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

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

Galaxy Raiders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crafty Puggles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tsuro is available on Amazon

Carcassonne is available on Amazon

Guess the Fence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Battleships is available on Amazon

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lord of the Bins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mystic Arts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fracto

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quality of Materials

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

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

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

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

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

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

The History of RPGs

Tabletop RPGs have a rich history, beginning with classics like Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), and evolving with new systems such as Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA), Belonging Outside Belonging, and Wretched & Alone. These games invite players to create characters, navigate intricate narratives, and address complex problems.

The experience is immersive and personal, fostering strategic thinking, cooperation, and empathy among players. These characteristics make such games ideal tools for exploring the complexity, ambiguity and, often, the lack of a clear ‘win-state’ which come with real-life ‘wicked’ problems.

Although traditionally, RPGs have focused on high-fantasy or Sci-Fi themes and have involved combat scenarios, the systems and narrative themes are largely independent of each other, allowing the mechanics of such games to be applied to any theme or narrative. Indeed, more modern RPGs have made moves towards more personal and ‘identity’ related themes, moved away from combat (and toned down the fantasy, or merged it with mundane reality), and made efforts to reduce the complexity of games systems, to lower the barriers to access this kind of play.

As a result, we see games such as Dream Apart (belonging outside belonging in a Jewish shetetl in Eastern Europe), Night Witches (Soviet airwomen from the Second World War) or Sagas of the Icelanders (the world of the sagas in Medieval Iceland). Such games are based in historical reality and culture.

Yet other games seek to create experiences which put you in another’s shoes. Logan is an excellent example of this – where the player rolls (and roles) their way through an alternate version of the game designer Logan Timmins’ own life.

Logan is a solo experience – something which is more available now than in the days when D&D was the standard. But identity-based narrative is also available for groups who want to explore these themes of inner life and one’s place in the world, together, in experiences such as Monsterhearts or Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine.

Translating RPG Mechanics to Learning Programmes

From a mechanical and system perspective, there are many aspects of RPGs which lend themselves to adaptation to ‘wicked’ scenarios and themes.

For instance, D&D’s alignment system teaches players about moral and ethical complexities by assigning their characters a moral and ethical stance.

D&D’s character creation system is a detailed process that encourages players to consider their character’s background, personality traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws. This system can be applied in a learning program focused on diversity and inclusion. Participants could create characters with diverse backgrounds and traits, encouraging them to step into the shoes of individuals who may have very different life experiences from their own.

There is now such a wealth of RPG systems, that if the character creation process of one does not suit your learning application, you can surely find another that will. For example, if assigning numeric values to traits and skills, as in D&D, is not appropriate, then the more narrative-based character creation process of PbtA games, very well might be.

Additionally, D&D’s leveling up system, which allows characters to gain new skills and abilities as they progress, can be adapted to represent professional growth in an organisational context,or any kind of developmental ‘journey’. Participants could ‘level up’ by acquiring new skills or knowledge or even attitudes and values, thereby reinforcing the importance of continuous learning and development.

PbtA games, on the other hand, provide robust, flexible mechanics that can be tailored to diverse themes and settings, challenging players to navigate complex systems and scenarios. For example, in The Sprawl, a PbtA game centered around futuristic corporate espionage, the mechanic of ‘missions’ can be adapted to learning programmes, projects or even causes (such as tackling poverty or climate impacts). Participants could be tasked with ‘missions’ that involve navigating a complex environments and tasks, reinforcing the importance of strategic planning and collaboration.

Skill checks, another RPG mechanic, require players to understand the interactions of various systems to make strategic decisions. This mechanic can be mirrored in programmes designed to address wicked problems such as climate change. For example, learners could ‘roll’ to see the effect of certain environmental decisions, helping them understand the interconnectedness of environmental systems and the far-reaching consequences of their actions.

Another key mechanic, cooperative problem-solving, encourages players to work together towards a common goal, reinforcing the value of teamwork and collective decision-making. This can be translated into learning programs to emphasise the importance of collaboration in addressing societal inequality, or other issues. For example, a scenario could be designed where learners, representing different strata of society, have to collaborate to bridge socio-economic gaps and improve societal welfare. The fact that most of the game systems are ‘theme-agnostic’ opens up a wealth of possibilities to tackle more or less any scenario you wish.

The Benefits and Challenges of Using RPGs in Learning

The use of RPG mechanics in learning programmes brings several benefits. It boosts engagement levels, encourages innovative thinking, and fosters empathy among learners. However, the challenges are also considerable. Acceptance, particularly among those unfamiliar with RPGs, implementation complexity, and time management can be potential hurdles.

To mitigate these challenges, it’s crucial to introduce RPG mechanics in a gradual, comprehensible manner, ensuring that all participants are comfortable with this unique learning approach. This could involve beginner-friendly sessions and pre-game workshops to familiarize participants with the mechanics, and using simplified RPG systems to start.

The newer, often independently published, RPGs, are an excellent resource to go to find inspiration for creating simpler RPG experiences. Many of these have deliberately sought to lower the player overhead in the learning OF the game, which from a learning perspective enables us to more quickly get to the point of learning FROM the game.

In comparison with the hefty manuals and endless tables of stats associated with RPGs like D&D, many of these games are expressed very briefly – sometimes on as little as a single page, and yet with carefully thought-out mechanics are able to create rich and impactful experiences for players.

Itch.io is a site well-worth getting to know if you want to dig up some inspirational indie gems.

Takeaways

The vast, interactive world of RPGs offers exciting opportunities for learning and development professionals. RPG mechanics can be a valuable tool in our quest to understand and address ‘wicked’ systemic issues. However, RPGs are not a panacea; they represent one among many innovative solutions. The path forward lies in continually pushing the boundaries of games-based learning, seeking new and imaginative ways to engage learners and equip them with the skills and knowledge they need to tackle our world’s most pressing problems.

The post Roll for Change: RPG Mechanics & Wicked Problems first appeared on Ludogogy.

In this game, each player must use a combination of critical thinking, problem solving, and communication skills in order to be successful. Each player has to consider the advantages and disadvantages of each decision, and must collaborate with other players to acquire resources and build settlements. In the end, the player who is able to use their skills to make the most strategic decisions and effectively communicate with their fellow players is the winner. 

Settlers of Catan is available on Amazon

Games such as Settlers of Catan are a great example of how SEL skills can be used to make a difference to our interpersonal experiences. These skills can be invaluable in a variety of real-world situations, from classroom projects to business meetings. To dive deeper into this context, we interviewed Manik and Chelsea from Tomo Club for this month’s edition of Ludogogy. Tomo Club uses social games to teach skills in video meets to K-12 students. These games and meets are moderated by trained professionals who keep an eye on the activity and ensure students make progress on their learning goals.

Q. What is the importance of SEL skills in today’s world, according to you?

A. It is essential that the new generation of students is equipped with SEL skills, also called 21st century and life skills. These skills, such as collaboration and critical thinking, are necessary for today’s complex world. They are integral in helping young people to learn how to interact with others, how to manage their emotions, and how to develop self-confidence and resilience. They provide a foundation for success in academic, professional, and personal domains. Without them, the new generation will struggle to compete in the global economy and reach their full potential.

Q. How has the importance of critical thinking in particular changed recently?

A. Today, there are tools like ChatGPT that have sorted out small-scale tasks, enabling us to focus on larger areas like decision-making and strategy. Now the crucial part is to know how to use such resources, which is where critical thinking plays a role. In the near future, more emphasis will be placed on creativity, teamwork, and problem solving – from the workplace to the personal domain. It’s important to figure out what to do and align people to achieve goals – as the “how” behind such work is getting simpler with more resources to the modern person.

Q. Usually game-based learning has a challenge of being assessed and tested conclusively. How do you present progress and test learning in students?

A. We use an elaborate, descriptive rubric that is broken into competencies, subskills, and even further into 40 subskills. Each of these subskills have descriptors that can be used to evaluate and understand individual performance. In order to do this, the teacher and teaching assistant must sit together and discuss each child’s performance and provide remarks, as well as recommendations. This ensures that the evaluations are thorough and that no student is overlooked.

The teacher and teaching assistant actively engage with the students to provide guidance and support. This includes providing feedback and advice on different strategies, helping the student stay motivated, and generally being a mentor. 

Q. Who are the people involved in delivering an experience like yours?

A. We have a small, lean team that starts with the development of a suitable curriculum, then progresses to game design, art, development, followed by rigorous testing. This process begins with adults as well as children, in different geographical locations to gauge reactions. Remarkably, although children have different contexts and curricula, their behaviors and preferences for fun in games remain surprisingly similar – unlike adults. This has implications for game design as it indicates that despite geographical differences, children’s responses to games can be consistent.

Q. Games are synonymous with fun. It’s easy to give feedback that praises someone for their activity in a game. But how do you give critical feedback that addresses negative behaviors, considering children like to play games specifically for fun?

A. It’s the feedback on what we did wrong that is more beneficial in learning. Our moderators are highly trained in providing feedback that is constructive in nature. If turns are broken in the conversation, for example, it is important to give specific feedback to the individual. 

A report is shared with the parents of the student so that they can better understand the feedback. There is a section called Collaboration and Action, where resources and videos are provided to both parents and children to watch together. This helps all parties understand the feedback in a deeper way and encourages an interactive experience.

You can take a demonstration of the experience in Play And Learn events organized by Tomo Club on alternate Saturdays, where educators, parents, and curious minds try games like Secret Santa and Crisis Crew :

Q. What would be your advice to someone wanting to use games in their classrooms?

A. To integrate games effectively, our advice is to consider the context of the learner. For working with adults, providing specific, exact instructions is usually best. With kids, however, it can be tricky to give a lot of instructions, as this overwhelms them. The more we delay gratification, the better equipped the kids will be to manage stress. 

Understanding a game requires familiarity, so allow players time to get familiar with it. If a game is difficult, you can scaffold it, breaking it down into smaller, easier tasks, and then building on them as the learner progresses. 

Conclusion

In conclusion, learning SEL skills is crucial for personal and social development, and doing so in a social and fun way can make the experience even more effective and enjoyable. As evidenced by the various initiatives and programs offered by organizations like Tomo Club, engaging in activities such as games can help individuals cultivate skills like self-awareness, empathy, and communication. Incorporating SEL skills into social and fun activities can benefit individuals of all ages and backgrounds, leading to greater well-being and success in all aspects of life. The testimonials of participants in Tomo Club’s SEL programs also provide insight into this impact. Organizations like Tomo Club are making a significant difference in the lives of learners by providing opportunities to learn and grow in a socially engaging and enjoyable way. You can try these games and experiences in online events every alternate Saturday that you can register for here : https://lu.ma/gamesandeducation

The post Social & Emotional Learning (SEL) with Tomo Club first appeared on Ludogogy.

Engine-building games are reliant on making systems of resources that become more efficient and rewarding as the game carries on. As with any type of system, there is a cost of setting up, which is difficult to reason for when there is an alternative that brings immediate benefits. Let’s take an example of a railway system. In Delhi, the capital city of India, there was a lot of resistance towards building a metro train infrastructure to support the growing traffic and population. Many citizens and opposition parties reasoned that the government should simply focus on improving roads and buses, blind to the environmental and operational benefits of urban trains. Also cited were reasons of initial cost and change of habits required in citizens. More than two decades have passed since these debates were put to rest. The evidence has made a strong case for efficient systems, as trains require significantly less energy and fewer human operators even as the city grows. However, some other cities like Jakarta and Karachi
have suffered from myopic views which have led to disastrous congestions on their roads.

[Make sure to check out The Ludogogy Podcast interview with Elizabeth Hargrave, the creator of Wingspan, soon to be published on the Podcast Page.]

As it stands, most of the games around us are an exercise in planning. Engine-building games are slightly different in the aspect that they reward behaviors that force us out of reactionary ways. Mastering these games requires a farsighted approach. The most approachable example is chess. Chess players often plan their moves and the opponent’s a few turns in advance. Gradually, the placement of pieces starts becoming more meaningful – to the untrained eye, some moves may look random, but the later stages of the game usually justify why the knight was placed centrally, why the bishop was placed on a diagonal without any apparent benefits immediately.

Even though carrying the discipline to build engines seems like a utopian habit, the decisions involved are no cakewalk. There are checks and balances involved in games which ensure that engines make sense, and are not a win-all trick that will get you guaranteed success every time you play. The difference between leading and trailing teams has to be fair enough, a difference that can be recovered in a few critical turns of a game. No resource has to be overpowered, neither should a type of strategy be too penalizing. Let’s discuss some of the experiences from top board games that shed light on the design of engines.

Gizmos

The objective of Gizmos is to build an engine by picking higher cards to add to your pipeline, with the goal of eventually acquiring all the necessary components to achieve victory. This type of engine-building mechanism allows for a lot of experimentation and flexibility in terms of strategy, as there’s less focus on rigidly following a set structure and more opportunities to try out different approaches.

In terms of real-world applications, this style of gameplay can be seen as a metaphor for product management. Just like in Gizmos, product managers must build a pipeline of components that work together in order to bring a product to market. They must experiment with different strategies to determine the most effective approach, and constantly adapt their plan as the market changes. By allowing for a lot of experimentation in a quick time frame, this type of engine-building mechanism can enable managers to try out different strategies and approaches to product development, helping them to find the most efficient and effective way of working.

Additionally, by focusing on strategy rather than structure, this mechanism can encourage managers to be more creative and innovative in their approach to product management.

Gizmos is available on Amazon

Spice Road

Spice Road is a deck-building / tableau-building game where players acquire and trade spices and gems to collect victory points. The engine-building mechanism in “Spice Road” involves constructing a deck of cards that can generate resources and victory points efficiently and consistently. This requires players to carefully select which cards to acquire and when, as well as plan for how to best use their resources to maximize their points.

As a learning game, Spice Road can teach several skills and principles, such as resource  management, planning and execution, and risk management. By playing the game, players can learn how to optimize their resources and make decisions that will lead to success in the long term. Additionally, Spice Road can be used as a tool to teach economic principles, such as supply and
demand, trade, and market dynamics. The game’s mechanics simulate real-world market conditions and can help players understand the consequences of different economic decisions.

Century: Spice Road is available on Amazon

Splendor

Splendor is a board game where players collect and spend gems to purchase and reserve cards representing mines, transportation, and shops, in order to gain victory points. A typical player will usually start by purchasing cards at low cost and reserving cards that will help them acquire gems more efficiently. As they progress, they aim to purchase cards that provide more prestige points and build a well-rounded engine to efficiently acquire and spend gems.

The best players in Splendor focus on building an engine, meaning a set of cards that generate more gems or points with each turn, allowing them to make more powerful moves. This often involves carefully selecting and timing their card purchases and reserves, as well as anticipating their opponents’ moves. The result of these different tactics is that the best players tend to have more efficient and powerful engines, allowing them to outpace their opponents and win more frequently.

Splendor is available on Amazon

Azul

Lastly, Azul is a tile-laying game where players collect tiles of different colors and place them on their player boards in specific patterns to score points. The game is known for its simplicity and elegance, making it a popular choice for families and casual gamers. Players of Azul also use different strategies and engines to maximize their points. For example, some players focus on maximizing points from rows by completing them with the same color tile, while others prefer to collect all tiles of the same color to score big in the end.

The effects of playing Azul according to an engine will depend on the player’s overall strategy and the particular game state. By focusing on the middle column specifically, a player can minimize negative points and restrict their opponents, but they may also miss out on other opportunities to score points by completing rows and columns.

Azul is available on Amazon

Conclusion

We want to conclude this article by paying a special acknowledgement and note of thanks to our guest contributor Aakrit Patel. He is a seasoned meeple himself and moderates games regularly. Aakrit was our source of understanding Azul in particular for this article, as he demonstrated the benefits of playing through the middle column. He also revised some of our observations in the other games, telling us the benefits-versus-costs analyses in some situations.

The post The Power of Compounding in Games first appeared on Ludogogy.

Tabletop games on the other hand, are, or have been, generally social affairs. There are games that are specifically meant for solo play, Patience card games, for example, but finding a one-player game in your local games store requires a little more searching than finding a party game, or a 2-4 player game.

But we can’t always find others to play with, and the pandemic has made that problem more prevalent. This has led to the recent rise in ‘Automa’, both ‘official’ – included with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) games when they are published, and ‘unofficial’ fan-built solo play systems.

What is an Automa?

An automa simulates an opponent in a game. You may sometimes hear it referred to AI, but in reality, the ways that different automa work differ a lot. Some may make use of the game’s resources and mechanics (a more AI-ish characteristic), while others simply allocate actions to the ‘opponent’ at a similar rate to which a real opponent would play – less ‘intelligent’.

The term was coined by the man who is arguably the most famous automa designer, Morten Monrad Pedersen, while he was creating a solo game version for Viticulture, Stonemaier Games’ wine-making game. Following that he founded The Automa Factory, which works with other games design companies to create solo game versions of their games.

Viticulture is available on Amazon

The Automa Factory work extensively with Stonemaier Games, and many of the games listed below come from their stable. Their automa are simple to use, and are based on a small deck of cards. In Wingspan, for example, a card is turned over from the deck each time it is the automa’s turn and the action listed on the card (from one of four sections, depending on which round of the game is current), are carried out. End of round scoring is implemented through a ‘base value’ of a resource printed on the automa card, added to the number of action cubes on the current round’s goal tile – removing these cubes may be one of the automa actions that is taken in a round.

There is even a really simple mechanism for varying the Automa’s competiveness, by changing the number of points it is awarded at the end of the game for each face down bird card – and by including the ‘expert’ level automa card ‘Automubon Society’.

Wingspan is available on Amazon

The automa in Wingspan has much reduced capacity for action compared to a real player; does not have a player mat, does not collect food tokens, does not pay for anything, does not benefit from bird powers and collects birds and eggs only for the purposes of game end scoring- a charactieristic known as ‘streamlining’. Nevertheless, given that the winning condition in Wingspan is a final score, it can still win.

Automa as AI and other methods

But the Automa Factory cards is not the only approach to creating automa. If you take Board Game Geek’s geeklist definition of an automa (and why not), it A) stops short of being a full AI simulation, and streamlines out much of the complexity of those, B) should be able to win or lose in much the same way as its human opponent, and C) does not require decision making or intervention on the part of the human player for it to work.

Several games that were submitted to the automa geeklist have been removed by the list owner for failing to meet these criteria. For example, Power Grid: The Robots, lost its place for including a full simulation rather than a streamlined experience of playing an opponent. Imperial Settlers lost out because it changed the experience of ‘losing’, so that it was not the same as losing to a human opponent, and Churchill was excluded because it was not sufficiently automated, and required players to come up with ideas of how to play the opponent.

Perusing the list of games which remain reveal a wealth of different ideas for implementing solo play, and for the sake of completeness I also include some games which might have been excluded, purely because the mechanisms used might be interesting and useful to readers of this article.

Just play – Some games, most likely cooperative games, have no opponent as such, so solo play is simply a case of playing on your own. Terraforming Mars is a good example of this. In the official, included, solo version, it says that you have a ‘neutral opponent’ from whom you can steal resources and so on, but as they do not ‘play’ this is simply a case of taking those resource from the stockpile. In reality, you just play alone, and your only opponent is time – you are limited to 14 generations in which to achieve the triple goal of terraforming. This of course, does not really qualify as an Automa. It is certainly ‘streamlined’ (in that it reduces the need for actually carrying out the game actions), but is in fact so streamlined that is effectively the same as having no opponent at all.

Terraforming Mars is available on Amazon

However, there are some inventive fans of Terraforming who have stepped in to remedy that shortfall.

The cards for a fan-developed ‘AI’ type automa for Terraforming Mars along with the English version of the rules, and the French version too.

Ark Nova – arguably the stand out game of 2021-22 also comes with a built in solo mode, but it attracted a fair bit of criticism from players for being overly rigid, and therefore not replicating the experience of playing against a real opponent. The Geeklist features a couple of fan-built automa including ARNO – which must be one of the most compact automa around at only 5 cards. It uses a simple selection of decisions using dice. Several ARNO bots can be used in a game – to add a 3^rd or 4^th player in a two player game, and they can be played at differing difficulty levels. Unlike many automa, there is quite a high degree of interaction between players and automa, as ARNO can move cards in the display for example.

However, the prize for the most compact automa I have played must go to the fan-built solo play version for Snowdonia, which uses only the materials which come in the box and a six-sided die. This is an example of the randomiser style of automa, and places game resources according to the die roll and the availability of spaces on the board.

Snowdonia is available on Amazon

Designing Automa as a learning practice

The most obvious reason for creating automa would be to be able to play a well-loved game even when there is no opponent(s) available, but the process of creating an automa has value within itself.

The process requires that the automa designer studies, and really deeply, understands the mechanics of the game they are trying to ‘automate’. While the resulting materials which actually implement the automa may appear simple, the work behind them is not. Ironically, the more compact the output, the more hours of work have probably gone into the processes of:

• Streamlining the actions of the ‘opponent’ so that players do not have to ‘play the part’ of the automa
• Ensuring that the use of an automa does not overly restrict or change the experience for the player
• Thorough playtesting to make sure that the behaviour of the automa remains congruent in all likely game situations
• Ensuring that a win state can be reached despite the streamlining
• Ensuring balance in play that replicates the play of human opponents (that it is neither too hard or too easy to beat the AI)

In recent years, games-based learning has moved beyond creating games for learners to play, to offering the experience of games design itself as a valuable learning opportunity. The design of an automa for a particular game is a decidedly non-trivial task, which could provide learning in design thinking, systems thinking and mathematical modelling – as well as any learning related to thematic aspects of the game.

The benefit doesn’t only extend to learners. As a practice for games-based learning practitioners themselves, automa design can be a way to really grok how a game works, maybe with a view to modding for a particular learning outcome, or to explore how to design your own game using similar mechanics.

Games-based Learning and Automa

In practice however, many GBL practitioners do not have the time, to play with creating automa without a specific (commercial) goal in mind, so why might you want to think about creating solo play versions of your existing (learning) games, or indeed, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) games that you use in your learning practice.

The pandemic meant that many of us who used tabletop games in face-to-face settings, had to adapt those experiences to online environments. In many cases, and to many people’s surprise, this worked remarkably well. However, in other situations, there was a definite feeling of having ‘lost’ something. In those cases, it might well be better to offer learners the opportunity for a solo (physical) learning game experience, rather than a ‘less good’ online shared experience. Any non-game aspects of the learning (e.g. debriefs, planning and so on), that require people to actually get together, could still be implemented through online meeting rooms etc. It gives the GBL practitioner another option to offer the play, other than simply ‘f2f together’ and ‘online together’.

Asynchronous learning has often been carried out in online settings too. Where games-based learning has been used asynchronously, tabletop gaming has never really been considered. Well-designed automa would open up the market for physical games in asynchronous learning settings, and would also give distance learners the opportunity for learning through interaction with “others”.

The post Playing by Yourself – Tabletop Automa first appeared on Ludogogy.

A similar thing has been happening to me, over the past few weeks, after reading a report in the Guardian Newspaper about how fungi can communicate with each other, using a vocabulary of up to 50 ‘words’.

I immediately felt drawn towards the idea of making a game from this, but never really considered that it would be anything beyond a bit of fun, that it would take up such a lot of my time and attention, or that it had potential to turn into a complex learning game with multiple applications.

It’s still not finished, and the first playtest won’t be happening for a few weeks, but already this has been a very different experience for me than almost every other game I have designed. Mechanics have emerged from contemplation of theme, and by reading around the topic of fungi. But, more than that, I feel that rather than my ‘designing’ the game, I have discovered it, almost as if the game has revealed itself to me.

Do we Find Ideas, or Do They Find Us?

This is not an unusual experience in creative work, and writers and artists often describe similar phenomena. I remember listening to a TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, where she recounts the poet’s Ruth Stone’s experience of having to run back into the house from outside, in order to ‘catch’ (using pencil and paper) the poem she had heard thundering towards her across the landscape.

It is only recently that ‘genius’ has been thought of as a characteristic of a person. Previously a ‘genius’ was something external; inspiration from elsewhere which would visit you and help you to create. Perhaps the idea of a ‘meme’ (not in the social media sense) comes closest to this, these days, being the concept that an idea has an independent existence from those who are ‘having’ the idea.

This is a speculative project. No client has set me a brief, and maybe that has something to do with it. In learning game design, one almost always starts from learning objectives, and then seeks to create a game to deliver those. The ‘fun’ of the game is immediately constrained by having to ‘fit’ with those. That is not to say that the game, when designed, will be less fun to play, but only that the kinds of play (and fun) that end up in the game, have been created in service of specific learning outcomes.

Fun is Learning, and Learning is Fun

In passing, I will mention a talk which I gave at Gamicon48V in May 2022. I won’t dwell, because it is beyond the scope of this article, but it focuses on the idea that ‘fun’ is derived from learning, and so suggests trying an exercise where you approach design with the only outcome being to create a fun experience. A learning topic will be involved, because the experience you create will have to be ‘about’ something, but that is secondary. The tricky part of this exercise for most games-based learning practitioners will be to pull themselves away from the idea of ‘learning outcomes’ and to instead make their only focus the creation of ‘fun’. It’s an experience very like the ‘Don’t think of a White Bear’ exercise.

The outcome of using the ‘fun first’ is very similar to the ‘traditional’ learning game design – you will most likely end up with a game, or something very like a game. And it’s a subtle distinction in practice. Instead of asking, and answering, questions such as ‘What game feature will support the learning outcome “recall and give examples of the seven key GDPR principles?”’, you will be asking ‘How can I use the seven key GDPR principles to support a fun experience?’

A Different Experience of Learning Design

However, the experience of working in this way is very different. Where the play is the point, rather than the learning, it feels like a much freer process of exploration – going where the ‘genius’ takes you. This is design itself as a form of play. I will use the experience of exploring mushroom communication as an example to explain this further.

Initially, my first thought on reflecting on the Guardian article was to create a small ‘lyric game’, similar to ‘Gift Horse’, which would have been little more than an individual or a small group of people listing the 50 words that they would want to be able to keep if these were the only words they could ever use – a bit like a lexicological Desert Island Discs.

Almost immediately, I began to see that even that very simple idea, if played individually, had a lot of potential to gain insight into the concepts that are most important to you. In fact, played individually, there is no actual communication involved, so the words are almost entirely about wanting to be able to think (alone) about specific concepts – if one subscribes to the idea that without the word for something, one does not have the concept for the thing either.

An Emergent Culture

When that idea is taken into a game played with others, it immediately suggests that the game is about building a ‘culture’ of some kind. A short reflection on what that meant for the learning potential of the game, gave me the first glimpse of the emergent complexity of what I was building. Furthermore, if you play it in a group, you could simply bring your allotted number of words to the game (50 / number of players), or there could be a mechanism to ‘accept’ or ‘refuse’ the suggested words brought by other players, so that the game becomes more than an interesting but trivial insight into someone’s top 10 favourite words.

A (non-exhaustive) list of ideas that emerged from this were:

• It is a game about negotiation, about what the culture of an organisation should be ‘about’.
• There are words which will be about the ‘housekeeping’ of being in a group, which could be considered mundane, and those which are about the ‘higher self’
• If players bring their own choices of words to the game, who will bring the ‘mundane’ words? Will people hope that others do this, so that they can focus on the ‘higher’ self?
• Do you ‘win’ the game, by getting the most words accepted into the culture?

Adding a Layer of Complexity

In the version of the game that was emerging up until this point, the player fungi were already ‘connected and able to communicate, but what came next was the addition of a couple of very simple ideas. What really surprised me, and which is the main reason for writing this article, was the exponential growth of learning possibility that came with each simple new mechanic. Thinking about the way that fungi ‘work’ added, first, the idea that the ‘making connections’ should be part of the game, and second, that actions in the game should be fuelled by spendable ‘food’. Simply put, fungi sending probing hyphae out into the (game)world and they will find; ‘empty’ soil, another fungus, the hyphae of other fungi, or food sources. The connections between themselves and other fungi will allow them to send (and receive) ‘words’ and food. Their connections to food sources will allow them to take food (until the source is exhausted). Actions are either free, or cost units of food to carry out. I won’t list all the learning possibilities and subsidiary mechanisms this uncovered, as it ran to dozens when I listed them, but here are some highlights:

• Changing the ‘cost’ of actions creates different ‘mental models’ of an (underlying) culture where what is rewarded or punished differs widely.
• If players are free to decide for themselves how they ‘win’, and to reveal, hide or even lie about that to others, there are learnings to be had about the nature of trust in an organisation.
• Those who find food first hold the power to act first, and can use that to gain advantage that may be unbeatable.
• Those who connect first can get a head start on establishing the ‘culture’, establishing accepted ‘words’, building alliances and so on.
• If players are free to exhaust food sources they find, without limitations, they can not only take power for themselves, but deliberately act to withhold it from others.
• There are the makings of two different strategies of play here, making and maintaining alliances, and securing power.

A Game Design Problem

At this stage in the design, there was something of a roadblock – a bit like my fruiting body was pushing upwards, but suddenly hit an asphalt road. But as we know, fungi are more than capable than pushing up through concrete and asphalt, so I just needed to persevere.

The sending out of searching hyphae, proved to be much more complex than it sounds at first. I had envisaged that players would play on some sort of grid, a bit like Battleships – on which a ‘map’ of the fungis’ world would emerge, as play goes on. However, the need for secrecy in Battleships is somewhat different than in this game. In Battleships the attacker states (out loud) some co-ordinates and the attacked will respond with information which reveals if the attack has hit one of their ships. This reveals information to both sides. The attacker finds out where a ship is (or isn’t), but the attacked player also knows where the attacker is looking.

In My-Celium, the fungi need to be literally groping around in the dark. A player cannot publicly announce where their hyphae is going because then other players will know they can connect with them at those coordinates. Likewise, if they find something (food, another hyphae, another fungus), the location cannot be revealed, except to the player asking the question. The game needs to know things about the world that the players don’t and there needs to be private communication. In a digital game, this is a trivial design problem, but in a tabletop game, this usually requires a Gamesmaster, which is the option I eventually went for.

Secret Communication Adds Even More Learning Potential

Even with a Gamesmaster, the problem of communication was still very difficult. I won’t bore you with the details here, but suffice it to say, it took a lot of failed iterations before a potential solution emerged. Now I have something workable, yet again, it has revealed a multitude of potential additions to the learning opportunities of the game. A small fraction of these is listed below.

• The chosen mechanic option allows for finely tuned degrees of secrecy. The game can reveal no information to other players. It can reveal what has been found, but not where. It can reveal what is being sent (words, food) but not to whom it is being sent, or vice versa, for example. It can even hide, or reveal, what nature of action a player is taking.
• This opens up possibilities for an extra ‘code-breaking’ aspect of the game – the equivalent to the ‘rumour mill’ in an organisation, where players can start to surmise where the power lies, where relationships are influencing ‘play’, who is doing what and what that reveals about their strategy or agenda.
• Different ‘modes of play’ with regard to transparency can be applied to different play sessions, which will reveal the impacts of ‘policy’ on the way that play unfolds in a specific instance.

Because I have never pursued any specific ‘learning outcome’, this has been a very different experience of learning game design. It was inevitable that the game would be ‘about’ communication, at some level, because of the nature of its inspiration, but the main difference has been that I started with the game, and the learning outcomes have emerged. I did not begin with a list of outcomes and then start to build a game to support those.

But surely if we do not start with the learning outcomes, we will not end up with the product our client needs, or a product which will be saleable. Surely it is only because this is speculative work that I have been able to do this, and I have just got lucky that such a rich set of outcomes have emerged.

How to do ‘Speculative’ Design to a Brief

Having been through this process, I don’t believe that to be true. I think that this can be a valid design process even if trying to match a firm client brief.  This is design itself as a form of play, and I think there are just one simple rule that you need to follow to make ‘speculative’ design like this work to a brief.

You need to choose the right theme / inspiration to match the brief. And that has two main elements; it needs to be related to the correct topic area, and it needs to be at the right level of systemic complexity – matching that of the system that the learning aims to change.

As you can see, the complexity emerges from simplicity, and considerable degrees of complexity can be added with just one new characteristic (or mechanic), so the complexity levels of game / target learning system can be calibrated, as part of the design process, leaving just one simple criteria to be met at the beginning of the design process – the right topic.

I picked Communication in Fungi, but here are just a few bits of similar inspiration I have spotted and noted down in the last few weeks. Many of these originate in nature, which may be a result of my bias towards biophilic design. But, on the other hand, if you are trying to make an organisational system ‘better’ through learning, why not start with systems which have functioned well for millions of years?

• Marketing – how Flowers Attract Pollinators
• Unintended Consequences – Parachuting Cats into Borneo (see also ‘The King, The Mice and The Cheese’ – available on Amazon)
• The Circular Economy in a Pond Ecosystem
• Procrastination & Time Management – the Exam Revision Timetable Game
• Process – Making Honey

Give it a try – start by playing at game design first, and let the learning outcomes emerge from it. The first half of each list item are not necessarily the only topic area that could be tackled by the second half, but might give you some food for thought.

Enjoy!! And do come along to the Playtest of My-Celium – 8th June 5pm BST

The post Speculative Learning Game Design (and Mushrooms) 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.

Theory of Change (TOC) was developed as a tool to address these missing elements in the design of change, and provide a framework to document, clearly, the path from the current situation to the desired goals.

As a visible reference of the design of the change, TOC can fulfil a variety of functions.

1. It provides a visible map to the change initiative, including milestones.
2. It creates a testable hypothesis for how the change will happen.
3. It provides a design for evaluation at the same time as it maps the steps to the change.
4. It communicates clearly the complexity of the process, and provides a document to which all stakeholders can give agreement.

The first step in creating a TOC is to work backwards from the desired endpoint and map outcomes that will logically lead to that goal, also drawing in the connections between these. Once that set of outcomes are decided, move backwards again mapping the outcomes that logically lead to those, and so on, until you have reached the current state. Outcomes will be added, deleted and amended many times, potentially, in this mapping process, and the discussions that stakeholders have while mapping are an extremely valuable part of the TOC process.

The next step is Developing Indicators. This is where the existing outcomes are ‘fleshed out’ with details which will be measurable. Each indicator seeks to answer the questions; Who will change? What proportion do we require to achieve for this to be a success? What is the measurement of success? When does this have to happen by?

The next step is to identify any assumptions that are inherent in the steps already covered. For example, if one of the identified outcomes is ‘Course graduates are ready to step into leadership roles’, it is possible that there is an assumption that leadership roles exist to be ‘stepped into’.

In a preceding step, outcomes were identified and connected with lines to show their causal relationship. In this stage these causal relationships are further examined. If an outcome can be connected to a later outcome (or end goal) with a solid line it means that one logically leads to the other without further need for intervention, for example, ‘learners attend course’ might logically lead to ‘learners gain attendance certificate’ but not necessarily to ‘learners gain qualification’. Such a connection would be connected with a dotted line to indicate that some intervention or evaluation needed to take place at this point to create a complete map of the change and how it will be achieved.

Theory of Change is just as valid a tool in the design of learning as it is in any other kind of proposed change, and can act as a very useful addition to the OOO (Objectives, Outcomes, Outputs) approach to learning design. There is a danger that many assumptions will creep into the OOO approach. One that is particularly problematic is the assumption that the achievement of individual learning outcomes will necessarily aggregate into the achievement of collective (organisational) objectives, without considering aspects which traditionally fall outside the remit of ‘learning professionals’. For example, these aspects might include, the agency (or lack thereof) of learners to implement new skills learned, the support, or not, of line management for new behaviours, lack of opportunity to engage in changed practices, and so on.

Using Theory of Change alongside OOO can alert learning designers and other stakeholders to these assumptions and other gaps in the chain of causality, allow appropriate additional measures to be put in place and thus give the learning initiative the best possible chance to appropriately contribute to the desired changes in an organisation.

As a design tool for learning, TOC can also obviously be a valuable aid when taking learning design into learning game design allowing us to map the complete and logical map of learning change onto the experiences we design into the games and gamification which support it.

The post Focus on… Theory of Change first appeared on Ludogogy.

“All of man’s misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room.” – Pascal, Pensées (1670)

“The only good thing for man is to be diverted so that he will stop thinking about his circumstances.” – Pascal, Pensées (1670)

Philosophy of the Bedroom and Home Entertainment

In his Pensées, French philosopher Blaise Pascal introduces us to two ideas that resonate particularly in the early 2020s:

First, an observation: It is part of our human condition – and not just a modern trend – to be unable to “sit quietly in a room”, as it echoes our mortality. At all times, humans have suffered and avoided loneliness, boredom, and the anxiety linked to facing our fragile existence.

Second, a workaround: Seeking solace in activity is an escape from experiencing our metaphysical fears. Pascal gives a definition of entertainment as a necessity to prevent us from overthinking our finitude and embrace our restlessness. Note that Pascal includes sports, war, and work within entertainment.

In 2020, two billion people have been forced into lockdown, and therefore into facing their inner fears – this accentuated by the deadly count of the pandemic. The bedroom in which we used to spend chosen and limited time in between two occurrences of outside activity, has become a physical and mental prison cell.

Following Pascal’s wisdom, at the peak of the pandemic, two philosophical attitudes have been available to help us face our confinement at home: Home Entertainment and Mindfulness. It comes as no surprise that both industries have been booming during the pandemic. Meditation apps are expected to reach $2b by 2022. Streaming services revenue increased by 30% in a year, with subscribers enjoying an average 5 subscriptions compared to 3 before the pandemic.

X-ing from Home: New frontiers and dynamics

During the pandemic, many of the activities we were used to conducting outside of the home were transferred partially or completely inside the home. As new dynamics surface, the frontier between the exterior and the interior of the home is moving.

Activities that we used to perform outside have been mostly conducted from home, bringing within the realm of the home – and with the support of online technologies – exterior elements such as: work, education, entertainment, exercising, shopping, befriending, and dating.

In addition, behaviors that are casual parts of home life have been intensified, sometimes to the point of exaltation or rupture, such as caring for each other or fighting with each other.

As part of the moving home dynamics, “escaping from home” also gained in importance to allow us to rebalance our mental health. Escaping the home, physically and virtually, changed in nature along the pandemic as we were craving for mental rest, nature hunt, and a new social.

Socializing in a distance around leisure and renewed rites of passage

If the pandemic popularized locutions such as community spread, sheltering, isolation, social distancing, it also celebrated front line heroes, essential workers, random acts of kindness, zooming, and joyscrolling. The evolution of our vocabulary reflects how the quarantine triggered our social nature. In addition to work and education, our socialization needs include connecting with family, friends, and romantic partners.

The pandemic recreated our social connections around the following modalities: sharing online activities (yoga, cooking, drawing tutorials) and conversing thanks to social networks and communication tools (Houseparty, Clubhouse, Tiktok, Amigo, Bumble), as well as nurturing distant in-person interaction (garage gym, balcony clap for heroes, outdoor movie nights).

We also revamped our rites of passage along these two lines: online graduations, streamed Thanksgiving dinner, wedding broadcast, funeral on zoom; outdoor banquet with wrapped treats, drive-through birthday party, Halloween trunk-or-treat, newborn introduction behind a window.

Our homes adapted consequently indoors with private rooms for intimate conversation, cosy area for online reception, and outdoors with garden remodeling for party hosting and garage cleaning for socially distant interaction.

Leisuring from home or from a distance

Larger access to culture is probably one of the most significant silver linings of the 2020 pandemic. As people had plenty of time closed at home, less social life, and a need to recenter themselves to balance home chores, work, and parenting, they dedicated more time to hobbies.

Reading acted as a refuge: 35% of people in the world read more books in 2020. Especially parents took more time reading with their children (Source: Global English Editing).

Culture, Music and Arts turned to AR, VR, and Mixed Reality: Museums shut their physical doors, but they created new ways for the public to tour their collections virtually (the Louvre, the MET). Paris Opera streamed its performances for free and ballet dancers filmed themselves dancing from their apartments. Stars led by Lady Gaga took part in the “One World: Together At Home” concert. Musicians gave concerts in immersive reality settings such as electronic violinist Lindsey Stirling.

Movies switch screens: As traditional theaters closed, drive-in gained in popularity. Paris offered a floating movie theater on the Seine. Streaming services have been the big winners of the pandemic with an increase of 44% in viewing time.

Sports events happened in a bubble: Many sports events have been canceled, but despite players getting COVID, NBA games were played in an isolation zone at the Disney World Bubble. Outdoors classes, garage gym, and indoor fitness had an immense success. Peloton doubled its sales in 2020.

Friends and family shared tutorials of anything possible: Cultural practice seemed less about status than acquiring new skills and sharing a common experience, be it about ballet dancing, cartooning, writing poetry, or launching a podcast!

Now what? The Future of Leisuring.

As we listen to signals from the future and investigate the driving forces in our current STEEP environment (Social, Technological, Economical, Environmental, Political), we broke down our future to three plausible scenarios:

1 – Back to the familiar: “We are social animals with physical bodies and haven’t forgotten about it. Big venues, outdoors, and travels will be fully available again.”

When the pandemic is over, we go back to our dinner parties. We welcome back the exterior world within the realm of our homes. We yearn for physical presence, body odors, non-distorted voices, human faces without masks, smiles, hugs, and more!

We have never craved that much the big outdoors, cultural life, and intellectual connections with peers. We go back to our old habits, movie nights, sports classes, travels. Renovated venues reopen and welcome large audiences for live events.

Signals:

• During the pandemic, young adults defied rules to date in hiding.
• Churches defied lockdown with back-door entrance and secret Church services.
• Our body needs vitamin D from sunlight, endorphins from exercising, oxytocin from relationships.
• $500M entertainment venue and hotel complex planned in Toronto.

2 – Pandemic-frozen: “We have tasted more immersive experiences and enjoyed it. Now comes the reign of AR/VR/MR. Culture comes to our home, it is more inclusive. Social life happens online anyway!”

The pandemic made us prioritize our relationships and we now go for lean. We avoid meeting in person unless necessary. Dating happens primarily online without leading to in-person. We move away from exterior social life to focus on the nuclear family.

The pandemic forced cultural institutions to renovate themselves. Culture is available worldwide. Mixed reality technology enables enhanced online experience. We share it in close circles in our home entertainment centers. The home has become a movie theater and the scene of our own talents.

Signals:

• We rediscover the concept of “positive solitude”.
• Tiktok launches a sexy, body-positive Silhouette Challenge.
• Clubhouse brings online dinner party-style chats.
• 2021 boom in Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT), crypto art record sales.
• Tomorrowland virtual festival set a new standard for digital events.
• Roblox’ IPO and video game boom.

3 – Creative disruption: “The pandemic scarred us, but we will grow stronger out of it. We recreate small committee quality events. A hobby marketplace develops. There is a continuity between physical and virtual, and it goes both ways. We explore new ways of being together.”

Our social nature and our tech-savviness make us adaptable and resilient under hard circumstances. We embrace different kinds of social interaction. We still enjoy “tech-free bubbles” and favor human touch. We reopen our homes.

We have discovered new ways to enjoy entertainment – arts galleries instead of big museums, small gatherings instead of large concerts. We enjoy intellectual, cultural, business, and creative conversations in small audiences and respectful settings. We also take an active part in cultural production. We give classes about hobbies and consume from others. A hobby marketplace based on mutual sharing of skills emerges.

Signals:

• During a funeral over zoom, despite missing the human touch, participants appreciate the possibility to convey participants from all over the world and make it a creative moment with a talent show and live emotions.
• French art galleries have seen record numbers of visitors end of 2020.
• Board game market gained 20% in 2020.
• Children invent versions of Among Us “IRL” extending online gaming to real life gaming.
• Clubhouse grew from 600,000 users in December 2020 to over six million in February 2021.

The objectives of foresight and futurism are to help us prepare for these plausible futures and to seize opportunity within these worlds. These scenarios might happen at different time scales (short-term reaction, mid-term innovation, long-term foresight vision) in different areas of the world. As vaccination is moving along, some countries are showing great signs of openness and physical social revival such as Israel, while others are in between reopening and closing again such as France and Germany, and others seemed to go through a slow but steady recovery process such as the U.S.A.

The post Leisuring from Home: The Future of Social Life, Entertainment, and Culture? first appeared on Ludogogy.