If you are interested in starting a local meetup group where you can meet others who are interested in gamestorming and practice your meeting mojo, please leave a comment here and let’s get that conversation going!
We have proposed a panel at the SXSW Interactive conference on Gamestorming. Here’s the description:
Work is getting flatter. There’s no central server dishing out orders. It’s a peer-to-peer, co-evolving world. The team that flocks together, rocks together. The future of work is not about dull routine, it’s about being more human. It’s about curiosity, exploration, flexibility and imagination. Gamestorming is for people who want to design the future, to change the world, to make, break and innovate. It’s a kind of Jedi-judo for inventors, explorers and change agents who want to engage the swarm, surf the infosphere and fan the creative hive to an excited state. Gamestorming is a practice made of people, paper and passion. The enabling technologies are sticky notes, whiteboards, index cards, loose rules and fast action. Gamestorming is a mashup of game principles, game mechanics and work. It’s about weaving energy and fast-feedback loops into your work, into your meetings with co-workers, into your design and development activities. Gamestorming is the future of work. Our panel of Gamestorming Jedi will infect you with the Gamestorming virus, so you can carry it back with you and unleash the contagion to the other nodes in your network. There is no antidote.
SXSW selects panels based on votes and comments from people like you. So get on over there and vote!
Objective of play: Improve the onboarding process of a product or service.
Number of players: 5-30
Duration of play: 30-60 minutes
How to play:
An example party invitation.
Strategy:
This is essentially a metaphor-generation game that allows participants to imagine how they want to engage their audience. Detail is good, and players who go whole-hog with imagining their party as anything from a white-tie gala to a potluck are likely to be successful as long as they carry it through. Interesting discussions will ensue when participants go for different versions — are we a come as you are party or do we have a festive dress code? Must you RSVP or can you just show up?
Why invitations?
At Bolt Peters, we often think of successful technology products as being more than just friendly. They are literally inviting — asking their audience to use them, rewarding them when they do, and asking again for higher levels of use and engagement. When deploying a conversion funnel, especially for gradual engagement, an enticing and escalating invitation is a critical piece of the puzzle.
Object of play:
Brainstorm multiple solution and answers to participants pressing problems…while feeling like a 7-year old again.
Number of players: 10-50
Duration of play: 30 minutes – 1.5 hours
How to play:
1. Everyone is handed a piece of construction paper.
2. At the top of one side, participants are asked to write their biggest, most pressing problem the group can assist with and then their name on the reverse side.
3. Ask participants to be as specific as possible with the question. (i.e. “What low or no-cost ways can I increase referrals for my service business?”)
4. Make sure participants leave enough space below their question for multiple answers.
5. Have people start folding their paper airplane with the question ending up the inside of the folds.
6. Recommend each person decorate their plane individually to be able to find it later on.
7. Once everyone has completed their airplanes it’s time to fly! Have everyone stand up and toss their planes into the wild blue yonder!
8. Each participant grabs an airplane that doesn’t belong to them and unfolds it.
9. Next, participants read through the question inside the airplane and provide their best answer. Make sure participants place their name or initials (for smaller groups) next to their response.
10. Allow 3 minutes for answers and then call time.
11. Participants (hopefully) re-fold their paper airplane and re-launch them.
12. The cycle repeats for as many rounds as time available or until someone pokes an eye out.
13. If a participant gets the same airplane twice they should switch with a neighbor.
14. At the end of the flying time – each participant retrieves their winged worksheet.
15. Facilitator asks for volunteers or selects individuals to present questions that have universal appeal to the audience and start group discussion.
16. (Optional) Silly prizes given for best flying plane, sorriest looking plane, best design, etc.
Strategy:
Questions dictate your answers and getting answers from an assortment from different people gives participants another vantage point to their ideal solution. Also, instead of a group setting, some quieter participants with good ideas are now ‘heard’ since they have introspective time to come up with responses. What’s more, since everyone has signed their name or initials to their answer, participants will naturally engage in private conversations later on.
Refinement:
You can customize the game based on a particular meeting theme. Recently for a Maverick World Cup adventure & business excursion, we used inflatable soccer balls and had participants tape index cards to the soccer ball before kicking them. We called the game “Kickin’ It!” (Like kicking their biggest business problem.)
Object of Play: Co-create products or services using design insights gained from collaborative analysis of key frames of peoples’ activities from video clips recorded during ethnographic field work.
Number of Players: 6 – 12
Duration of Play: 7 – 8 hours
Required Resources: The Video Card Family Game requires use of a video camera (perhaps a smartphone), video editing software, graphics software, desktop publishing software, index card printing stock paper, and a printer (preferably color).
Preparing to Play: The Video Card Family Game is a research technique useful in promoting collaboration among design team members and people engaged in the front-end design process. It uses video recording as a visualization resource for ethnographic fieldwork, especially participant observation among stakeholders (typically a product innovation team) and people who will use the product or service. The preparation time depends on the nature of the project as well as the logistics of the field work.
Ethnographic field work, in the simplest terms, means going to where the people of interest gather to share in their experience and analyze it. Designers use participant observation to co-create insights for product and service design by experiencing the peoples’ activities involved, such as working in their own context, or staging an environment in which people perform the activities of interest using mock-ups or prototypes.
1. To prepare for the Video Card Family Game, the facilitator edits the video into segments of no more than two minutes each. The importance of participant observation comes into play during the selection of video segments. Participant observers select video segments using insights about what is significant that they gained during the field work.
Note: It is important to select video segments in which actions, rather than conversations, are primarily occurring. You want, predominantly, to see what people do rather than hear what they say they do. In other words, focus on video where people are involved in physical action.
2. Save each video segment with a unique file name.
3. Select a key frame from each video segment and give it a unique identifier.
4. Create a video card by copying the key frame for each segment and pasting it into two corresponding index cards in your stock paper template. Give both cards the same title. Number both cards with the same unique identifier. Leave a comment area either below, or beside, the picture depending on how you layout the index cards.
Note: The image from the key frame may need resizing in a graphics editor before pasting it onto the index card stock paper template. You paste the image on two index cards to produce duplicate video cards.
5. Print the duplicate video cards and place each in a separate stack.
6. Repeat steps 2-5 for each video segment.
Note: The number of video cards created from the two-minute segments provides a degree of objectivity in the selection process. Ideally, each game player receives a stack of 10 video cards.
How to Play:
(Allocate one hour for Steps 1 – 5 of playing the game)
1. Explain the rules of the game by providing a synopsis of steps 2 – 10 in the game play.
2. Provide players with instructional guidance on the difference between observing action in video and interpreting action.
Note: Observations come from descriptions of who is engaged in the action, what they are doing, where they are doing it, when they do it, and how they do. Interpretations involve assertions about why particular people do what they do when and where they do it. At times though, how they do it applies to interpretation when it relates to why the action occurs.
3. Group the players into pairs and provide each group with duplicate stacks of video cards.
4. Play the video segments corresponding to each video card in the duplicate stacks provided to each pair of players.
Note: Instruct the game players in each group to review the video segments in their group but not to discuss them with their partner.
5. Ask players in each group to take observational notes regarding what happens in the video segment corresponding to a video card. The idea here is for each player to personalize their video cards through writing notes on them, making them tangible research artifacts to handle and use in design discussions.
(Allocate 30 minutes for Step 6)
6. Ask each pair of players to discuss what they saw in the video segments and arrange their video cards into “families” that share a theme, before placing them on a table. Any theme is appropriate as long as it makes sense for the design focus of the game.
(Allow 1 hour for Steps 7 – 8 )
7. Ask each player to choose a favorite “family” of video cards from those they identified with the other player in their group. Doing so makes that player responsible for relating the design focus to user input as exhibited in the resulting “family” of video cards.
8. Attach each favorite “family” of video cards to a poster and write a heading for the theme it represents. Organize the video segments corresponding to each “family” for easy review.
(Allow 3 – 4 hours for Step 9)
9. Bring all the players from all the pair groups back together with their posters. Ask each player to describe and show their favorite “family” of video cards and invite other players who think their video cards fit, or resemble, the theme to add them to that family.
Note: The game property of the play comes to bear at this step, since the idea of the game is to pass as many cards from your stack to others as possible. The player describing their favorite “family” attempts to avoid further additions to their theme by playing the relevant video segment and explaining why the proposal to add another video card does not fit. No single player has seen all the video segments. Therefore, accepting or rejecting a video card for each theme depends on all the players reviewing the video segment from which the video card proposed for addition is drawn.
(Allow 1 hour for Step 10)
10. Document the themes by having members of each group write a structured description using the following format:
Strategy
Video of people’s activity is one of the most challenging resources used in design research. Playing and replaying video segments for review is time consuming and, depending on the number of people involved and the type of activity recorded, difficult to distill into agreed upon insights. The Video Card Game’s design provides a collaborative structure for interaction between designers and users to co-create insights for product and service design from video sources.
When playing the Video Card Family Game, facilitators need to remember that, even though the video cards give the video a tangible mode of expression, the images remain on relatively small cards, whether on the surface of a table or attached to a poster on the wall. One can imagine an interactive wall display like Microsoft’s Surface that minimizes the legibility problem. Short of such a solution however it is important to keep in mind the logistical limitations imposed by rendering video representations of action onto video cards.
Provenance
The Video Card Family Game draws from the “Happy Families” children’s card game, a game in which players collect families of four cards as they ask one another in turn for cards of a particular archetype. The goal of “Happy Families” is to collect a family of four cards, forming a stack. Collecting the most stacks makes you the winner.
Werner Sperschneider, a user-centered designer, at the Danish industrial manufacturer, Danfoss A/S, created the initial version of the Video Card Game as a method for combining ethnographic and visual research methods using video. Design researchers, Margot Brereton, Jared Donovan, Stephen Viller, at the University of Queensland, as well as Jacob Buur and Astrid Soendergaard, of the University of Southern Denmark, and the University of Aarhus, respectively, also provide case studies of its use.
The rendition of the game offered here refers to it as the Video Card Family Game for the explicit purpose of making it clear that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance is a key criteria in the gaming process for deciding to which themes a video card belongs.
Mouse Traps break the worry cycle to develop new habits and behaviors
Worry is something that we all of have. Worry stops us from;
Worry follows a familiar pattern
Event (internal or external) –> Worry (Thoughts & Feelings) –> Worry—Physical (Stress reactions) –> Worry—Behavior (Checking & Avoiding) –> returning to Worry
So how do mouse traps break this? A mouse trap has an external worry attached. Fears from getting injured, to rodent phobia etc…
Attaching and working through a Worry, creating familiarity with the worry, determining the exceptions to the worry and what solutions can happen, and the final step is attaching a solution that the person has to the mouse trap.
Here is how I generally sequence Breaking the Worry Cycle with Mouse traps.
Mouse Traps and the Worry Cycle – good stuff. To discuss this further contact me
Michael Cardus is the founder of Create-Learning an experiential based consulting, facilitation, training and coaching organization. Leading to successful results in retention of staff talent, increased satisfaction with work, increased collaboration and information sharing within and between departments, increased accountability of success and failures, increased knowledge transfer, increased trust as well as speed of project completion and decision making of Leaders, Teams and Organizations.
Entrepreneur and hipster Marcel Botha of Mutopo shows a copy of Gamestorming, hot off the press! Can’t wait to get my own copy 
(Photographer unknown)
Gamestorming author Dave Gray was just interviewed by Mac Slocum of O’Reilly Radar:
We’re hardwired to play games. We play them for fun. We play them in our social interactions. We play them at work.
That last one is tricky. “Games” and “work” don’t seem like a natural pairing. Their coupling in the workplace either implies goofing off (the fun variant) or office politics (the not-so-fun type).
Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, and James Macanufo, co-authors of the upcoming bookGamestorming, have a different perspective. They contend that an embrace and understanding of game mechanics can yield benefits in many work environments, particularly those where old hierarchical models are no longer applicable.
In the following Q&A, Gray discusses the collaborative power of games and how they can cut through increasing workplace complexity.
Read the whole interview here.
Complex simulation illustrating communication by people listening and sharing information in a manner that other people can understand the message being received as well as sent.
Creates environment to transfer, strengthen and re-work systems of communication with intra as well as inter departmental systems.
Can also be used to highlight different idioms and references that are used internally, this can be confusing to other departments and cultures (for global organizations and teams).
The objective is for the group to assemble themselves according to the directives and place the Communicate This puzzle pieces into their proper order.
Secondary objective is for the group to explore a complex process that requires mapping, planning, strategy, and situational leadership of each team member.
Concluding in the group exploring and developing improved use of communication systems, process mapping and listening plus speaking for understanding.
Prior to beginning this activity with 18 people (see group size above for different group sizes) laminate and cut out each of the square Communicate This puzzle pieces. Place each piece into its own separate envelope, you will need and use 18 envelopes.
The Communicate This grid should be on a table somewhere on the opposite side of the room of where you will have the group gather.
Split about ¼ of the room and place on a table the Communicate This blank grid. In the other ¾ of the room will be the working area for the team. It helps to lay a rope or use masking tape to mark the “Grid Area” and “Planning Area”
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Have the guidelines written on flip chart paper
Hand out the puzzle pieces in a random order to the people; ask them NOT to open the envelopes until the activity begins.
Below is how I generally explain the initiative
“Each of you contain within your envelope specific pieces of information that is needed for your personal advancement and the teams overall success. Please keep the envelopes sealed until the countdown timer begins.
The objective of this simulation is to place each of the puzzle pieces in the correct order in less than 60 minutes, and then place the puzzle pieces into the Communicate This grid in under 30 seconds. Here are the guidelines;
Any questions? Your time starts NOW.”
Communicate this is a challenging activity. Expect yelling, confusion, and some chaos in the beginning.
For the team to complete the task a shared use of language for the symbols will be either formally or informally created. Some of the names of the symbols are not commonly known, for example ampersand. Additionally global team members may not know and have the same symbol and description; this creates a great discussion for the processing. This may / will create confusion and frustration for people who are working to solve the puzzle.
Pay attention to the group dynamics; are they all working together? Are they splitting into smaller teams? Are the smaller teams sharing information with the larger group? Who is keeping track of the time?
Once the team is all in place and they are ready to transfer the pieces to the grid, did they remember that once the 1st person crosses the line the 30 seconds for completion starts. Teams need to also plan for how they are going to move everybody in a sequence from the Planning Zone to the Grid Zone and place each piece correctly in the Puzzle Grid.
As you can see this is a multi process, situational leadership simulation.
Here are some ideas;
Show or list Great Team Dynamics Include;
Ask the people to break into groups of 4 to discuss and find areas in the initiative that match the Great Team Dynamics.
Following about 10-15 minutes of small group discussion ask the groups to share what they discussed.
Ask the group to split into 2 groups of 6 and to come up with an example from their work lives that is similar to Communicate This.
Allow each group to share the example, and then ask each group to create a solution based idea that can change and improve the example either team explained.
First saw a version when working at a Corporate Conference Center in Buffalo, NY. While co-facilitating a Global Corporate Team with Dave Davenport of DxM
![clip_image002[11]](http://www.gogamestorm.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/clip_image00211.jpg)
![clip_image002[13]](http://www.gogamestorm.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/clip_image00213.jpg)
Michael Cardus is the founder of Create-Learning an experiential based consulting, facilitation, training and coaching organization. Leading to successful results in retention of staff talent, increased satisfaction with work, increased collaboration and information sharing within and between departments, increased accountability of success and failures, increased knowledge transfer, increased trust as well as speed of project completion and decision making of Leaders, Teams and Organizations.
