…the goal shouldn’t be to overlay rewards and achievements, the goal should be to get people more involved in experiences in meaningful ways.
Koreen Olbrish – “Reflections on LEEF 2011″ – eLearn Mag
Couldn’t have said it better myself. It’s not about the game. It’s about the experience and the outcome. Games are just one type of immersive experience. This doesn’t just apply to learning, either.
…you end up killing the intrinsic motivation to do things you didn’t need to be rewarded to do before.
Aaron Silvers – “On Education, Badges and Scouting”
Both Koreen and Aaron make similar points. Don’t do something (like trying to gamify everything) just because you can. Do something because it will give your users great experiences that lead to meaningful outcomes.
It’s simple, really:
- What do you want your users/learners to DO?
- How can you make a great experience that gets them to a point where they CAN?
One of the coolest experiences I had at mLearnCon last week was playing A Game of Phones, a wonderful creation from Kris Rockwell (@hybridkris) and Alicia Sanchez (@gamesczar). Every attendee received a deck of cards when he or she registered, and a brief tutorial of how to play.
The basic premise is training and performance challenges presented to two or more players, who can then play technology, hardware and expert cards to offer up a potential solution. Both players state their case, and then they can either debate or they can have a third party judge their proposals.
At the end of the day on Wednesday, they held a tournament, judged by none other than The Beard and Jason Haag. Surprisingly, there were only eight of us who entered, but the ideas generated in this tournament were simply amazing. The energy level was high and the debates and follow-up discussions with the judges and participants were enlightening. Aaron or Kris should be posting some video and pictures of the event soon.
The three top scorers were myself, Stephanie Daul and Aisha Taylor. The final battle was between Stephanie and myself, and I ended up winning. It was so much fun, and such a useful game. I can’t wait to take it back to some folks I work with to generate some ideas for solving our mobile learning problems, or just to start talking about mobile solutions.
You can order the game as is, or you can request some tweaks to make it more specific to your organization. I highly recommend at least grabbing a deck or two and playing a few games with your team and then sharing some of the best solutions with management, and then playing the game with them! It’s a great way to show the benefits of a game in a real world environment that produces innovative, but practical solutions.
Most importantly, it was a lot of fun to play!
Additional Information:
*Update 07-08-2011*
The website for this game is agameofphones.com.
This one’s for Kenny.
Just simple, beautiful design. Read more here.
