Podcast 35: What makes a great learning game?
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Gamification Nation Podcast
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Welcome to this week's, a question of gamification. This week, I'm talking about what makes a great learning game. My name is An Coppens. I'm the chief game changer at Gamification Nation, and also the show host for this show. Serious games must still be fun We are working a lot on learning related games, HR related games, and games for all kinds of marketing related business purposes. One of the key things we focus in is both gamification and serious games for business usage. We don't just make games for fun, we want to make games that are fun, but also have a serious objective. The definition of a serious game is a game designed with a serious objective in mind, in our case that is typically a business related scenario. I want to make clear, when we say serious games, usually people think, they're boring. To be honest, a learning game should still be fun to play. If it's not fun to play, you are immediately causing a barrier for someone to make the most out of their learning experience. First things first, learning games should still be fun. How do you make a game fun? There are many ways of doing that. Interaction is definitely a requirement. It differs very much from a training setup for eLearning, for example, where you just click next. A learning game should be making you think, making you realize that maybe I don't know everything here and I need to explore, I need to find out, I need to discover what else there is to learn. Encouraging curiosity to delve deeper into the topic. Learning by experiencing What makes a great learning game? In my view, there are a couple of things. I believe a good learning game creates an experience where you are learning by doing, whether that's the doing of whatever it is you need them to learn mimicked in a digital space or in a board game space where you go through the same motions and emotions of what a real scenario would be like. For example, we made a cybersecurity board game where the players have to defend the company when a cyber attack happens. The game was created to help salespeople to sell more cybersecurity insurance and understand why a business owner should have such insurance. It's a very specific objective. We created an experience, there was emotion in the game because people could lose their business, they could be fined a lot of money, they could lose a lot of money based on cyber attacks that happened. You couldn't control the attack, but you could control your chosen response as a team sitting around the board trying to collaboratively defend the business. We mimicked real life scenarios. Life like experiences work best for adults With adult learners, in my opinion, the more closely it is linked to real life experiences, the more chance you have of it being a great learning game. Because you immediately provide the context that they need in order to have the ability to make sense of learning. If you think of our brain as a sense-making device, making sense of something is linking it to things that we can relate to, things that we understand. Complex topics for example, cybersecurity to a laymans person could result in responses like: I don't know nothing about cyber and it may make them run the other way. No matter how well you explain it in your learning. Experiencing what happens, experiencing what can be done is one thing. Actually going through the emotions and experiencing an attack in a game from the same perspective as the prospective client. Also gives the same kind of feedback as if you would, have expereinced it first hand in reality. It may not be as extreme as what would happen in real life in case you were the owner of a business under cyber attack. Creating an experience that resembles real life, with similar choices and consequences, is one of the key ingredients in my view for a good learning game. Appeal to the intrinsic motivation of the learner The other aspects of good learning game,
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Podcast 44: Is gaming bad for my child?
Welcome to today's Question of Gamification, the podcast by An Coppens. And today we have a guest, Andy Robertson, who also goes by the Twitter handle @GeekDadGamer, and he's a video game journalist and the author of the book Taming Gaming. I'm delighted to have Andy with us today because we're going to address the question of: is gaming safe for my child? And it's a funny story how we actually met and how it came about, with me tweeting and re-tweeting some information that I sent out around #GetSetGo, a campaign by UKIE, who is the organization supporting the games and digital entertainments industry. I was basically quoting that, "Is gaming safe for my child?" Is probably the most frequently asked question I receive at the end of seminars or webinars when I speak about gamification because my audience tends to be adults. Andy, welcome to the podcast. Andy Robertson : Hello. Thanks for having me. An Coppens : Yes, delighted to have you. So, let's delve straight in. Is gaming safe for children these days? Andy Robertson : Yeah, it's a hot topic, isn't it? And particularly during this period where the amount of games that children are playing is on the increase, and the amount of screen use. And so, often that comes with a bit of baggage, and so usually I'll start to try and unpick it. There are various places we could start. Gaming classed as a disorder An Coppens: Yes, exactly. And I suppose the one place that triggered the conversation for a lot of parents in my view is when the World Health Organization classed gaming as a disorder, and definitely, that's when I saw the increase of questions in this regard, "What should I be watching out for? Is my kid going to be addicted? Should I stop them?" So, do you see that the same way as the World Health Organization? What's your take on that? Andy Robertson : I think it is a complex topic. And I'm not against having a gaming disorder clarified so we can talk about it. But I think the challenge is that some of how it's reported was just like, "Now, finally, kids who game too much can get a diagnosis from a doctor and can be sent to clinics and can be fixed, and can be labelled", rather than actually looking at an individual child and thinking, "Okay, what's working for them and what isn't?" I think the downside was that the danger is that it granted permission to us as parents sometimes to just label an issue that a child might have had, rather than actually taking a step forwards into the games they play and asking them questions, and spending time with them playing to understand what it was and why they were playing. But that said, if you look at the detail of that gaming disorder criteria that the World Health Organization has specified, I don't really know anyone with a child who would fall into that. We'll often say at the school gate, "My son's addicted to Fortnite", but we don't really mean addiction as the World Health Organization means it, because they talk about if a child is playing games so much it's detrimental to other parts of their life, so they wouldn't be going to school, they wouldn't be eating properly, they probably would be washing properly or taking part in family activities. And not only that, but once they noticed that and had been told about that, they would then carry on doing it, they would be unable to stop in spite of those negative consequences, and then that would continue for around about 12 months, and then only then do you start falling into this clinical criteria. So, it's a really extreme end of the spectrum, which I think is actually quite helpful to help us reserve that language of addiction to clinically addicted children, which is in the minority, rather than a label we can apply widely. Gaming as a passing fad An Coppens: I think it's a great explanation, some children, and myself included as a child, I used to love playing a specific game, and I would play it until I fell asleep.
Podcast 43: How to compete in an unlevel playing field?
Welcome to a Question of Gamification, a podcast where gamification expert An Coppens answers your questions. Today's question is How can we compete in an unlevel playing field? Today's question was triggered based on a number of conversations, I was having online and offline with different people and also across different sectors. So I don't think it is actually limited to the gamification world. In fact, I think as side hustlers, unlevel playing fields happen and exist in every walk of life, whether you're a builder and you're coming up against the little man in a van and rogue builders without certification, etc., or whether you're in learning design and you come up against people who just basically talk to video or add their PowerPoint deck into a rapid authoring tool and sell it off as amazingly fantastic courses. You will have all of those. In gamification, we have quite a lot of Indies, a lot of small design houses, and I think everyone has to start somewhere. So I applaud them for starting their business, its where I started too. But we also have a lot of people who are in day jobs by reputable institutes, reputable organisations, often researchers, professors, or people working for in jobs that they don't like or which they are holding on to, for the security of the wage package. So it's interesting that we come up against them. It's also interesting to find an approach on how to compete with it. For me as a female founder, for some time, this really annoyed me. It was like, why are they not just sticking to their day job? I was focusing on the fact that in my eyes they already had a main stream of income so why do they want more? I had to find a way of, I guess, rationalising and finding a strategy on how to deal and compete with or against them. Or make peace in my mind that they are there, and they are there to stay. They're not going to go away. For every one that then becomes a real business. There are a hundred who will never reappear and should never make it. I knew I had to find a way of dealing with it and it had to be a positive way of dealing with it, instead of getting angry all the time, which with social media in the picture, is not always easy. Know what you stand for and what you don't stand for What I will say is that when you were competing against many side hustlers, is that you need to be clear on what you are and what you're not. That needs to be very clear to your target market. I would also encourage you to challenge side hustlers or rogue traders and pull them up on things that they are spreading about your industry that you do not find are so savoury or sustainable in the long run. For those of you in a side hustle, appreciate that for people that do pay fair wages and don't have unlimited access to free software tools that there are different realities out there. Keep that in mind when you make predictions about pricing and what should, and shouldn't be done. Pricing, when you have access to cheap or free resources is a whole different ball game than when you pay market rates. As a customer, if you are researching who to do business with, look out for whether they are full time working on this work only, or do they have a day job? And if that's okay with you, then absolutely go for it. B what are their values like? And then when you are shopping around, if you want the cheapest price, the indie will always win the quality and the range and the scalability that they can offer may not be there. You choose and you buy what you choose for as well. How can you deal with competition in a healthy way? Value-based positioning Well, first of all, it's coming up with your values. And for me, I always wanted to make a name for myself and encourage other women too, to join the gamification industry. I mean, for me, the reason to set up Gamification Nation was to bring a female and feminine voice to the industry. When, as I started in 2012,
Podcast 42: What have the generations in work been doing in lockdown?
Welcome to a Question of Gamification! Today's question is, "what have your people been doing in lockdown?" We will take a look at how much they've been spending their time on various tools and media, based on the global web index. We will look at where have your people hung out and you know, we'll use a few statistical research tools that have given us different insights. Generations at work But, we also look at it from a generational perspective. First things first, and… what have they been doing on mass? Well, in April, they were mainly still searching for Coronavirus updates. People were looking for, rule changes, etc. The biggest group active in doing that were the millennials, followed closely by Generation X. Generation X are those aged in the mid-thirties to mid-forties, some even end of the forties. And then, boomers are the generation that follows in age group the 55 plussers. Millennials are aged between 25 to 35 more or less and Gen Z are classed those younger than 25 better. The generation as defined by Global Web Index in their research: Gen Z – 16-23 years-old Gen Y (Millennials) – 24-37 years-old Gen X – 38-56 years-old Baby boomers – 57-64 years-old If we look at, the various generations, they had one consistency, all of those actively in work were looking for Coronavirus updates and following the statistics and probably reading some of the news. Then, after that, actually, the divide becomes more interesting. Listening to music online was very much a Gen Z sport, as in, the youngest of the generations in work would have spent 70% of their time engaging with music. Then, you know, for millennials that drops down to about 60% for Gen X 50% and for the baby boomers down to about 40%. It had a gliding scale backwards. Watching movies was the highest for millennials, watching funny videos, the highest for GenZ, so the younger ones. And then playing games actually came in a solid fourth place across ALL age groups. Now give it 10 years ago, that was not the case, so playing games on mobile playing games on laptops, if you combine the two, they were actually one of the top activities for Generation Z, a generation of millennials, and even 30% of Gen X and baby boomers are 30/35% of those were engaged in playing games, either online, or mobile or on a PC or laptops. Top online consumption (based on figures from April 2020 from Global Web Index) Coronavirus news and updates (68%) listening to music (58%), watching movies/shows (49%), watching funny videos (42%), playing games on mobile (40%), and looking at memes (32%) Unless you are a Gen Z native in which case the list was something more like this: Listening to music (71%) Looking for memes (54%) Looking at funny videos (52%) So, there's quite an interesting divide. Now. Some of the other things people have done is reading business articles, looking for cooking recipes, looking for discounts, healthy eating, sports news, celebrity news. And then it goes all the way down to, well, beyond 10th place before people actually engage in learning activities like podcasts, live blogs and webinars are way down. They weren't consuming educational content If you were thinking, and a lot of my audience is in the learning space, so I would have expected it to be higher. If you're thinking that your people have been diligently learning and consuming content, think again! Most likely there will have been listening to music or listening to something, watching movies or videos, looking at memes or playing games. I'm thrilled to say that games are up there. Games enable connection and achievement Now, this was a global web index report dating back to April. Haven't yet seen the figures for May and June, but my thinking is that, this may not be vastly different. When I look at, the increase in consumer behaviour, even in just the UK, analysed by, Statista and others, we see a,
Podcast 41: Are you all zoomed out?
Welcome to a Question of Gamification. I'm An Coppens the show host for the show and today's question is one of mine. Are you all zoomed out? Yes. I mean the Zoom online meeting system or in fact, any online webinar, meeting or conferencing tool. In this lockdown, and thankfully for many of us, we are coming to the end of the lockdown. Or at least the end of remote working for some of you. For organizations like ours that have been remote from the start, we'll continue to do what you have been doing for the last number of weeks. As in work remotely and we probably see many more companies doing this. What I see is there's an awful lot of debate on how great it is that more things are moving online and how great it is. I champion that. I would be the first to say, yes, I think it's good that we are exploring all opportunities and all ways of communicating, I am definitely all for it. One-way traffic or Talking heads syndrome What I also increasingly see, and this is what I feel a bit more opinionated about, because of our gamification work where we try to encourage engagement, and this is the talking heads syndrome. I think in most of the meetings that I've been in online, whether they were conferences, learning events, et cetera, the trend is towards more talking heads, video heads. People talking at you with very limited interaction. In fact, in some online conferences, they are even going so far as saying, please do not post questions on the sidebar whilst people are speaking. Or the other example where they are at least trying I guess, where there is a sidebar in the software, where you do get encouraged to ask questions but then nobody answers anything and you are left with to nothing, no interaction or no questions answered. The people that are actually speaking rather than just ramble on about whatever hobby horse topic, they are on. Some of them are very informational. Don't get me wrong. But it's very much an information one-way street and very little about the two-way interactive experience that most learners need for them to make sense out of information. The side or backchannel matters I'm also part of other networks where I actually feel, you can have a great sideshow going whilst still listening to the speaker. I think that is more true to reality. In most situations, if you're training in the classroom, primarily, you'll always have side chat, side conversations and sometimes these side conversations will make the mainstream. Sometimes they don't. I think that's natural. So for people to be asked to shut these natural responses down, I think is going against human nature. What is worse and more likely to happen is that they will join each other on Slack and start slagging each other off, or the speaker off or worse again, tune out altogether and leave the meeting or conference run in the background. I have definitely done that on a lot of online events and conferences in recent months. Making your online meeting or conference more interactive? What can you do to make your Zoom or whichever webinar tool that you use more interactive? The first thing is to actually look for questions and to engage people, to comment on specific topics. You can include polls. Most of the webinar or online meeting software, these days have polls as a functionality, where you can get like a temperature check. As a rough guide, I would say every five to 10 minutes, you should schedule in some activity in order to keep people engaged, whether that is a Q and A, whether that is a quiz, whether that is a poll, whether that is a question what are your thoughts. Ideally, go further and get people to work together on something. People work together in the real world. I would go even further than that and set them a challenge where they can break out into breakout rooms, work on it together, and then have per group feedback very much like you would do in a, in a seminar setting.
Podcast 40: What does loyalty mean in times of crisis?
What does loyalty mean in times of crisis Welcome to a Question of Gamification. I am An Coppens, the show host for this show and the CEO and chief game changer at Gamification Nation. Today, I want to answer the question, what does loyalty mean in times of crisis? I will give a bit of a health warning to start with, that this will be a very personal and probably a very honest podcast episode in the sense that what we see all around us is probably the same for most of us. How we see and how we experience what is going on with Covid-19, business, family, friends, is what's different based on all of our own previous experiences. The topic of loyalty is interesting because in gamification, we often design for loyalty, for consistency, for continuous support for either a company, a product or even a service offering. We often get asked to make learning sticky, which is effectively a request to train people to be loyal to training itself, but also loyal to specific pieces of content. Now, what I'm noticing, and I wonder if it's the same for you, is that loyalty during this time also has many more meanings. Or maybe it's just the same, only experienced much more in your face now, than it used to be before. I think as a small business loyalty from your customers, loyalty from your suppliers and loyalty from the leaders towards the people that work for you. Loyalty in times of crisis? Well, I have to say what was striking in the early weeks of this COVID19 lockdown, is that our pipeline went from a healthy pipeline of many potential projects to nearly completely gone in the space of two weeks. The biggest companies were the first to drop the enquiry and to close the ranks. The smaller ones led us a little bit on the long finger and you know, eventually also had to park or pause. From the existing clients, it was also interesting to see who's being loyal and who we could turn to because as soon as we started losing pipeline, one of the steps I took was to reach out to our client base and say, look, is there anything else we can do for you? Is there a project that you've been thinking about that you now have time to execute? The response to that was also interesting. Those that we worked well with, and you know, although they didn't have immediate projects, we're able to reach out and say, Hey, why don't we do this? Why don't we look at that? And a few others rang me personally to say, "Hey, we'll keep an eye out for something. You know, we don't have anything right now that we can move on with but, you're first on the list when we do." You know, those are heartening things when everyone is feeling the pinch of lockdowns and potential closures. We are no way near as bad as a retail store or a bar or restaurant who have to completely lockdown and many won't make it out of this crisis. Saying that, we didn't actually expect to be hit as much as we are, because in reality, our business has been functioning remotely since its inception. That's how we structured it. That's how I wanted it to be, to have, let's say, a digital nomad lifestyle. And you know, most of my team is the same. You know, we meet when we can in person, but we don't have to meet on a regular basis to be effective and to deliver the services we do. So it was interesting to see that even though we are structured that way, that we are still significantly hit. Reality check We had eight live projects, out of the eight only two are still alive. We had, as I said, a healthy pipeline. That one completely evaporated within the space of two weeks, and we have not, so far been able to generate new business. The team, on my side, I've been honest with from the start. My guys, we have a small team of seven people. Most of them are on long term freelance arrangements with us. So we're very much tapping into the gig economy. What I could have done is say to everyone, looks like, we're closing, closing projects and therefore thank you very ...