I wrote a whole lot yesterday that I saved as a draft, thus there will be two posts today.

Anyway today we had the third meeting of the week, in just as many days. This time however we had someone who wasn’t a part of the group to join us when we were testing the game that we had. The feedback we got was something we had thought about, but it was said and explained in such a fashion that we instantly after that knew what to do. All cred to Oskar who basically put us on the right track. It’s incredible that a small thing like that can do so much for a project. Just having someone coming from the outside, seeing things that we’re too close to see and then make us go aaaah. After that it was just a matter of fixing the broken things and we have a serious game that now not only feels like a serious game, but it also plays as one with the mechanics. So now we have both the narrative aspects in the cards that the Pablo player has, but also with his actions. Although a lot of what we have done have been abstracted, it still feels like you have a Pablo simulator. Also as a player you feel the tension, you have strategies that you can do and you have an internal economy in the game where the Pablo player gets an advantage, then the other players get an advantage and it swings back and forth like that until one side gets the upper hand.

Also the way we achieve this is both by using dice and using strategy to pick locations that is difficult for the players to reach within a certain amount of time. Although we haven’t really balanced the game, it is already now semi balanced, because if the players choose the wrong strategy they will lose, and if the Pablo player use the wrong strategy he will easily lose. So I think we got a system that works really well, which means that we have the Serious Game in the mechanics as well as in the cards that the Pablo player plays. The cards will tell the story, the mechanics will show it visually, that for instance he did a lot of bad stuff, but that he occasionally builds a school or something that benefited the people living in Colombia.

Feels good that we were able to bring the game further to a final version and it feels really great that we are finally on the right track. Not that I was ever worried, as the people in my group are really good at what we are doing.

Gamification

While I’m on the subject of serious games, I might as well add a few thoughts on the guest lecture that we had on Monday. I have to be honest I didn’t think about the gamification idea that they had and didn’t really think that much about it. I thought it was cool that they could make a game about pretty much anything, that you just make goals in real life, where people update the progress through their phones. Now the interesting part is that when they did this, smart phones didn’t exist, so there was no GPS and they used sms instead of GPS locations etc.

Now that there’s been a few days since the lecture however, the idea is nice and I know that there are games where people are out looking for stuff that they need to locate, making them travel around in the community to find small notes or whatever it is. However I do believe that those games are limited in themselves, firstly you need to pay in order to be able to create your own locations. Then you need to make sure that the location you put something in is updated. It can’t be too accessible, because people will then either think it is trash or something else. Then again a lot of people, myself included, find the notion of a message in a bottle very interesting, and I would say that a system like that kinda invoke that feeling. You don’t know what the message is, but it is from someone else and it is sort of a treasure hunt.

Anyway it’s a very interesting idea that you can make games out of something that you want people to learn, or that you want to change a certain behavior, figure out how you can change that behavior and then make a game so that the things you want to change become something fun and interesting rather than a dull command from the top of the “food chain”. This kind of competition is something that I’m going to suggest for my wife that she implement in the business she’s in. Making agents compete against each other, but at the same time make them want to to as best as they can. Several ways this can be done, but since the call center is divided into countries, they could have different countries have a competition so that the winning team will win an award and make the whole thing an experience they remember. The award could be something that the whole team can do, a team event or just an award ceremony of sorts.

I see this could be a motivational thing that people can do for their employees, on nearly any workplaces. The goal might not always be to improve production, it could also be about improving the work environment or even finding ways to save money, like one of the examples we got was to try and get the electrical bill down a notch. They achieved it by having a competition where people turned off lights that were on and every time they did so they got points. Anyway most important thing is to have a goal and have an incentive to why they should complete the goals and also know what behavior you want to change / improve.