Ideas
Making a small, vibrant city through gamification
A blend of gamification and city branding can be one approach to giving small cities more energy and appeal to tourists – to compete with larger cities. […]
Sustainability
design process
Co-creative Experiences – Serious Games for Spatial Planning
It worked better than expected and was the seed that inspired my new adventures, including a workshop using more games to discuss environmental sustainability. […]
learning topics
Utopoly – Game and Utopian Research Method
acing catastrophes of pandemics, ecosystem collapse and climate change.Utopoly started out as a ‘hack’ of Monopoly but has evolved to become much more. […]
Ideas
Gamifying Social Action Towards Thriving Cities.
Applying game-design elements to real-world scenarios can increase community engagement by responding to some of our most basic social instincts […]
Ideas
Three Scenarios of a Future World
Our current volatile reality provides us with opportunities to build a new, better future. Three possible future scenarios are presented here. […]
learning topics
Board games to engage in systems thinking
Systems thinking is one of the competencies that enable us to understand the complexity of global and networked structures and their outcomes. The interconnectivity between countries, companies, and people creates a net of relationships that […]
learning topics
‘Play it before you live it’
– the case for alternate reality games and narrative-making play Most games don’t pretend to be real. As a player you sit around a table holding cards or moving pieces, or stare at a screen […]
how to
#Play4Sustainability: Engaging employees in sustainability through play
Sustainability is an aspect of business that is perceived by employees as complex, confusing and time consuming. A topic that is still too often ‘siloed’, leaving employees disengaged and lacking interest to understand the full […]
learning topics
Legacy Games and Tipping Points
One of the much-vaunted advantages of using games to facilitate learning is the idea of the ‘safe environment’. The premise is, that players and teams can experiment with taking actions, and, because there are no […]
design process
Octalysis Analysis of a Sustainability Learning Programme
When I first discovered Yu-kai Chou’s Octalysis framework, shortly after he published ‘Actionable Gamification’, I knew straight away that I would find it an invaluable tool, not just to help me design learning with learner […]
learning topics
Enhancing Biophilia for Sustainability Learning
Edward O Wilson popularised the term Biophilia a hypothesis that humans innately possess “…the urge to affiliate with other forms of life”. […]
Ideas
Natural & organisational ecosystems
A design challenge I have frequently tackled over the past few years has been to create games which relate to the functioning of ecosystems. This is not perhaps surprising as I have been delivering learning […]
design process
Imagining a Better World: Game Design with and for Teens
As long-time youth program developers, several years ago we became curious about game design, inspired in part by Doris Rusch’s work on deep games.[1] In Making Deep Games and her TEDx Talk[2], Rusch describes how […]
learning topics
Climate Change-Catalyzed Simulations in the Anthropocene – Going Back to the Future with Jurassic Park?
Water stress, searing heat, refugees, displacement, geopolitical uncertainty. In talking to innovative colleagues in the serious games space in The Hague this past week, the wargaming of the future is complex, and multidimensional—and climate change […]
learning topics
Transferable skills learning through games
In any face-to-face learning situation, the facilitator has to consider that they may face dissent from the learners. I used to like to believe that as someone who works with adults, that I wouldn’t have […]