Were any of us a trumpeter, we’d toot that thang. Instead it sits, spit-coated and lonely in the corner, rusting in synchronicity with our Nordic Track.

The fanfare (instead, silence) would sound the launch of Evoke, the newest endeavor of esteemed gamestress Jane McGonigal on behalf of the World Bank. In what she’s lovingly titled “a crash course in changing the world,” the game empowers young people all over the world, and especially in Africa, to start solving urgent social problems like hunger, poverty, disease, conflict, climate change, sustainable energy, health care, education, and human rights. You know, the little things.

Natron Baxter Applied Gaming is lucky enough to have designed and developed the Evoke platform (we did so atop the sometimes moody Ning), built the backend, and brought the astounding work of McGonigal, Kiyash Monsef, and illustrator Jacob Glaser to life. Cheers to all the hardworking Baxters involved.

The game launched March 3rd and runs for ten weeks, so get thee evoking! (The world ain’t gonna fix itself.)

We’re developing The Garden with everybody and nobody in particular in mind. We want worker/players to feel as though their garden is unique to them, so we’re imbuing The Garden with opportunities for personalization all over the dang place.

Of course, organizations customize The Garden with their unique sales or training or retention objectives. And managers customize The Garden by aligning game performance with individual job performance. But when it comes down to it, The Garden lets worker/players personalize their gameplay experience.

With the help of some amazing designers (including friendlies Emily Lonigro, Terri Falvey and Patrick Olds), we’re assembling a library of skins and sprites that allow folks to design a personal organic space. These aesthetic assets work on a macro and micro level:

Skins define the overall theme for The Garden. A skin might be a desert themed garden, for instance, or a cell-shaded or origami one. Heck, it might not be a garden at all. Depending upon the deployment, the skin might be chosen by your organization (in corporate colors, perhaps), or by the individual player.

Sprites define the style and behavior of individual plants and critters within the garden. As the game progresses, worker/players are given the opportunity to plant increasingly unique and exotic plants, and interact with increasingly curious critters. Some interactions and rewards require the combination of specific sprites, too, so exploration is continually encouraged.

Skins and sprites are designed atop a standard working logic, so styles are infinitely interchangeable. This allows us to continually grow the library of assets and keep the game interesting for the green-thumbed worker/player.

Which begs the question: what sort of interesting things would you grow?

Quest to Learn is a new education model in NYC that believes “students of all sorts can and do learn in different ways.” At the center of their lives is a steady diet of innovation, digital media, and play.

Sayeth the brilliant minds:

“Quest supports a dynamic curriculum that uses the underlying design principles of games to create highly immersive, game-like learning experiences for students. Games and other forms of digital media also model the complexity and promise of “systems.” Understanding and accounting for this complexity is a fundamental literacy of the 21st century.

Games work as rule-based learning systems, creating worlds in which players actively participate, use strategic thinking to make choices, solve complex problems, seek content knowledge, receive constant feedback, and consider the point of view of others.”

Huzzah!

Unouplus is the portfolio site of Tokyo interactive designer Yoshihiro Toda. In any language (the site is mostly kanji), Yoshi’s talent is easy to appreciate. Even moreso his skills at sneaking a little asobi into your day.

His work is worth enjoying in its own right, but reward awaits those patient few who choose a longer stay …

This intercontinental Michael Scott recounts the impetus for his efforts:

“My team used to go overboard with useless emails, thus burying the few important ones somewhere within. And sadly, thanks to the overload, replying to those few important emails would take forever,” said Agarwal, “On the other hand, they loved video games. So when I found an email solution that borrows from games like World of Warcraft, I knew I’d struck gold.”

It seems obvious: encourage employee engagement and productivity by appropriating those experiences that cause employees to _disengage_ from their full time gigs — namely, social networks, shopping, and (you guessed it) games.

We’ve hung our hat on games, given the tendency for sophisticated games to become a lifestyle. Facebook’s Farmville, with far more regular users than Twitter (and across all demographics), might be the most paid-attention-to “activity dashboard” in existence. When companies leverage the psychology of motivated gamers — and subsequently align gameplay with job performance — they’ll be swimming in rupees.

* Those with chocolate allergies are highly discouraged from attending.

“The competition is light, fun and no one gets hurt, but it’s public — social,” Reeves said. “My reputation, even if it’s just in the context of the game, is on the line, and I care just a little more than otherwise whether I do all right.”

Thus spouts Byron Reeves regarding the potential of interactive and quasi-competitive energy consumption. He’s part of a Stanford team exploring the powerful application of game psychology in lightswitch-flipping. He continues:

“The whole idea is to use all the powerful psychology of gaming, especially sophisticated, collaborative games, to change behavior in the world of energy,”

We were reminded of this humdinger in the Natron Baxter Bookmarkery following a conversation about the Honda Insight dashboard, and the dots seemed to connect themselves. h/t John Ferrara.

(A month behind on our blog posts — can you tell the Natron Baxter team is working overtime?)

“Once I found sites that had guides on which were the easy games, I beat (20,000) in like a month and a half,” she says. “It got me hooked and it was like a drug. A bad drug. A bad habit … I definitely play more games I don’t enjoy than games I do … Like, maybe 65 percent of the games I play I don’t enjoy.”

That, friends, doesn’t sound like play to us at all.

You don’t need virtual worlds when you game reality. The “serious game” designers at Natron Baxter explore the psychology and application of sponsored enterprise games, and propose a path toward total employee engagement: the very real human traits of curiosity, collaboration, and competition.

Selection is dependent upon public engagement, so hop over to the session proposal, tell us what you think, and dramatically increase the likelihood that we’ll send you fresh-baked cookies.

We’ll toss up one more notice when voting opens, and then never bug you about it again.

To be fair, the system developers probably weren’t thinking of their feedback mechanism as a game. But having established a hint of gameplay, they’ve whet the whistles of a whole slew of game-playing employees. With a little aesthetic polish, real-time team challenges / rewards, and high scores (most consecutive “perfect checkouts,” for example), they’d no doubt invigorate that latent spirit of competition.

And you’ll have to get your leisurely checkout banter elsewhere.