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

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

A small city is not a destination for tourists

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

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

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

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

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

Merging gamification with city branding

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Online, Content, Experience value

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I´ve worked some years as an urban planning advisor for the Municipality of Leiria. In the beginning, it was very exciting because I believed we could deliver better results if citizens could participate in the ongoing decision-making processes. But, as time went by, this was not possible to achieve in practice. Some gatherings were not attended at all, while others ended in violent discussions with no concrete outcomes whatsoever. These results were very disturbing and demotivating for all.

Inspiration from Commercial Games

After leaving the job as an urban planning advisor, I went back to the university (University of Coimbra) to do a PhD in spatial planning. My thesis is about serious games. Since 2017 games are my work, either in analogue game design or serious game approaches. I came to think that games are the tools to deliver collaborative planning experiences. I believed it could be done because planning experiences are what many entertainment games provide. It should be possible to apply it to spatial planning. Pandemic, Magic Maze, The Mind and many other modern board games have inspired me. My mind was blown away after meeting Ekim Tan, Juval Portugali, and experiencing a game from the colleagues of Nova University in 2019. Games could implement the communicative rationality principles from Jürgen Habermas. We could engage participants, allowing them to express their claims and negotiate solutions while learning during the process. Would games like Suburbia and Between Two Cities be useful?  

Analogue games (board, card, dice and so on) are special. These games lack automatization, which in turn leads to higher player agency. The game systems are more transparent, being more adaptable. Learning from modern board game designs is useful to understand how to build games that simulate complex realities while being engaging. Eurogames build strong game economies, and American games (known as “Ameritrash”) explore narratives in meaningful ways. Learning from these two design trends help develop serious games, adapting to the necessary goals and targetting players.

The Outcomes the Games must Achieve

But developing games is not easy, and serious games are no exception. Serious games must be engaging and achieve objectives beyond fun. In the case of collaborative planning, the games should incentivize participation while delivering meaningful collective decisions. Players should freely participate, express themselves, learn, negotiate, and assume the game results as their own. If well done, plans can emerge and represent tangible decisions about what to do in a territory. The uncertainty and agency games generate fits in the urban complexity approach. Multiple agents plan and interact, having different power, resources, and knowledge. They can plan and shape a territory, individual or collectively. I tested my first game in 2019. Play happened during a class about regional and urban planning at Polytechnic of Leiria. The experience generated a paper about how to combine game components and mechanisms to deliver a playable experience over a Google map. This experience also explored design thinking processes. The game incentivized students to explore the territory and define solutions for the issues at stake. In this case, the goal was to support traditional commerce in the city centre. Decision-making was collaborative, emerging from the game rules and mechanisms.

Collaborative Planning in Games

Collaborative planning demands many skills from participants. Games require many of the same skills. This skills approach was tested in another experience at the city of Coimbra. This time the process was different, following game modding. It departed from two similar previous tests. In the first, transport games helped engineering students dealing with transport networks. In the second, MBA students played a modified version of Steam to define optimal shortest paths. At Coimbra, players participated in a meeting to define a common goal agenda for the academic culture and sports activities. I challenged them to play a sequence of games, aiming to identify the requisites that would help them collaborate more in the future. Games like Team3, Magic Maze, Telestrations engaged participants in identifying key concepts, such as communication, trust, shared power and knowledge to ideate collective projects.

Unexpected Consequences of Using Games for Learning

But simply using games is not a magic solution. During the experiences, it was evident that teaching the games and supporting doubts during gameplay is mandatory. Modern board games are not known to the masses. The questionnaires for each session showed that 10% or less of the participants knew any of these games. Sometimes more than 90% of the participants had never heard of Catan, Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, Azul, Codenames, or other popular modern games. Even when players understood how to play the games, the results were often not what the game facilitator expected. During a game about network planning, the players deliberately created their network not to be efficient but to block other players, just for fun. This unexpected result is a problem. Without debriefing that clarifies the purposes of the games and how players approached the games, playing can have opposite effects from what was desired. This need to deal with uncertainty and establish an interactive and collective learning flow is why debriefing and complementing the game activities is essential to build serious games. Behaviour analysis and addressing other topics related to the issues at stake is necessary.

The Challenges of Serious Games Design and Facilitation

Using games is challenging. Adopting and building a framework to use games beyond entertainment successfully is not easy. We can transform entertainment games into serious games or create them from scratch. In each case, mastering game design is necessary. Although this might seem obvious, in practice, this might not occur. There are examples of serious games and gamification developed without this game design expertise background. Who’s to blame? Despite games being as old as civilization itself, learning about serious game design is not easily accessible. Some books exist, but they are not enough, considering the challenge at stake. And most of the available literature aims directly at digital games. All games share some design traits, independently of the platform. Therefore, authors like Tracy Fullerton, Brenda Brathwaite, Lewis Pulsipher, Ethan Ham, and others recommend going analogue. Even for videogame development, learning how to prototype with tabletop games is useful. Of course, there are differences, and each platform fits better in some contexts than others. In my case, analogue games are perfect for fostering collaboration experiences. When participants agree to play a face-to-face game together, collaboration happens naturally.

Getting Inputs from Non-players

There are many forms of collaboration happening in games. But can the game foster collaboration even when people are not playing it? Inviting stakeholders to a collaborative planning game does not lead to effective participation. No one can guarantee that participants will attend and be engaged. Prejudices about games are real. And some individuals require seeing an activity and understanding it fully before participating. So, we cannot force people to play serious games. But we should not waste valuable inputs from those not playing either. This balance is not easy in practice. However, analogue games provide some solutions. Playing physical games with pieces and components, where we can see people interacting, is like a performance. If the dynamic is watchable, it can be engaging, depending on the game played. A recently published paper addressed this phenomenon. During a conference about transport sustainability, I invited the audience to play a fast game (less than 30 minutes).

Real Play must be Voluntary

Attendants could come to the stage to play the game. The game challenged them to define the local transport system by laying coloured strings over a map. The available strings represented different modes of transport . This dynamic and game set-up did not force the attendants to participate. Those more timid or suspicious were incentivized to watch first before participating. They could comment and suggest what to do, influencing the actual players. Planning experts and elected officials were the most engaged in participating in the game without playing directly. By doing this, attendants participated in the game. Collaboration happened without requiring all attendants to play directly. The analogue nature of this game allowed to adapt the game in real-time to the number of players available to play. Currently, I am working on another fascinating serious game to address urban security. In Urbsecurity (Urbact), I have been developing a methodology where the participants, through a gamified process, helped me in co-creating a game that is a decision-making tool. Although not yet finished, some positive results were achieved for this method when applied in cities like Leiria, Coimbra, and Viana do Castelo (Portugal).

Games are a Surprising Experience to New Players

What surprised me the most in these last few years was the game’s potential to be applicable for almost everything, even online. And modern board games have this potential also. Consumers are still massively unaware of these games. This one is the reason why they can be so impactful. People are not expecting the kind of experiences new games provide. When we invite casual players to play a cooperative game like Pandemic, they are usually astonished. Adults are used to considering games as childish activities, especially board games. They ignore that there are many different games. Most people never consider that their personality and personal preferences define what type of games they enjoy. Games are not all the same. Understanding player profiles is a key factor for the success of games.

It might seem surprising, but I also deal with game-based learning and serious games for health. In projects like Gym2beKind, health students learn how to use and develop serious games to develop soft skills and specific therapeutics and healthcare. Along my journey, games helped me support brainstorming sessions also.

Games provide us means to enter the magic circle, and we can do it collectively, having fun and achieving serious goals simultaneously. I could not be happier when dealing with games and sharing game-based approaches. It feels like magic come true!

This article summarises a study carried out by Micael Sousa et al. You can read the full paper Fast Serious Analogue Games in Planning: The Role of Non-Player Participants in Simulation & Gaming, Sage Journals

The post Co-creative Experiences – Serious Games for Spatial Planning 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.

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

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

Cities matter a lot. Here’s why

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People are at the center of urban life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gamifying social action towards thriving cities

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

Turning urban visions into clear goals and actionable steps

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

Mobilize

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

Mindset

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

57 x 124

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

Final Thoughts

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

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

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

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

These scenarios are an excerpt from Joana’s upcoming “choose-your-own-adventure” strategy and foresight book – working title “Choose Your Own Future”. The book is a gamified way to approach the Future vs standard business books. For more information go to https://www.futures-forward.com/chooseyourownfuture where you can find a video that explains the book idea.]

In times of crisis and uncertainty, our initial instinctive response is to stick to what we know. However, our current volatile reality provides us with the unique opportunity to build a new, better future.

Three possible future scenarios that may emerge are presented, with the direction of travel based on decisions taken today.

In times of crisis such as the one we are currently living through; our ingrained responses are to fight to preserve and restore our lives to their pre-pandemic status. However, it is now, more than ever, important for us to recognize this as an opportunity to reconsider our priorities, review our old systems, and rebuild our future in new and better ways.

In this article we take a journey into the future through three different worlds that could emerge.

A Brand-New World is prosperous and sustainable, there is global collaboration and people live in harmony with nature as well as technology. Corporates are more sustainable and work in the best interest of all stakeholders.

My Own Personal World is one, where technology facilitates progress and our lives are more convenient but at a cost. It’s a world of failed governments, where companies own all our personal data.

A Hot New World emerges, when we build higher walls and divide our world, instead of collaborating. The effects of the pandemic are long-lasting across all areas of our lives and the health of our planet is neglected.

These scenarios unfold as a result of colliding social, economic, scientific, technological, and environmental developments and the decisions we, as society, must urgently take today. Let’s explore the three scenarios.

A Brand-New World

You wake up and it’s pleasantly chilly, just as you like it, thanks to Sol, your home artificial intelligence (AI), which monitors your body temperature and movements while you sleep, and creates the most pleasant home environment based on your preferences. The blinds go up and Sol has already started brewing the coffee, knowing that you’ve had a late night at the National Health Research Centre. Your health tech company has big news to announce to the public today – a universal respiratory virus vaccine!

The pandemic unlocked investment for research and innovation in healthcare, leading to a massive breakthrough that should save millions of lives. It took years of research and global collaboration between governments, universities, and the private sector to get here but it was worth it. The vaccine eliminates the need for seasonal reimmunization and protects us from different strains of respiratory viruses.

Following the 2020 pandemic, companies focused on sustainability and the adoption of the Economics of Mutuality management model, benefiting not only shareholders but all stakeholders: people, planet, and company. At the beginning, it seemed like a utopian concept but the pandemic proved it to be a sustainable way to do business, enabling your company to live longer and be more profitable. Choosing long-term sustainability over short-term profit was the right decision to make.

There was a societal epiphany moment during the pandemic leading to shifting priorities, with people dedicating more time to family, altruism, and education. A Personal Social Standing (PSS) score was introduced, measuring your contribution to the world’s global sustainable development goals, and rewarding you with access to certain services, entertainment perks, and upgrades to your AI devices.

My Own Personal World

The baby is still sleeping. SecondSkin, the digital patch on your wrist, reminds you it is time to prepare her food as her vitals are showing she will be awake soon. You had the option to bioengineer her DNA. It is now common practice for parents to exercise their recently legalized right to remove genes associated with hereditary disease. Choosing a child’s physical attributes is also possible, if not yet completely legal. There is an ongoing ethical and regulatory debate over whether we should leverage scientific innovations in body and brain engineering and augmentation to fully design a baby’s eye color, intelligence, or physical strength.

The package with the baby’s supplements has arrived, pre-curated for her new developmental phase, with food ingredients, clothes, toys, and vitamins. A subscription service delivers all of these items for the entire family right to your door. You get points added to your overall Personal Social Standing (PSS) score for exercising regularly and eating your personalized diet, built in accordance with your DNA profile.

Governments crumbled during the pandemic, so large companies stepped in. Googlezon now owns the data for your city, as well as its telemedicine platform. You have some rights, of course. You can choose how much you share, but your PSS score is impacted by it. You like to get hyper-personalized services and products, whenever and wherever you need them. However, you sometimes feel trapped in the bubble. If you are feeling more adventurous, you try to confuse the algorithms by making random product choices, just because you want to experiment and try something new.

A Hot New World

It’s been a tough few years since the pandemic. The researchers are still struggling to find a vaccine or a cure. Climate change and shifting weather patterns brought new diseases and stricter control on movement and social contact was needed. Borders were closed and we started living more secluded digital lives. We now long for personal contact but are limited to immediate family and a handful of geo-proximate friends. International travel is almost impossible, so we take virtual vacations. Our main concerns are now cybercriminals and identity theft.

In hindsight, we deployed too many resources searching for a solution to the pandemic health threat, which hit the economy hard. Global trade seized up in favor of higher cost local production and home production of essentials. Those limited by space or ability are relying on government rationed powdered food, which is fortified with essential vitamins and minerals.

With borders closed, illegal immigration from areas of severe drought rose and brought unrest and conflict. Refugee camps and poverty are a common sight these days. However, we did also make some good decisions during the pandemic. Governmental incentives were given to companies and individuals that produce renewable energy. Air pollution was dramatically reduced but global warming continued and we are now adapting to its effects by building houses with less glass and thicker walls. It’s still hot. Very hot.

Conclusion

All of these scenarios are plausible and their realization depends on what decisions we, as society, make now. We could build A Brand New World if we prioritize research investment, sustainable practices, and global collaboration. We could create My Own Personal World, where convenience is key and we advance scientifically and technologically, but our governments fail to protect our privacy and freedom. A Hot New World is a place where poverty, disease, nationalism, and the creeping effects of climate change are taking their toll, because nations failed to recognize the urgency and acted alone rather in collaboration against a global threat.

Will we take the opportunity to build a future in which we are better equipped to face the challenges of the new world? Or will we try to hold on to the past, resisting the change?

The post Three Scenarios of a Future World first appeared on Ludogogy.

Sustainable development is a complex problem encompassing an interrelationship between different domains such as society, environment, and economic agents in different levels (local to global) (Weijs, Bekebrede and Nikolic, 2016). To address the complexity of systems thinking and sustainable development, we designed a board game, Green Economy and developed a game-based learning approach utilizing this game (Gatti Junior, Kim, et al., 2020; Gatti Junior, Lai, et al., 2020). The game design began with a simple prototype (Figure 1) and finished after 10 weeks.

Why a game?

Games are models of systems (Kim and Bastani, 2017) and systems themselves (Fullerton, 2008) which makes game play and game design promising learning tools for complex issues. Playing a game that invites the players to participate in the system itself helps to cultivate systems thinking in diverse age groups and contexts. For example, Goodwin and Franklin (1994) designed a Beer Distribution Board Game for adult learners in management development programs to experience the product distribution system. Castronova and Knowles (2015) also explored how a board game about climate systems can be played by university students to learn about and (hypothetically) participate in climate policy making. More recently, Nordby, Øygardslia, Sverdrup, and Sverdrup (2016) observed the potential of their digital game about ecosystems for elementary students’ experiencing and learning about the system. From the constructivist and situated learning perspective (Lave and Wenger, 1991), games situate knowledge within the modeled system and, therefore, simulate a meaningful context for systems thinking.

Why a board game?

Green Economy encompasses both the gameplay and game design experiences in one experiential game-based learning activity. By incorporating a unique feature that enables players to change the rules during the game play, we invited the players to act as game designers during the game play. Both play and design engages students in systems thinking as they need “to think about how various parts of a system (e.g., different subsystems within a system) or different systems interact with each other” (Gee, 2009, p. 6). The board game as a tool embodies design possibilities based on low-cost resources and can easily be used in formal and informal learning settings without computers, internet access, or other technical devices. Additionally, a board game requires much prior experience for learners to play or design (e.g., coding) and provides an immersive learning experience.

In Green Economy, players are invited to engage in the reasoning of sustainable development. They lead a nation through two distinctive stages. They gather and manage resources (including land and Gold) in the first stage to build facilities that will allow them to evolve as a civilization into the second stage.

The game board is formed with hexagons (Figure 2), and each hexagon represents a land; the cards include resources, chances cards, and rules cards. The game encompasses other elements that represent population, Gold, factories, and army. The first nation that reaches a certain degree of wealth without negative environmental points wins the game.

In the first stage, players must have land, Gold, technology, and mineral to build factories and armies. The Factory is the element of the game that provides Gold for players. In each turn, a player receives for each factory owned 1 Gold and 1 negative environmental point. Yet, the army can move throughout the board one land per turn and only to adjacent land. The players may (but are not required to) build or use armies to protect their own lands and factories, to conquer an available land and/or to attack other players’ land. When players use their army to conquer an empty land, they receive 1 negative environmental point. When they use the army to attack another player, they receive 2 negative environmental points.

To win the game, a player must present 10 Golds, 1 stage two factory, and 0 (zero) environmental points. It means that some decisions in the first stage (the use of the army and build factories) will lead players to deal with a critical burden at the second stage. Thereby, we argue that this game play mechanism helps players (as students) reflect on their decisions and the consequences of their actions for the environment.

The feature introduced in our design that fosters the system thinking in-depth is the rule change cards (Figure 3). These cards introduced learning opportunities in our game anchored in new design possibilities that emerged during the game play. The players often have the chance to transform the result of the game completely as we could observe in one of the tables in playtesting with master students when the group started playing collaboratively to attack a player who would win the game. In this particular game, a joint attack was possible when one of the players, who had a rule change card, allowed players to move their armies more than one land per turn. One of the students shared his observation, and acknowledged,

“Once the rule change cards came into play the objective began to focus on how to extend or manage the play between the entire group. The change of rules began to happen to instigate events in creating game play that would promote a deep group interaction.”

One of the important moments from the learning process using games is the discussions conducted by instructors after the game play. During the debriefing sessions, players learned from the decisions made and their consequences in the game. Similarly in the Beer Distribution Game (Goodwin and Franklin, 1994), players acted in the roles of the factory, distributor, wholesaler, and retailer, aiming to consider cost-effectiveness. After the gameplay, players in different positions drew a graph of the pattern of customer demand. While explaining what happened in the game, most students thought other players’ behaviors had ripple effects on their game performance, but seldom noticed the impact of the larger game structure and how their own behaviors contributed to systems result. After collaboratively reviewing and analyzing how the system worked with videotapes of their gameplay, students were able to interpret with systems perspective (Goodwin and Franklin, 1994). The study by Nordby et al., (2016) similarly encouraged elementary students’ reflective practices of writing diaries on ecosystems based on their gameplay and holding debriefing sessions. In Green Economy, through the reflection on the decision making during the game play, we could see that students were involved in systems thinking recognizing elements and their relationships in the game, as well as organizing those components and the process of the game system. Through the interaction of different game design elements that supported social interaction and the formulation of emerging strategies, it was possible to see how players were engaged in systems thinking emerged in a social gaming experience.

Our research seeks to contribute to a growing wave of game design for educational purposes (serious games) that encompass not only the creation of digital games but also card and board games (Kwok, 2017). Our work contributes to a critical discussion concerning the integration of elements of game design and learning theories for developing a board game that enables educators to enhance player’s systems thinking.

Acknowledgment: The authors acknowledge the work of Liping Liu and Xingru Lai (former master’s students at the University of Calgary) who were part of the game design team.

The post Board games to engage in systems thinking first appeared on Ludogogy.

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 mashing buttons on an oddly shaped controller – actions that are different from what’s going on in the game narrative. If the game represents reality at all, it’s some remarkably small subset of reality, and there are layers of abstraction between you and that sliver of a world. Playing Settlers of Catan could never be confused with the actual experience of colonizing an island.

And yet: many games do carry a layer of verisimilitude. Even chess, a game in which the abstraction layers are about half a mile thick, can echo the emotional struggles of waging war. A person playing (losing) at chess can still feel emotions about it (crushing pain) half a century later – a ludic echo of PTSD? (Don’t ask me how I know this.)

So a game about X is barely like the real X, nevertheless it can still be evocative of the experience of real X in meaningful ways. That’s the allure of serious games. But what if playing a game about X was actually a lot like living the real X? And still be a game, not a simulation? Come closer, children, and let me tell you a story or two…

Unavatared play and liminal identities

Most games feature avatars – the representation of the player in the world of the game. You are a meeple on a gameboard or a sprite on a screen. As game abstractions go, this avatar is probably the most profound one, because it’s messing with your identity. You might be the most fiscally responsible person in the world, but in Monopoly, if your token lands on my hotel on Park Place, you will bankrupt yourself. A game avatar inevitably signifies that some aspects of your personal identity are not relevant; this is problematic.

Many games use this identity shift as a feature. You are not a robber baroness or a fey elf, but you get to play one in Catan or Dungeons & Dragons. This is role-playing in games. Note that role-playing doesn’t eliminate problematic aspects of avatared play, it just normalizes them.

To me, role-playing gets interesting as it gets less avatared – when it encourages you the player to inhabit not a foreign identity but a liminal one, one that maps to your actual self. So, for example, you play a character that’s a lot like you except less afraid to take chances. Or you take on the worldview and goals of a real-life opponent of yours, to walk an uneasy mile in their moccasins.

But, you say. It says “alternate reality games” in the title of this article and we’re half a dozen paragraphs in and you haven’t got to even mentioning them yet? Ah, good point. I did promise you a story or two. Here we go:

Collaboratively creating the Global Oil Crisis of 2007

Once upon a time, in early 2007, a motley group of U.S. citizens had an inkling that a global oil crisis was looming. As you do. There was no Facebook/Twitter/Insta back then, so to prepare for the crisis they set up their own citizen nerve center at worldwithoutoil.org and spread word about it “just in case.” So, when the crisis did begin on 30 April that year, they were ready to receive the citizen reports about the crisis that began to flood in from across the U.S. and around the globe. As hundreds then thousands then tens of thousands of people began to interact with the site, a unique massively multithreaded narrative of the crisis began to emerge. Reviewer Nina K. Simon described it:

“It is a far cry from the “calculate your carbon footprint” or other casual games about resource usage. It required much higher engagement than reading news articles on the topic; [World Without Oil] was a huge growing, twisting network of news, strategy, activism, and personal expression.”

World Without Oil was an alternate reality game, or ARG. The motley group of citizens were characters played online by gamerunners, and worldwithoutoil.org was the portal to the alternate reality of the (entirely fictional) oil crisis. The people engaging in the game played along with the fiction, telling how the crisis would be affecting them as though it were really happening. And, you’ll notice, it was unavatared play. The game didn’t ask you the player to change; it changes your world instead. Whatever defines you – your wit, your art, your feels, your imagination – you could bring to the game. And this openness enriched the game’s massively multithreaded narrative. The players’ collective story arc, which initially was full of individual stories of disruption and chaos, pivoted to shared practical ideas for adaptation and resilience.

World Without Oil showed that an alternate reality-style game about X can be very much like the real X, and thus more verisimilitudinous and meaningful to its players. An authentic fiction, if you will. Player OrganizedChaos explained the game experience succinctly:

“It was real to me.”

Games reaching out into your life

Every game has a “platform” – the magic circle in which it appears. Football has the football field, chess has its board, and so on. In storytelling games the physical platform can disappear entirely: the game is taking place entirely in the shared imaginations of the storytellers. In alternate reality games such as World Without Oil, the entire world is the platform. Thanks to the Internet, anything can be in the magic circle: players transport the fictional oil crisis to their back-yard garden in Toronto, gas station in Atlanta, residential street in Marseilles, and so on.

World Without Oil, then, had “pull” immersion – once the game idea was in your head, you the player could freely pull signals of the game story from the real world around you. Alternate reality games rise to next-level immersion if the gamerunners can add “push immersion” – if they can arrange for the game fiction to manifest itself in the real world. A classic example: the calls to phone booths in the I Love Bees ARG (2004). In the fiction of that game, a damaged Artificial Intelligence from the future had crash-landed to Earth and, in trying to figure out what had happened to it, was ringing public pay phones (a few still existed then). So that game, which could otherwise seem esoteric and virtual, elegantly pushed itself into the real world to make the experience more immersive for its players.

FutureCoast (2014), an alternate reality game about climate-changed futures, also featured pull immersion. In the fiction of that game, the Internet of the future had developed a file leak. The gamerunners created physical representations of these bits of leaked data – crystalline artifacts – and cached them in public spaces for players to find. When a player successfully recovered a “chronofact,” they (and everyone) were rewarded by a new glimpse of the future… a chunk of leaked data…

…which, as it turns out, was a voicemail. The leak was in the voicemail system of the future. Which may seem, um, underwhelming? Maybe. But here’s the transcript of one:

“Hi, honey. It’s Mom, I was just thinking about your visit and about when we talked about how hard your pregnancy is, and how you’re scared of bringing a new person into this world when everything feels so uncertain. Yeah I told you when we talked I felt exactly like you when I was pregnant with you, so, I’m pretty sure every mom felt that way and you’re definitely not alone. -But honey I think that you might wanna move somewhere with a better water supply and farmable land nearby. You know we definitely got it up here and I would love to help you take care of that baby. So, you know, why don’t you guys talk about it. I know that you guys have your jobs and your friends and everything in Southern California but it might be time to think about moving somewhere that’s gonna be a little safer and easier while you’re bringing up that baby. Ok sweetie I love you thanks for those pictures and call me after you’ve had your next check up. Bye-bye.”

The chronofacts were a “rabbit hole” that helped bring people to imagining, and ultimately creating, visions of possible futures. People would listen to one, then another, then another, of the messages that people will be leaving for each other in the years 2033, 2041, and so on. Ultimately the listeners discover that the voicemails they are hearing were created by people just like themselves. There was a 800 number to call, so they could contribute their own voicemail leaked from the future.

As did World Without Oil, the FutureCoast ARG seeded a fiction that was then grown into something big by its players. By the time the project ended, it had amassed over 500 voicemails, more than you could listen to in a day. Collectively the voicemails built up a guidebook to climate-changed futures that supplies all the texture and context that I find lacking in statistical projections. FutureCoast was an engagement engine for storytelling – a way to encourage people to think about the future and participate in its shaping.

That time you rage-quit high school

Earlier I said that ARGs don’t require you to change your identity (as role-playing games do), and that’s true. But at the same time, ARGs don’t require you to keep your identity. As a player, you can slide easily into a liminal identity (one adjacent to your current concept of self), and players often do.

In 2012 an ARG called Ed Zed Omega explored the values and shortcomings of American education, especially in high school. It did so by embodying a common liminal identity for American young people: the escapee. In Ed Zed Omega, in live events and on the internet, seven young actors played the version of themselves that actually did act on their dissatisfactions with school and walked out. In real life, when a young person leaves school, it happens quietly; in Ed Zed Omega, the students dropped out loud.

Once again we find an ARG that seeded a fiction that players grew into a unique narrative about U.S. education today. The provocative, transgressive characters created a space for voices not normally heard in debates about what we teach and how and why. The Zed Omegas encouraged unavatared play and, when they appeared live, were a landmark example of the power of push immersion in narrative-making play.

Authored and unauthored narratives  

I don’t know why we enjoy authored narratives so much. Maybe because they’re characterized by the things – plot, arc, characters, an ending – that we don’t have in the stories we tell about our real lives. These days, when I sit down with a friend (on Zoom, alas) and we catch each other up on our lives, the stories often sound like just one damn thing after another.

When it comes to stories that help us make sense of our lives, I find that authored narratives fall short. The author is going to bend messy reality to advance the plot and pace the action and give us the sense of an ending, and that’s not what we need. We need to hear all those voices spinning out all those multiple threads of possibility, in huge growing twisting networks of news, strategy, activism, and personal expression.

I wish I could point you now to Thirteen Patient Zeros, an ARG in 2017 about a global pandemic. But to be clear, I can’t. We didn’t run one. We didn’t have thousands of people globally imagining what they would do if an infectious disease with asymptomatic transmission was starting to spread across the globe. I wish also I could point you to Whose Streets?, an ARG in 2019 about the rise of fascism and paramilitary threats to U.S. democracy. To be clear, I can’t do that either, because no one ran one. We didn’t play these things first, and now we must live them.

The post ‘Play it before you live it’ first appeared on Ludogogy.

But there is hope.

In a recent survey, play was named as a high potential tool to engage employees in sustainability.

Sustainability is key to future business success

Businesses get it.

94% of CEOs say sustainability issues are important to the future success of their business[1]

The sustainability message has been heard, loud and clear, at the top level of big corporates. CEOs are beginning to see the importance of working towards running their businesses in ways that:

• meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs
• balance the pillars of Planet, People and Profit
• contribute to a common goal of a better tomorrow

But sustainability is not a destination; it is a journey. Every company is at a different stage on their sustainability journey, they will be following different paths, have different priorities and use different language… Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Corporate Social Innovation, Sustainability, Purpose….  and that’s ok.

The challenge is no longer “why” sustainability. The challenge is now “how” to implement sustainability in an impactful way.

Sustainability touches all areas of business and operations, from product level to company level, from employees to customers and from local to global issues.

Every company is unique and the context in which they operate affects the sustainability challenges they face – CO², waste management, gender equality, plastic use, energy consumption, human rights issues in supply chain, biodiversity …the list goes on.

One thing is common though…wherever companies are on their journeys they will advance more quickly by getting employees from across their business engaged and on-board early on.

The challenges of engaging employees in sustainability

So if the key to creating a successful sustainable company is to get all employees – from top management to shop floor workers – personally engaged in the company’s sustainability goals. Why isn’t this happening?

We conducted a survey to find out more.

Whilst sustainability may now be seen as important, 50 % of respondents stated that sustainability isn’t well integrated in the companies they work for and that companies lack solutions to make sustainability more accessible and relevant to employees.[2]

It is also difficult to break silos and make sustainability a priority for all employees regardless of their roles and responsibilities. Only 15% of respondents told us their companies had identified ways to make sustainability part of every employee’s role.[3]

We learnt that the top three challenges companies face in engaging employees in sustainability are time, knowledge and complexity.[4]

1: Employees don’t have enough time
Projects, meetings, calls, reports, presentations, more meetings. We are all getting busier and busier, always connected, available at any time of day, with deliverables that were due yesterday. Employees may feel they don’t have time to do their own job, let alone reading their company’s latest content heavy, complex and lengthy sustainability report.

2: Employees don’t have sufficient knowledge
Sustainability is still seen as a specialist topic. Whilst the key principles are common to most businesses, many aspects are very industry specific – a shipping company will have very different sustainability focus than a fashion company or a medical devices company. It is important that there is a common understanding that the goal of engaging employees is notfor them to become sustainability experts. The goal is to increase general awareness of sustainability, how it relates to the company they work for and how they can take action for sustainability within their own roles.

3: Employees find sustainability complex
Sustainability brings a whole new level of jargon, with its three pillars Economy, Environment and Society (or alternatively Planet, People and Profit). Then there is the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals, 169 targets and 231 indicators. Climate change, carbon footprints, CO² emissions, carbon sinks, causes and effects …. Layer that with the company’s approach, language and priorities, and no wonder sustainability seems overly complex and off-putting.

In a world where sustainability is seen as complex, where employees are disengaged, where the need for change is urgent, doing the same as we’ve done before simply doesn’t work. As Einstein once said “insanity is doing the same over and over again”.

Could play be new way to engage employees in sustainability?

Games are structured forms of play and well-developed immersive games are a perfect starting point for experience and enquiry driven learning about sustainability.

Harnessing play for sustainability can help companies to overcome the challenges of time, knowledge and complexity through providing a fun and engaging environment along with games that can captivate, excite and motivate players whilst instinctively conveying meaningful content in a time-condensed and simplified way.

Two sustainability games that illustrate this new way of engaging employees are:

The SDG 2030 game a thought-provoking facilitated multi-player card-based game developed that simulates what the world could look like in 2030. The game engages participants in exploring how we can achieve a more balanced world and the consequences of our actions. Playing the game and reflecting on it afterwards, participants realise that everything is interconnected, that we can change the world when we work together and that even seemingly small actions can have a big impact. Players leave with an understanding of the importance of the Sustainable Development Goals and that we all have a role to play.

In the Loop is a serious game that helps players take the first step in identifying what it means to move towards a more circular economy. The board-based game simulates complex, global resource supply chains and triggers players to find solutions in a fun and engaging way. Players take on the role of a manufacturing company and collect resources and build products, but we live in an unpredictable world and players face difficult strategic decisions about collaboration, investments and business models as they navigate the game.

Why is play so powerful?

Freedom of play – When we play, as adult or children, we step into a new world, a world of opportunities with no boundaries to our creativity. There is no right or wrong and risks are minimised. Play allows us to explore, experiment and question different approaches and ideas and learn from this experience.

Create an experience – As we say, if a picture is worth a thousand words, an experience is worth a thousand pictures. Games are memorable shared experiences that can bring people together, change perspectives, shifting behaviours and inspire action.

Bring people together – In every play situation, there is an element of competition as well as a shared experience. When applying play to sustainability, people get together around a common goal, which is very powerful.

Change perspectives – Play helps all of us to look at the world from a different perspective and sustainability themed games can spark real aha moments that demonstrate to players that alternative approaches are required and that even small actions can have an important impact on the big picture.

Action beyond play – Awareness without action is pointless. Powerful sustainability games spark individual and collective reflection and inspire participants to co-create solutions and take action.

Play is a key enabler for sustainability

For companies who want to bring their sustainability goals to life and embed sustainability across their organisation, play has the potential to be a truly transformative tool to engage employees in sustainability.[5]

Let’s get more people playing with purpose at work, then the ripple effect of that play will create positive impact for both planet and people as well as for business.

The post #Play4Sustainability: Engaging employees in sustainability through play first appeared on Ludogogy.

This idea can be extended in a number of ways. One method would be the ‘rewind’, which is popular in the kind of learning games where there is a ‘right answer’ or at least a limited number of preferred routes through the game.  For example, let’s say we have created a game which is designed to reduce siloing within a business.  The learning designers have identified communication issues as a problem within the business, and the game aims to illustrate this.  Players comes to understand this idea – through one or more rounds of the game which have had disastrous results.

Rewinding the game

Each time the game is ‘rewound’ to a starting position, usually along with some teaching in between each round, to introduce a better tool or technique, or behaviour.  The results of each round thus get progressively better, until by the end of the training, each team achieves some measure of success, and the learning about the improved approach is hopefully embedded.

Even games which are not ‘rewound’ within each play, will be ‘rewound’ between one instance of play and the next. A team may play several rounds of the same game, with each round building on the results from the last.  But the next time the game is played anew, with new teams, it will start from the same position it always has.

You may think that this is self-evident. This is the way games, serious or otherwise, have always worked. Each time you get ‘Monopoly’ out of the box, everyone will start from the same position and you have a new opportunity to win, even if you lost last time.

Legacy games

But then came ‘Legacy’ games, and these games, I would argue, are particularly appropriate for learning about environmental sustainability.

The basic idea of a legacy game is that the game itself evolves over time, as a result of the decisions made by players within play.  There is no possibility of ‘rewind’. The game world is irrevocably changed by each and every play that is made.  In tabletop games, this manifests, for example through the use of stickers which are added to the board, permanently changing it, or through the permanent destruction of game pieces, or by the opening of previously sealed game elements.

Rather appropriately for the times we are now living through, one of the first legacy board games was ‘Pandemic Legacy’ in 2015.  This was created by Matt Leacock (original creator of Pandemic) and Rob Daviau (the originator of the Legacy mechanic). Like a lot of legacy games, this is designed to be played as a ‘campaign’, over multiple play sessions and with an unfolding storyline. Because the rules and game elements are changed by the legacy mechanic through play, the experience of playing the game will be near to unique for each group of people who play it.

Planetary Boundaries and Tipping Points

When I first learned about legacy games, I was working delivering learning in Environmental Sustainabilty to corporate employees. It immediately struck me that this was exactly what we needed to do with learning games in this field.  The mechanic is particularly appropriate for learning about the concepts of Planetary Boundaries and Tipping Points.

According to the Stockholm Resilience Centre, there are nine planetary boundaries, including Climate Change and Biosphere Integrity.  The current state of each of these aspects of the planetary system can be represented diagrammatically, so that we can see whether we are currently operating within safe limits or not.

The green part of the diagram represents the zone of operation within which sustainable growth can occur. So long as human actions do not move the planetary system beyond the green zone, then we are ‘safe’.  Once the metric for any boundary moves beyond the green zone, we are operating in increased risk. As the metric moves into the areas of increased and critical risk, boundaries representing stable regimes are breached. That aspect of the planetary system then moves into a new stable regime. This is the concept of ‘Tipping Points’. Once we have passed a tipping point there is no returning. A good way to visualise this is as a ball bearing moving on an undulating track (but with a general ‘downhill’ trend).  Once the bearing reaches a peak, it will ‘tip’ into the next valley.  It would then need to go uphill to return to the previous valley, which it cannot do.

Legacy games provide an excellent way of doing several things in this context:

1. Demonstrating the ‘one-way’ trend of planetary boundaries and tipping points
2. Creating long-term learning experiences which can be returned to over time (campaign games), and which represent irrevocable changes over that period of time
3. Allowing changes ‘outside of play’ to be made by designers in response to changes discovered by e.g. scientific research, real-world events
4. The legacy mechanic itself is a powerful analogy demonstrating that our actions and decisions have far-reaching and irreversible consequences
5. Demonstrating the importance of each decision. Although this is still a game, and therefore ‘safe’ in that your decision is not actually impacting the ‘real world’ , in a campaign  you will have to ‘live with’ that decision and its consequences in the long term.

In commercial ‘for fun’ games, Legacy is an endlessly fascinating mechanic. In the hands of a skilled learning designer it can be a tool which can drive a whole new generation of games for deep and lasting learning in some of our most complex and biggest challenges.

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The very first such analysis I attempted was of a learning programme that I had not designed, but was heavily involved in delivering.  This article is a description of that experience. It is not intended to be an in-depth explanation of Octalysis – it is best to go straight to source for that. The Octalysis Group provide some outstanding learning. Nor is it intended to be an in-depth analysis of the learning programme I evaluated.  It is a description of an experience, along with some commentary about what I discovered about how to use Octalysis, and the Player Type Hexad (not part of the Octalysis framework). I hope it will be useful if you are planning to use the same tools, or if you need to undertake a similar analysis.

A brief overview

Some small explanation is however necessary before continuing, specifically about the eight ‘core drives’ (CDs), and two ways of categorising those drives:

CD1 Epic Meaning & Calling – The motivational drive whereby participants feel called to become involved in something greater than themselves.  This is the drive which is in play when people become involved in a cause.

CD2 Development & Achievement – The motivational drive whereby participants are driven by a desire to make progress or to achieve something.

CD3 Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback – The motivational drive whereby participants feel more drawn to complete an activity if they have autonomy to approach it creatively, by, for example, trying a new approach.

CD4 Ownership & Possession – The motivational drive whereby participants are driven by a desire to acquire something, to possess it, or even to improve things they already possess.

CD5 Social Influence & Relatedness – The motivational drive to be connected to others, to gain status and recognition or approval, or to help others

CD6 Scarcity & Impatience – The drive which makes you want something simply because you cannot currently have it, or because it has rarity value.

CD7 Uncertainty & Curiosity – The drive to explore and find out.  The pleasure of surprise.

CD8 Avoidance & Loss – The drive where participants will do something simply because the they fear the consequences of not doing it.

Black Hat / White Hat – A way of viewing the eight drives as being either empowering (white hat) or manipulative (black hat).  1,2 and 3 are seen as WH and 6,7, and 8 as BH.  The remaining two drives could be either depending on specific outcomes or implementation.

Left Brain /Right Brain – A way of viewing the eight drives as being either extrinsic (Left) or intrinsic (Right).  2, 4 and 6 are seen as LB and 3, 5 and 7 as RB. The remaining two drives could be either depending on specific outcomes or implementation.

The deliverables of the process

Octalysis offers up to five levels of analysis, but I believe that for most people’s purposes, it is sufficient to undertake just the first three levels.  These will give you, by the end of your analysis process:

1. An overview of how well your analysed experienced satisfies each of eight core motivational drives.
2. That same experience split into four stages, reflecting the different motivational requirements of an experience as it passes from beginning to maturity
3. Those four stages further subdivided by six different personality types (because of the player type model I have chosen – others are available), giving a matrix of 24 smaller experiences

The outputs from this process therefore give you some very granular feedback on how likely people are to want to take part in your experience, which is an excellent basis to start thinking about how that experience might be amended to make it more compelling, enjoyable and thus to maintain participation.

Throughout the analysis one needs to make judgments on how well your experience meets particular criteria.  The ideal situation would be that you have hard data on which to make those judgments, but that is not always possible.  My experience was a corporate sustainability learning programme and I had post programme evaluation forms and the results of a participant survey, taken six months after the programme. I also used discussions with colleagues and my own experience of the programme in my evaluation.

Based on these judgments, one assigns a value of between 0 and 10 to each of the drives. For example, in the diagram below, I assigned a value of 7 to Epic Meaning and Calling (Core Drive 1) and 3 to Unpredictability and Curiosity (CD7)

This is what I found, in general terms, as it would not be appropriate to reveal  the details of the programme itself.  This article is more about the experience of using the tool than the result of my analysis.

Level I analysis (115)

The Octalysis score, in this case, 115, is derived from the sum of the squares of the values assigned to each of the drives.  It provides a gross summary of the ‘strength’ of the experience, but cannot really provide any insight beyond that. It is much more revealing to look at the balance between Black vs White Hat drives (the top three CDs vs bottom three in the diagram), and Left vs Right Brain (three leftmost vs three rightmost), as well as getting a picture of which drives are particularly well or badly served by a particular product or experience.

Looked at in this way, it seems to be a reasonably strong experience, but there is some imbalance.  It is skewed both towards White Hat and Right Brain drives, meaning that it shoud be an intrinsically rewarding experience, and also empowering, participation in which will make people generally feel good.

However, the lack of Left Brain drives may make the experience less appealing to those who are driven by Achievement (CD2) and Ownership(CD4) , for example, or require other ‘logical’ justification to attend.  It fails to answer the question ‘What’s in it for me?’  (WIIFM). Likewise, the emphasis on White Hat drives means that participants will derive feelings of wellbeing and satisfaction from their participation, but may lack a sense of urgency to carry out any of the desired actions.  Bluntly put, although they may know that they are taking part in a meaningful activity CD1), if they get a better offer on a day when they are due to do so, or something is seen as a barrier (inconvenience (CD8), lack of time (CD6)), they may well decide to miss the action.  There are no negative consequences to NOT acting.

Imagine an individual who needs to complete a self-assessment tax return.  She knows that it is a good idea to complete the task, and that she will get a feeling of accomplishment and relief when the troublesome task is out of the way.  Ultimately though, it is the prospect of a £100 late payment penalty and the unwelcome attention of HMRC which motivates her to submit her return, the day before the deadline.  Deadlines are a very  good example of Black Hat motivation CD8 – Loss and Avoidance.

The programme instils a sense of purpose and agency (to a certain extent), but does not sufficiently push people towards exercising that agency to reach that purpose.

Level II

Discovery (61)

During the Discovery phase you must convince people WHY they want to participate in what you have to offer.  Whether they reach the end of this stage and sign up to your product or experience will depend on how well they feel their own particular drives are satisfied during this awareness raising phase.

In the Discovery phase, thought must be given to how you can market your experience to emphasise  Curiosity and Unpredictability (CD7), so that people will feel driven to find out more, Epic Meaning & Calling (CD1), so that people feel that they will be becoming involved in something worthwhile, and perhaps Social Influence & Relatedness (CD5) if you people to virally spread awareness of your product or experience.

The experience is notably weaker in its Discovery phase than when viewed as a whole.  It is particularly noteworthy that it is very heavily skewed towards Right Brain drives.  While it could be considered ‘better’ to design an experience which is intrinsically motivating, extrinsic motivation can be very motivating for those looking for a ‘convincer’ (again – WIIFM?).

There is also an emphasis on White Hat Drives, just as there was in the overall Level I diagram.  This indicates that while the Discovery phase is rich in meaning and conveys a feeling of something that it ‘worth doing’, it may lack the appropriate Black Hat ‘call to action’ that will actually make people sign up to attend the training experience.

Onboarding (151)

Once the participant has signed up to your experience, you must teach them how to interact with it; how it works, and the tools they will need to navigate through it. This stage ends once these basic skills are in place and participants have reached the early win-states.

Within this programme, this stage is largely covered by face-to-face learning days, but will continue into their first uses of a website, and their first ‘solo’ actions, following the activities they have been trained to carry out (if either of these things even occur). Not all participants will undertake all of the elements offered, as some may drop out after training, or more rarely, may not turn up for training at all.

Onboarding appears to be a relatively strong experience, compared to Discovery (and as we shall see, Scaffolding and the Endgame) and this bears out our observations of running the programme.  We get very positive feedback from people who attend the face-to-face learning days.  People feel they have learned a lot (CD2); they feel positively motivated to make lifestyle changes (CD1, CD3) and they find the active learning component engaging and thought provoking (CD1).  However, we do seem to face challenges in funnelling people through to this stage, with many days having to be cancelled because of poor recruitment.  Although there is still an emphasis on Right Brain drives, this is less pronounced than previously, and the scores on all drives are better than before.

We are also seeing for the first time in the journey, an opportunity for those who focus on achievement to satisfy some of their needs.  There are many and various things to do and learn during the training, giving numerous opportunities for participants to feel that they have gained knowledge or skills, or have reached new insights (CD2).  It is also a social experience, and this can be very motivating (CD5).  CD1 is particularly strong during the face-to-face experience, as people learn about specific complex challenges, and also how they can become part of the solution.

Scaffolding (107)

Once participants have the basic skills to interact with your experience and they have reached the first major win-state, they enter the Scaffolding phase.

This is where they carry out the normal activities which make up your experience.  It is ‘Business as Usual’. One aspect of this which can therefore be problematic is that you may be asking people to carry out the same actions repeatedly, and you must ask the question ” Why would our participants keep coming back to do this?”

In the programme, this is the crucial time when we leave participants to their own devices.  They will be using the techniques which we taught them on the training day, but on their own in their own time.  We hope they will be spreading the word about what they have learned, encouraging their colleagues to attend, and telling their friends and families about relevant issues, as well as encouraging behaviour change.  We want them to participate in the learning community via the website.  We send them information now and again to keep them up to date with what is going on.

Again, we find ourselves a bit thin on Black Hat drives.  The feeling of wanting to do good persists (CD1), but where is the ‘prod’ to make sure that happens.  Our surveys have shown that a key motivation in those who continue to participate in this stage is the fact that the activities can be social (CD5), and those who receive regular feedback from their organisational rep (CD5, CD7)  also remain more engaged for longer.  But for many, their action becomes a solitary activity, once they are out of the Onboarding phase, meaning that this drive has less influence.

There are ways of achieving (CD2), gaining more knowledge, completing learning modules and so on, but many respondents report that they have never visited the learning materials on the website or do not know where they are.  Again, although the White Hat drives have potential, the signposting and the Black Hat ‘prod’ to get participants to engage with the activities which satisfy these drives is lacking.

End Game (38)

Once people feel that they have done everything your experience has to offer at least once, they need to be convinced to continue interacting with your experience – well at least if you have a need for long-term enagagement.  Never forget that by this time, newer alternatives for other experiences will have been dangled in front of them.  You need to ask why they would not leave your experience to pursue these instead.

If you do want long-term you need to design in ‘evergreen’ activities which keep your participants for the foreseeable future.

In the Endgame, we see a drastic falling away of the satisfaction of nearly all the drives.  There is nothing new in this stage, just a continuation of the activities which the participants have carried out in the Scaffolding stage.  This is therefore by far the weakest point in the journey.  Participants can continue to act and use the website, but they have exhausted many of the ‘finite’ aspects of the programme.  They have probably ‘converted’ all the friends and family they can.  If they have engaged with the website, they have probably exhausted the material there or ceased to engage if they did not find it compelling.  Even CD1 will become less motivating over time, unless the participants receive regular feedback which shows them the impact of their activities.  And we know from feedback that this is potentially a problematic area, with many people unsure about why they are performing certain actions or what impact they are having.

In short, the Level II analysis shows us an experience which is strong in the face to face component but which struggles for initial sign up and maintaining long term engagement.

Level III

Level III Octalysis takes the four stages of level II and further subdivides them by overlaying player types, because the player type framework I have chosen consists of six player types, in a full analysis this level would consist of 24 separate diagrams with analysis, but I will just show a representative example from each stage in this article. This required the use of a third party player type model as Octalysis did not have its own player type framework at the time I did this analysis.

The diagrams below show the ‘shape’ of the experiences at that stage, for that specific player type.

Octalysis analysis for player types

I have chosen to use Andrzej Marczewski’s six player types, as these are considered more suitable for gamification in the workplace than Richard Bartle’s four player types (upon which Andrzej’s work is based).

Disruptor

Disruptors are motivated by Change. They want to effect (hopefully) positive change, but possibly negative change by interacting with your experience.

There are 4 sub types in Andrzej’s model.  We do not want Griefers or Destroyers in our system.  We must either convert them to the two more positive types, or get rid of them as their influence is wholly negative and destructive.  Therefore the below diagrams consider only the drives which appeal to the subtypes Improver and Influencer.  These two player types favour

• Improver – they like to explore a system and find ways to make it better. They are disruptive problem solvers
• Influencer – they like to changes things by using their influence over others.

Disruptors are largely driven by CD2 and CD4, but also CD3, CD5, and to a lesser extent by CD8.

Discovery – for a Disruptor (29)

For Disruptors, the Discovery Phase of the programme is not a strong experience.  There is really nothing for them currently in their key drives around Accomplishment (CD2) and Ownership (CD4).  They may see opportunities to increase their influence through CD5, but only in a specific set of circumstances where there is strong line manger pressure / support to attend, or where they are a team leader.  CD1 and CD8 may well appeal, but in this case would be reliant on feeling of agency that they can enact change, as well as a prior interest in enacting change of the kind offered by this learning programme, which may not be their area of interest.

Philanthropist

Philanthropists are motivated by Purpose and Meaning. They want to ‘do good’ and do not expect rewards for doing so.  They are most driven by CD1, but to a lesser extent by CD2, CD3 and CD5.

Onboarding – for a Philanthropist(196)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Philanthropists have the strongest experience of all the player types, and it seems markedly more balanced than the experiences of other player types in terms of Left/Right and Black/White.  CD1 still tops the list of their drives for participating, but the other drives support their purpose strongly too. CD3, Empowerment of Creativity and feedback is one of the weaker drives across the board, as there few ways to express creativity during the training.  Although CD3 is something which Philanthropists would like in an experience, its lack is more than made up for by the strong reinforcement that participation will help.  It is only later on in the experience where the lack of options to do so creatively may become something that causes even Philanthropists to disengage.

Free Spirit

Free Spirits want autonomy to create and explore.  Self-expression is also important to them.  CD3 and CD7 will drive them most strongly, but also CD2 and CD6 to a certain extent.

Scaffolding – for a Free Spirit (63)

Given the ’finite’ nature of the activities offered in the Scaffolding stage, many Free Spirits may fall away once they have explored the website a bit, or maybe posted one or two blogs.  The activities may engage initially as they will be keen to explore (CD7) options to use the activities in their local environment, but if the experience does not change from one visit to the next, they may lose interest, and find reasons to cease participating, especially given the lack of other Black Hat drives which might give them the impetus to carry on.

Socialiser

Socialisers want to interact with other people and make connections. Mainly motivated by CD5, they also favour CD3 and CD7, or even CD4 (‘my’ friends).

Discovery – for a Socialiser (37)

The Socialiser is second only to the Philanthropist (in terms of raw ‘score’) in how appealing they find Discovery.  Particularly if they are to attend a team day, or if they have a personal recommendation (CD5), they are likely to be interested in signing up.  However, like the Philanthropist and the Free Spirit, they may struggle to find a firm Left Brain reason to convince either themselves or others that they should attend.

Achiever

Achievers are motivated by Mastery, wanting to learn new things and improve themselves. They need to feel they are overcoming challenges.  Achievers are obviously strongly driven by CD2, and CD4 and CD6 will also influence them.  They will also enjoy finding creative ways to achieve (CD3)

End game – for an Achiever(22)

It would be surprising if we retained many Achievers into the End Game, unless they are embedded within a Sustainability function in the business or see professional opportunities in that area. The total lack of any Black Hat ‘calls to action’ will be the death knell for the influence of the very weak White Hat drives we see here.

Player

Players are motivated by Rewards. They will do what is needed of them to collect rewards from a system. They are in it for themselves.  Their primary drivers are CDs 2 and 4, and to a lesser extent 6.

Onboarding (51)

The experience becomes slightly better for Players, as it does for all our player types, once they attend the face-to-face event.  However, the total lack of Black Hat drives will probably mean that they are deciding, even during the day itself, that their participation will end there.  The only exception will be if they see scope for professional advancement or recognition, which will only occur in specific circumstances related to their work, so cannot be relied upon as general motivation for all participants who favour this player type.

Review of my experience of Octalysis analysis

Level I is interesting as an overview but it of little use as an analysis tool. The usefulness increases exponentially with the addition of Levels II and II, and these enabled me to see very clearly where the issues were with the current experience. That clarity in turn, makes it a relatively easy task to then make concrete recommendations for how an experience can be tweaked.  I include a sample of the findings and recommendations I made to illustrate this part of the process.

Level I – overall experience

While the overall score shows a reasonably strong experience, the programme is a markedly White Hat /Right Brain experience, which indicates that we may need to ensure that participants can see sufficient ‘rational’ justification to participate – especially given that the target audience comprises busy corporate employees, and that there are sufficient compelling ‘calls to action’ to drive them successfully through the experience.  The graph shows that the overall experience is about ‘for good’ actions and behaviour changes and personal learning, with a potential strong social element.  We have to ask ourselves about how generally relevant those themes and aspects are, given that they are attending in their capacity as employees.

Level II – Journey

Discovery phase

This phase is particularly lacking in the Left Brain, logical drives.  Again, given our audience, who work in a competitive corporate environment, are we doing enough to convince them that this is an experience which will bring them benefits that are relevant to that role, rather than just a ‘nice to have’ experience which satisfies personal curiosity and social opportunities?

Onboarding phase

Much stronger than the other phases, we can be confident that for the majority of our attendees we have crafted an enjoyable, thought-provoking experience (some exceptions do suggest themselves in Level III).  Even this phase is somewhat lacking in the Left Brain drives, and there is also a marked lack of opportunities for participants to be creative in how they approach the experience.

Giving our participants more autonomy and potential for creativity (CD3) in how they approach the programme would help us to provide effective differentiation of the central experience, also increasing the ways in which they can achieve (CD2) outcomes that are particularly relevant to them, thereby allowing a greater feeling of ‘ownership’ (CD4) over their participantrole

Scaffolding phase

The attrition that we see in activities might be in part attributable to the lack of Black Hat ‘calls to action’ once the participants are left to their own devices.

We could improve this experience considerably, driving greater retention and more desired actions, if we built a journey incorporating Black Hat mechanisms which act as the immediate driver to carry out desired actions (activities that were trained for, participating in community platform),leading to Win-states  replete with White Hat rewards to reinforce the benefits of carrying out those actions.

End Game phase

A properly designed End Game could increase our current ‘Star’ cohort beyond those who have a pre-existing interest in the environmental theme of the programme, which would in turn increase the impact we are able to have by letting us move beyond ‘preaching to the converted’.

Level III – Player Types

Disruptor

The main confounding issues for a Disruptor of the experience are that we do not currently articulate very well how participation in the programme enacts change or how participants have agency.  Once participants have been through the face-to-face training it is unclear how they would be able to link their actions to changes in,e.g. policy or land management.  A Disruptor would need to be able to see these connections to remain engaged.

Their experience is one of the weakest in the Discovery phase but one of the strongest in Scaffolding, so we are probably currently failing to recruit people who could be very engaged.  We need to spot and take opportunities throughout the experience to strengthen our evidencing (and feedback) of positive impacts and change.

Philanthropist

Philanthropists have the strongest experience of the programme, which is maybe not surprising, but this could still be strengthened particularly in Scaffolding and the End Game to include more Black Hat ‘calls to action’.  A similar lack of a ‘prod’ in the Discovery stage may lead to many Philanthropists not signing up at all – a missed opportunity which we must address.

Free Spirit

Free Spirits may feel very drawn to participate but find themselves lacking a rationale to do so, given the other demands on their time.  The lack of creative ways to interact with the experience, and a lack of novelty in activities may well drive them away early, especially considering the lack of Black Hat inducements.

Greater creative opportunities and ‘new’ discoveries throughout the journey would help to keep this player type on board.

Socialiser

Socialisers have a similar experience to Free Spirits – wanting to participate (especially in team days), but finding it hard to justify either to themselves or others.  The social potential is great, but we need to ask ourselves ‘Why this programme?’ as there will probably be rival social-based activities they could participate in if they wanted to.

We need to more deeply embed the social benefits of participation, making the two things far less easily decoupled.  For example, many cite the sustainability actions offered by the programme as an enjoyable way to spend time with family, but they could just as easily do the same walk to the same location with the same family members, deriving the same pleasure, even if they did not carry out the activity.

Achievers and Players

Achievers and Players are the two player types least well served by the current experience, and my feeling is that this is a particular problem given our audience (ambitious corporate employees).  It is quite likely that many ambitious corporate employees do show characteristics of these two player types.  It is likely that they are concerned about their careers, their material possessions, their professional reputations and development and any number of other aspects which relate to CDs 2, 4 and 6, the Left Brain drives, which we do less well in the programme.

That this issue has not manifested itself in feedback and surveys, may be a sign that it is not a problem, but my feeling is that the lack of evidence of this shortcoming may very well be because very few of these player types sign up in the first place.  The Discovery phase is particularly weak for these player types, with no Black Hat ‘calls to action’ at all.

If we want to show ROI to corporates, these are exactly the people who should be attending our programmes – the high flyers, the future general management.

Our programmes need to be linked to relevant business-based achievements and rewards to attract and retain these player types.

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