivated to move towards it, or you will not enjoy your game of life, or you may achieve something you do not truly want. You might express the game as the industry you want to work in.

Determine your role in the game

..by understanding your stats and style. In your ‘Initial Stats’ you should explore what you are good at. This is a non-trivial step and may take lots of time to get right. Maybe you could enlist the help of friends, colleagues or even a coach. What you want to do is to find a role that you could play that would see you ‘winning’ at the game you identified in step one. The Initial Stats are different from Skills (comes later). Maybe you could view them more as ‘talents’ – “I’m good at making new connections with people”, “I’m very spatially aware” etc. You may already have decided your role “I want to be a learning designer”, but you also might find that when you have established your initial stats, that you revisit this role too.

Plan out a character skills growth road map

Yu-kai recommends mapping both the skills you have now, and the skills you will need to gain (or develop) in order to achieve the goals you have set for yourself. At what level do you need these? You could (like I did) literally apply numbers to establish the level you already have in these skills and the level you need to have, but that is up to you.

Find Teammates and conquer easy quests together to level up

You can find people who will help you to level up, but don’t forget that it is also important to help others to level up. Your skills levels will help you to see what quests you need to carry out in order to improve your skills to achieve your goals, and they will also help you to see where you have greater skills or more experience than someone else, and can thus help them on their own quest. For, example if you have identified that you need to improve your ‘video editing’ skill, you could attend a course, or you could volunteer to help someone who knows more than you with a video project they have in hand. Watch out for requests for help from your networks and offer mentorship where you can.

If you work through these steps you will have worked out the game you are wanting to play (the field you want to be in and your ultimate goal), your role in achieving that goal and your underlying characteristics that make that goal a good fit for you, a clear picture of the skills you need to achieve, and where you are with those skills currently. You will know who are your allies, who will help you and that you will help along the way and the quests you will need to carry out to ‘win’ at the game you have designed.

Designing your own Game of Life

So how does this gel with ‘Quantified Self’? Well it doesn’t necessarily. Yu-kai never specifically mentioned applying the kind of character design you would see in an RPG, with a sheet listing numeric values for stats. But for me, and maybe for others who see the world similarly to me, it was the next logical step. It gave me a way of assessing where I am in relation to where I want to be, and I thus applied the RPG analogy a little bit more literally than this idea necessarily needs. I give myself actual experience points, and I update my stats and skills as I see fit. When you come to undertake this exercise, how you apply the ideas is entirely up to you. And that is surely the point when designing your own game of life.

In games, goals are very clear. You know exactly what experience points you need to get to the next level, and you have a very good idea of what activities will get you to that milestone. This exercise puts you in a similar situation, with a major life goal.

This has just been a very brief introduction to designing your own game of life, as per the ‘Real-Life RPG’ from Yu-Kai Chou. He has since developed this idea in ‘10,000 Hours of Play’, and I would highly recommend that you get more details straight from the horse’s mouth. In particular, you can join Octalysis Prime to access 100s of hours of videos about this, and other aspects and applications of Octalysis.

You may also want to explore other ‘Self-Gamification’ ideas as developed by Ludogogy author, Victoria Ichizli-Bartels

The post The Game of You – A Real-life RPG first appeared on Ludogogy.

Brian Cant’s Dialectic

For international readers, or those of a fresher vintage than the authors, Brian Cant (no relation of Immanuel) presented a children’s television programme, along with guests including Jeremy irons in his pre-Pentaverate youth.

P-L-A-Y, P-L-A-Y… it made for a good theme song, at least. But when playfulness is confused for childishness, things get tricky, not least in conversations with Human Resources. So we set out to apply Ekvall’s insights in a way which business could make use of. Surely, we thought, that couldn’t be too much to ask.

We Need a Landscape – Call a Constable!

John Constable, preferably – but more about art therapy anon. Our adaptation of Ekvall’s findings set out to identify the key dimensions of what we call Creative Climate, a quality so closely related to Ludogogy’s founder calls Landscape that we’re not going to argue about it. The nature of the landscape and the clemency of the climate do tend to define the success of a day in the Great Outdoors, so it seems fair to identify as kindred spirits. What we soon found was that Creative Climate could be not only measured, but improved – and when the experience of measurement and change is delivered playfully, it works even better. If you’re curious enough to digest the full logic, there’s even a book about it called Creative Climate Change, but we’re not contributing here just to sell more copies so let’s share a summary to get started with.

What Gets Measured Gets Done – but whodunit?

The assumed consensus these days seems to be that ‘gamification’ is good while ‘gaming the system’ is bad – but maybe it’s the same human trait reflected in subtly different ways. We found that some previous attempts to gauge team culture, such as surveys, had been of limited use due to a tendency to tell visiting consultants what the boss wanted to hear. So we anonymised our scoring process, which immediately removed the ‘who said that?’ distraction while also making room for a bit of constructive competition. Our self-scored tool produces a spider’s web diagram and, when compared to that of an ‘ideal’ or high-performing team, leads to the temptation to show ‘em what we’re made of. In practice, gamesmanship thus introduced itself into the Creative Climate Change model without having to be invited – and we anonymised the team self-scoring process to avoid that become too much of a distraction. But the spider’s web usually proved informative, and once those spinnerets got pumping, the fun could really begin.

The Eye Of The Spider

Organisational Development folk sometimes talk about the difference between deficits based and strengths-based models of improvement. In helping teams to make sense of their spider’s web outputs, we found neither extreme useful; one gets people’s backs up while the other leads to excessive back-slapping. What does seem to work well is looking at the dimensions as a recipe rather than a list of ingredients – for a team to be successful, it needs to get the mix right.

All the Right Notes, but not Necessarily in the Right Order…

How playfulness interacts with other dimensions is often very instructive. To take a hypothetical case (because it’s rarely quite this simple), a team which scored high on Playfulness but rock bottom on Idea Time and Idea Support could well be frittering much of its time at the office ping-pong table and very rarely producing anything of real value. Yes, play is desirable in and of itself – but to really get something from it which will benefit the bottom line, a structure of positive habits is required. Fortunately, those habits can all become games too.

Surfacing the Submarine

Good ideas are often lurking just below the surface, and ‘idea liberation’ can be promoted quickly through a combination of freedom, risk-talking and playfulness itself. We know of several techniques to promote that, one of the most well-received being – wait for it – a card deck! As devoted music fans we’ve always been drawn to Brian Eno’s ‘Oblique Strategies’ method – if it’s good enough to unblock creativity for David Bowie why shouldn’t we play too? It works remarkably for teams trying to innovate in bureaucratic or highly formal organisational cultures, where the random element of the deck cuts-through staid group-think, as well as generating a little laughter along the way (which is also great for getting creative juices flowing). “Mechanise something idiosyncratic”, for instance, is guaranteed to raise a chortle or two – and might accidentally distil your USP for wider use.

All Time is Relative – Lunchtime, Doubly So

Idea Time is an important dimension in Ekvall’s concept, and therefore in ours too. Much has been made of structural solutions, from Fed-Ex Days for creative tinkering to Lockheed’s skunk works, but where there isn’t yet C-suite permission for such radical methods it’s still possible to get almost as far – by making a game of it. We backed-up Creative Climate Change with a ‘periodic table’ of change techniques, so there are plenty of games to choose from, but one of the most immersive is the full-on role-play experience of Synectics. It certainly involves ample idea Timer, of necessity, but creating a metaphor for a business problem then riffing on themes surfaced by random (or are they?) stimuli is also a lot of fun – and, often to the surprise of PMOverseers and Prince-wallahs, it usually solves thorny problems a whole lot better than any number of Gantt charts could.

Without Visible Means of Support

Idea Support is a term which we have found has to be used with some care; if it looks like there isn’t enough, it can seem a criticism of the team manager. But it really is not just the boss’s responsibility; supporting the introduction of new ideas is a task for the organisation as a whole, and culture may need to evolve for this to happen meaningfully.

By this point, it might not be entirely surprising to learn that games can be part of the answer. But we’ve saved the best for last. In a workplace culture which views fresh ideas with a scepticism bordering upon phobic, laughter is not just desirable –it’s essential. So when Idea Support runs low, amongst the many responses available is the near legendary game of Reversals. The opening phase of this game is a riot of creativity, inviting as it does suggestions as to how we can completely screw-up the reputation, profitability or actual future of the business. You might accidentally write a new episode of The Thick Of It as a result. The second phase takes all the identified destructive factors and turns them on their heads, generating development options so easy to support that only a complete loser would demur. If you haven’t tried it before, you’ll be amazed at how well it works.

Wanna play?

The post Play with a Purpose first appeared on Ludogogy.

When Song Ha-na says “I PLAY TO WIN!” in Overwatch, this Korean character, could be talking about not only Overwatch but all FPS (First-person Shooter) games. The purpose of the game is to have fun. Despite the trolling, nuisance, and boosting, it’s still fun if the player wins.

In other words, the player needs to win for the game to be fun. For this, s/he must gain victory by crushing or killing others. However, unlike Song Ha-na, who plays only to win, gamers can also take pleasure in any moment of being interested and impressed by the game.

So, what does it mean to say ‘Win’, ‘Victory’, and ‘You Win’?  So, let’s look at two questions “Is it necessary for players to win the game?”, and “Should a ‘winner’ necessarily be better than other players?”.

When we all knew what it meant to ‘win’

When I was young, the purpose of games in arcades or DOS-game was very simple and primitive. The player killed NPCs (Non-Player Characters), or beat the game quicker than other players, or got higher points. There were no community websites, Youtube, or social networks. So, knowing many effective methods of attack were important.

There was a huge difference between “It didn’t work when I did exactly what you said” and “It worked when I did exactly what you said”. Among peers, knowledge of how to play well, conferred status. Knowing more than others meant beating the competition.

In the early 2000s when high-speed internet infrastructure such as ADSL or VDSL was spreading in the region, Korean young people began to show off their game skills and thirst for competition. It was an age of ‘rivalry of warlords’ (Yu-Gi-Oh card reference – Ed). From this time on, players needed to be able to deal with other players via a LAN cable, not with an NPC in the computer. There were only two options – ‘Beat down’ or ‘Be beaten’. It was still clear what needed to be done to win the game.

Simply put, the ‘winner’ is the one who hears ‘GG’ (Good Game) from other players.

The quest to be ‘faster than anyone, and higher than others’, continued. Teenagers who liked games believed this above all else. Just like in the school classroom, the game means competition. They had to win by any means, beat the final boss by any means, and be able to show off “I reached the end-stage with only 10 cents”. Outside the competition in school, they competed in games skills in PC bang (Korean LAN gaming centre) and arcades.

However, nobody felt the competition to be a burden or tried to escape this situation. Even young people who hated competition in school, liked it in games, and really wanted to be Pro-Gamers (professional gamers).

Young people who played the game well started to form groups to decide the best player among them, and, in time, this was broadcast on TV. From then on, young gamers on TV were called Pro-Gamers. However, with this added status came the increased stigma of being beaten in the game. For a Pro-gamer winning each game, and winning in game leagues, became all-important.

The age of rivalry of warlords among Pro-Gamers was not a simple passing trend or a firework that would eventually fizzle out. There is still a similar mood from that heated time. The first generation became parents whose children now dream of becoming Pro-Gamers. So, there is now no quarter given in play between parents and children.

Johnver (Hodler) Wins

However, unlike games from arguably simpler times, recently published games allow gamers to achieve victories in many various ways. New paths to victory other than being ‘better’ than other players emerged. In the past, the single route to victory was clear. Now, there was variety.

The game, ‘PUBG: Battlegrounds’, clearly showed players all over the world that they could win the game without ever engaging in combat. Previously, in FPS games, gamers had previously thought that battle couldn’t be escaped. Now, they realized that ‘Johnver’ (HODL, Holding on for dear life), wins were possible. Doing nothing and staying still in PUBG: Battlegrounds could result in a win. The primary objective of the game is to neutralize others by using guns, but the player can win without firing a single round of ammunition.

In FPS, this concept was quite unfamiliar, but gamers really started to be enthusiastic about it. But wouldn’t FPS gamers in ‘Quake’ or ‘Counter Strike’ think that this kind of play is like being a coward?

In the genre of Battle Royale games in which the player must survive as the last one standing among one hundred people, the traditional rule that the player wins by killing others, is a dominant strategy. So adopting a strategy without combat feels like it is not in the spirit of the game. However, developers intentionally include opportunities to avoid competition from the beginning, clearly indicating that this is a valid strategy to win.

Anybody can do it, but it is not easy. Those choosing this strategy must know the game well and have the capability to make appropriate moves. If the player can watch and read a combat situation well,  and thus weasel out of becoming involved themselves, this kind of play is acceptable.

Battlegrounds’ decision to subvert the FPS genre definitely makes the game very popular. Also, many gamers and streamers deliberately set themselves missions like ‘no shooting’ or ‘no item farming’, which makes people keen to watch whether they can achieve it. When ninety-nine people aim a gun at each other, but the eventual winner has prevailed by intentionally weaseling out – many gamers are crazy about it. There is another meaning of ‘Victory’.

What if it’s better to lose?

However, not all methods of winning a game are acceptable. Badly designed games can lead to gameplay experiences and opportunities which are very different from the original intention. Gamers are very clever. If the balance between ‘do nothing’ and ‘intentional escaping’ is broken, this can lead to strategies which are actually just abuse.

‘Abuse’ in games means to repeatedly exploit faulty features. Gamers can maliciously and intentionally be beaten by using features of the game that do not work as intended.

In Mercenaries of Hearthstone, the main game mechanic was ‘combat’ by a one-to-one card game, so it should have been that the only way to ‘win’ was to prevail in this competition.

However, there can be unintended consequences of the way a game is designed, leading gamers to choose to ‘lose’ rather than win. In this game the more losses there were, the more rewards built up for all players. There was also the option to ‘surrender’ in a game. Players were able to choose to lose (by surrendering) as a way of ‘grinding’ for rewards.

’Surrender Run’ only for rewards. If the purpose of the game changes into ‘grinding for rewards’, the game goes in an unexpected direction which is against the intention of developers. Designers need to be aware of the potential for unintended consequences.

Therefore, the purpose of the game becomes to click ‘Surrender’ first to gain greater rewards?’. There is little fun in this kind of victory. If the other player simultaneously quits at the start of the game, the gamer can achieve ‘Victory’, but all related aspects of gameplay are omitted. This is pretty much exactly the opposite of what was intended for the gameplay experience of Hearthstone. If rewards incentivize but there is no penalty for surrendering, or otherwise acting against the spirit of the game, this will become a widespread gameplay decision.

Sure, it was quickly fixed. But this clearly shows how a game can be played against the intention of developers was changed. Gamers choose ‘lose’ without hesitation if it is beneficial to them.

To win, the player must be beaten first

After playing ‘World of Warcraft’ for a long time, one thing I realized is that many attempts are needed to win a Boss Battle.

Victory in World of Warcraft, unlike Battlegrounds or Hearthstone, includes mid to long-term play. Victory in MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) includes a sort of journey, incorporating grwth and ongoing challenge, rather than a ‘single throw of the dice’. Games such as FPS, Battle Royale, or Trading Card Games can be a single bet, but the flow in MMORPGs is long. So, the feeling of achieving victory is different from that in other games. In fact, sometimes there is no win or lose at all.

When I (as a Raid Leader) tried to kill the boss for over nine hours every day for several weeks, I often thought ‘What am I doing now?’. If I narrowly missed the win because of the mistakes of others, there would often be feelings of resentment and might be misanthropy hating and doubting my teammates.

The road to victory is a long and difficult one. Frustration and losing can continue for ages without getting anything. So, in Raid or Dungeon play in which many gamers have to cooperate, strategizing about the number of participants and what approaches to use is more important than achieving the win.

This sort of situation doesn’t just happen in online games. In games like Dark Soul, the player will make many attempts. Gamers are not disappointed at the failure of catching the boss overmany attempts. Rather, they enjoy repeatedly realizing ‘YOU DIED’. They will be disappointed if the boss is beaten by just one attempt feeling the game is too easy. The purpose of the game is to win, but gamers don’t want to achieve that too easily.

Disappointment and frustration are part of what make the eventual victory so much sweeter. Simply winning for gamers is not actually as important as how the process of getting there feels. Would others go crazy over my gameplay screen? Could my gameplay be presented at my funeral, to show what a super excellent player I was in life? These are what is important.

Game developers and gamers do not want wishy-washy victory. The victory only has this kind of lasting meaning because it was preceded by so much frustration, desperation, and failure.

However, somebody will win and somebody will lose in the game. The purpose of the game is to perform the activities described by the pre-defined rules to arrive at ‘who is better’ (on that occasion), and have fun doing it. So, if you have that fun, winning or losing becomes meaningless. It is not as if only the first winner can be remembered.

Not everyone can be a winner, but people don’t need to be disappointed. We don’t all need to pursue the pre-determined victory. The process is more important than winning. Sometimes, there are more impactful experiences and fun in losing rather than winning. ‘Winning’ is sort of a milestone rather than an endpoint.

Gamers in bronze or silver tiers and newbies are more accustomed to losing than winning. However, they are often more enthusiastic than other gamers in a higher tier. By approaching the required tasks step-by-step, they enjoy the process of enhancing their skills. If the continued practice of trying and staying motivated carries on, victory will eventually naturally follow.

For gamers, the meaning of ‘Makpan’ (at the last moment) is

1. Just barely exchanging the win and loss between two teams
2. ‘Hanta’ (team fighting) in unexpected ways
3. Reversal afterwards
4. Getting the attention of my gameplay
5. Winning the game

The ‘win’ is almost like this process.

Human vs AI

In the Baduk (Go) between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol 9^th dan, what people remember is that eventually the Human beat the AI (Artificial Intelligence)’. However, Lee Sedol 9^th dan said that “In the opposite way, I am the first one who lost Baduk to an AI”. As a result, Lee Sedol 9^th dan won only one game over AlphaGo. Overall, he lost the match with AlphaGo by four-to-one games. Lee Sedol 9^th dan decided to retire because of this loss.

The reason why Lee Sedol 9^th dan eventually won over AlphaGo is that he experienced many defeats. Through this experience, he learned how to win.

Many people remember the win in the 4^th game, rather than the loss of Lee Sedol 9^th dan. Despite the overall defeat, many people think that he beat the AlphaGo because of this single win. This one win retains the valuable meaning, ‘human victory’. Although he lost to the AlphaGo, his one win is what will be remembered.

Losing is quite hard to accept, but everybody knows that victory is also hard to obtain. Many people live today for their own win or victory. The most important thing in games or life is the process to arrive at the destination. In continuous losing or failures, we achieve more than a simple ‘Win’.

It’s like a joke, but there must be a loser for there to be a winner. No losing, no win. Failure is just a stepping stone to success. So always remember – my victory is not more valuable than yours, just as yours is no more valuable than mine.

The post I PLAY TO WIN! first appeared on Ludogogy.

De La Cruz, Pablo; Bello Baltazar, Eduardo; García-Barrios, Luis; Baquero Vargas, María Paula; Acosta, Luis Eduardo; Estrada Lugo, Erín.

In 2015 we carried out an experimental ethnography using a board game in a participatory research in Tarapacá in the Colombian Amazon. One of the objectives of this project was to increase dietary autonomy and promote traditional knowledge associated with biodiversity of indigenous peoples.  In 2012, indigenous organizations of the township of Tarapacá and the Sinchi Amazonian Institute of Scientific Research agreed to support members of Tikuna, Uitoto, Cocama, Bora, and Inga indigenous peoples by helping to develop a local market in which they could sell their traditional products.

Our initial hypothesis was that the main reason that indigenous peoples sell few products from their chagras was that in Tarapacá there is no local marketplace. Rather, they generally sell on the street or to intermediaries at very low prices. With the board game, new variables of analysis emerged, such as intra-community redistribution, sufficiency, and seasonality of planting and harvesting, which transformed the initial hypothesis and explain the low level of sales of chagra products by indigenous peoples and the lack of a permanent marketplace (De La Cruz, 2015, 29; Eloy & Le Tourneau, 2009, 218; Eloy, 2008, 17; Fontaine 2002, 177; Peña-Venegas et. al. 2009, 84; Yagüe 2013, 31).

The idea of carrying out an experimental ethnography using a board game as part of participatory research was a response to criticism by the indigenous peoples, that research results often do not have a significant positive impact on their territories.  They commented that “scientific” methodologies typically do little to resolve the problems that they identify, and that research results remain limited to production of academic documents.  This is partly due to the fact that methodologies used in encounters between indigenous peoples and government functionaries are generally meetings in which “people just speak” and non-verbal communication is rarely explored.

We understand experimental ethnography as:

1. A combination of qualitative methods (stories) with quantitative methods (numbers) to achieve experiments that create an effective “black box” test of cause and effect and an understanding of how those effects occurred inside the black box.
2. As a research practice that involves embedded, embodied, sensorial, empathetic learning – through sensorial means such as games – that transcends a simple combination of participation and observation (Magnat 2016, 219).

For us, the key to experimental ethnographies through board games is the ability of such games to represent the decisions of the actors and catalyse cultural performances which make evident the players’ meaningful contexts.  An ethnography communicates an experience which occurred during fieldwork, presenting in legible terms the lessons learned through research.  The experimental ethnography involves trigger presentation of stimuli during fieldwork with the objective of providing a strategic trigger consisting of multiple tactical procedures, ranging from “passive” observation to directly provoking the subjects.  Methodologically, experimental ethnographies recognize that data both exists prior to the study and emerges through interactions occurring during the research process (Castañeda 2006, 82).

Experimental ethnographies embed the subjects (e.g. players, as well as game creators and testers) in performances in which they must make choices according to the paths they wish to follow and the specific set of meanings they wish to project. These choices are the scripts that either precede the performance and are (more or less) revealed by them, or that take form beforehand and are textually reconstructed post-hoc (Alexander 2009, 29).  A game allows for constructing analysis based on the meanings that the players give to their own performances as well as to those of others.  The purpose of the game is to generate subjective meaning in players which allows for convincing performances (Alexander 2009, 36), and to alter the value of what is at stake (McKee 1997, 62).  To reach this point, the structure of the game should bring together and simplify the scripts upon which the plot is constructed.  The players should reach crossroads at which they must make decisions based on values that they may express as moral binaries (e.g. I like this or don’t like it; I´ll plant or not plant).  If the performance is energetically and skillfully manifested in moral binaries through metaphors which catalyse psychological identification, the players´ understanding of daily life can be applied through drama to the particular situation being represented (Alexander 2009, 37).

The objective of the Game of Chagras[2] is to harvest, process, and sell agricultural products. This game represents some decisions of Amazonian indigenous peoples involved in planting, harvesting, processing, barter, and sale of the products of their chagras.  Actions of cultivating and food processing are carried out on the game board of each player, and those regarding sales are carried out individually on a single collective game board, where purchase-sale prices are modified as the products are offered by each player in the various sales points. The three possible sales points – store, doorstep, and fair – have different stipulations with respect to type of product and quantity which may be sold.

The Game of Chagras allowed participants to compare and contrast different types of game strategies, and comprehending the pertinence of games in both experimental and participatory research methods. Players made decisions based on meaningful contexts that arise from the personal experience of playing the game. In the game, any player could harvest his or her entire chagra by spending 2 UE; thus, the energetic cost was the same regardless of the quantity harvested.  Similarly, all players could sell some or all of their harvest by spending 2 UE.  Nonetheless, some players did not harvest their entire chagra; rather they left some plants of up to three different species (of the five permitted in the game) unharvested; similarly, some decided not to sell all their harvested produce.

We – as game moderator – initially thought that we failed to make it clear that each player could harvest everything in one turn and sell it all in another.  As the game advanced, the moderator often reiterated this possibility, but the actions of many players suggested that they felt that not all should be harvested in a single turn, nor all sold in a single turn.  If the game did not place any limit in UE on harvesting their entire crop and selling all products, what was establishing that limit? Analysis of dialogues during and after game sessions elucidated that seasonality of planting and harvesting different species, and the idea of sufficiency is closely related with chagra management.  Despite the fact that the game allows for a broad range of liberty in the timing of planting and harvesting and quantity of plants planted, players simulated the real-life seasonality and quantities of chagra species planted.  The results of the game also coincide with the fact that when a grower destines the majority for sale, crop diversity tends to diminish.

Reviewing players´ game strategies and commentaries led us to modify the initial hypothesis that due to the lack of a set market, local peasants sell few of their chagra products.  The new hypothesis took into account the ecological particularities of the chagra system and the social relations within which food is produced. Through conversations during and after the game sessions, some variables of chagra management became evident, such as work exchanges through mingas; seasonality of planting, harvesting, and weeding; and the way in which these variables influence local sale and barter of products. When the results of all game sessions had been analysed, they were presented in a meeting with some indigenous leaders.

The game sessions produce performances that lead the participants to compare their daily life situations with the simplified model presented by the game. The Game of Chagras resulted in meaningful interactions which help to understand the dynamics of sale and barter of agricultural products within Tarapacá.  The players´ subjective meanings pointed out aspects of local commerce of chagra products that some players felt were not adequately represented.  The experimental nature of the game lay not only in the possibility of repeating controlled sessions, but also in allowing players to suggest changes to the game rules.

The researchers neither assumed that the categories of analysis that emerged existed previously nor that they were new, but rather that they are cultural performances based on the game sessions. The game did not precisely reflect how the actors make decisions, nor did it create situations totally foreign to the participants.  Rather, its value was to catalyse performances that allowed for better understanding a particular phenomenon. The intention of visualizing their daily actions through a game is to induce the players to view their life precisely in a “non-daily” manner. That is, the game as metaphor for reality seeks that such denaturalization of daily life allows the players to enter a space of simulation and experience themselves as performers. Thus, the game metaphorized their experience and diluted some borders between reality and the game, such that narratives were constructed which were abstracted from their daily experience to later be recovered and presented as objectively real phenomena in daily life (Berger and Luckmann 1976, 61).

Rather than an experiment that “controls” and “isolates” variables to analyse decisions, the game is a lived experience – a plot with its texts, scripts, and performances.  It is a performance space, with a juncture, some turning points, and a dialectic that spurs interest, curiosity, and revelations in the players.  The performance is what happens, whether mute or audible, consisting of gestures, laughs, commentaries, and distractions; it is all part of the scene. For anthropology, it is worth elaborating on experimental ethnographies in terms of the lived experience, which occurs upon recreating a real-life situation and experiencing it in conditions that do not place the players´ existence at risk.  This lived experience is essential to establishing the game as an experiential situation in which the players play the game and “play within the play”[3].

The post Board games for participatory research first appeared on Ludogogy.