A couple weeks back I was invited to participate in a fantastic discussion at SFMOMA entitled Museums as Game Board. Held in conjunction with the museum’s inspiring ArtGameLab, I was joined on the panel by GlichLab’s Sarah Brin, Ian Kizu-Blair and Sam Levigne from Situate, Tom Russotti, an experimental art/game designer who was Skyped in from somewhere in Eastern Europe, and SFMOMA’s superlative Erica Gangsei, who also served as the moderator of the panel.

Before an hour-long discussion (which will hopefully be available as a podcast at some point in the near future), panelists were invited to talk briefly about their work, and what they see as the intersections between games and museums. Ever since my cover piece for Kill Screen last summer, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about play in the context of a museum space, and so I was thrilled to get the chance to articulate some of my ideas. The following is the text that I prepared for April 19th panel. Although the actual presentation was differed slightly in specifics, my overall theme was the same.

Natron Baxter Applied Gaming designs and realizes blended reality games for social good. Across web, mobile, and no-tech platforms, we use games to solve real problems for organizations, inspire new perspectives, and bring out the best in people.

For us, applied gaming refers to the thoughtful application of game design to address problemtunities from a novel perspective. Game design is by one such tool available to contemporary organizations, and though games are by no means the magic bullet for every situation, in the case of museums I believe that there are some fundamental synchronicities that make games and museums a great match.

I believe that at their core games and museums strive for the same goal: namely, providing people with emotional experiences. Whether in the form of a particularly striking landscape, or a tense round of chess, at their best both seek to move individuals.

When we talk about where museums and games might intersect, I think that there are a few dimensions that it is useful to articulate. On the museum side, it is helpful to get a sense of whether we are talking about the physical space within a museum: the lobby, café, gallery floor, etc., or about the mission of the museum itself (e.g. providing education about a particular time) regardless of where the public intersects with that mission.

On the game side, on one hand we can talk about games that are designed to draw attention to things that already exist within the museum space, or we can refer to games that are intended to serve as physical, emotional, or intellectual experiences in line with the museum’s content – that is, not as a supplement to the museum experience, but as entirely other way to experience the museum.

While there is certainly tremendous value to games that make use of existing museum exhibits in the context of the physical architecture of these spaces – indeed, Natron Baxter has helped produce exactly these types of games, most notably Find the Future with Jane McGonigal’s SuperBetter Labs and the New York Public Library – what I’d like to address is the second type of game. Because I think that given the overlap between the goals of game design and museums, I think there is a real opportunity for game designers to partner with museums to produce fundamentally new ways to interact with the traditional domains of museums such as history, art, and science.

(Image via)

I mention science because growing up in Toronto, Canada and Canberra, Australia, science museums were a huge part of my childhood, and I think that they offer a great perspective on why games and museums are such natural bedfellows. These are some pictures from the Ontario Science Centre, which was a staple of my youth: I both visited the science centre on countless occasions throughout my formative years, and ended up working at the science centre during high school. What science museums show us is how the use of well designed artifacts can offer a type of learning that is altogether distinct from what we might think of as “display-oriented” museum exhibits. Rather than relying on absorption of knowledge through reading and observation, science museums make use of an embodied learning – one that relies on tangible, experiential interactions with artifacts. This type of procedural learning is great because it maps what the subject of the learning with the experience of the subject, and it is in this respect that I think games can do great things with places like SFMoMA.

(Image via)

What we see here is a picture of SFMoMA’s rooftop garden. This is a great image because it shows us the space where we as patrons of the museum are put most proximate to the artifacts that populate this fantastic space. What I think is sad about this image, however, is that while this space offers so much potential for bringing visitors into tangible contact with works of art, the space is still organized around the logic of a divide between the art and the viewer. The benches in this picture really drive the point home for me: families are expected to sit in a row, like spectators at a baseball game, and not to forge connections with and through the art.

What is heartening to know, however, is that this has not always been the case. In fact, for a time during the middle of last century SFMoMA’s sister organization in New York was engaged in projects that sought to both forge new connections between visitors to the museum and the objects within the museum, as well as to extend the mission of the museum outside the bounds of its physical location

In the 1950s, MoMA sponsored a competition which was, according to a press release from the time “to encourage the design of new kinds of playground equipment which, by its shape and use of colors, would stimulate children’s imagination.” Stimulating imagination — as an aside, to me that sounds exactly like the type of goal that game designers and museums might try to pursue in collaboration. The museum received 360 submissions, and pictured here is the winning result, which was put into production by Creative Playthings.

And throughout the next decade, MoMA repeatedly partnered (with varying degrees of success) with artists, architects, and industrial designers to bring this notion of engaging with the museum to the world outside the museum’s walls. What we see here is one of the results from this partnership. Built in Brooklyn, NY, Charles Forberg – the architect of the playground – described its logic beautifully: “This design intentionally accepts traditionally rugged and indestructible materials with the belief that these can, in provocative arrangements, provide children with play excitement which does not depend on the materials themselves, but rather on the spaces they create. All of the parts are stationary, but they are intended to intrigue the child to move and to give him rich and varied spaces to be in, run through, climb up…“

Images from Kill Screen 

Coming back to the present, what we have now is an opportunity to try to re-visit the types of partnerships that MoMA forged in the mid 20th century. 

My friend Keita Takahashi, designer of the celebrated PlayStation 2 title Katamari Damacy, offers us a nice vision for how we might go about this type of project, since his career trajectory shows an unconscious harmony with the goals of 1950s MoMA. Between jobs as designer of digital games, Keita took on a project to create a playground in Nottingham, England. When I spoke to him about why decided to make this shift in his career path, he corrected me, pointing out that game design and playgrounds stem from the same core. To quote Keita:

“I prefer to make things that are entertaining; not just videogames. That’s why I want to make a playground, and if I’ve got a good idea, of course I want to make games too. I think developers now are too fixated on what’s on the screen. Since your job is to create fun experiences, I think it’s good to expand your horizons. It’s so wasteful not to.“

What I am encouraging here, therefore, is for museums and game designers to expand our horizons: for us to come together to dream up new ways to create meaningful experiences that we are uniquely suited to bring to the public. As Keita said, it’s so wasteful not to.

We’ve been hunched over the keyboards, catching red-eyes, and working dutifully on lots of promising things these past several weeks, such as supporting and improving SuperBetter so that it can better help more people; monitoring fundraising games that strengthen American hearts and communities; developing a solid foundation for EVOKE 2; crafting a statement of work so mighty that our own daughters chimed in with advice; and tending to ourselves by spending a few days together finding harmony in Music City.

Indeed, all things that matter greatly to us and our livelihood are possibly not that interesting or inspiring to you. Or maybe they are! The growth spurt we’re in now has left us feeling some trippy growing pains and made it damn near impossible to see straight.

Curse you, hormones!

Uncovering exactly where it hurts has been enlightening to say the least, but our hope is that “talking it out” by documenting it here will serve as a waypoint of sorts, for us and those of you who feel (or have felt) our pain, too.

Putting pep in our step.

We’re constantly fiddling with how we design and develop games, from creating more ambitious project proposals that better align our corporate wants and needs with those of our clients’ to implementing workgroups and progress reports that encourage meaningful and rewarding collaboration to honing our processes so that they facilitate agility and uproot apathy. Every effort to improve the ways in which we work together will ultimately make future player experiences as lush and lovable as possible.

Or so our moms say. (Early Happy Mother’s Day, moms!)

Actually accomplishing these goals is rarely easy, and the challenges are made that much more grand since we have at least one person working in each mainland U.S. time zone, including several mates in the U.K. And in an industry where doubts and prophecies about the potential for games to bring about the level of societal, environmental, and economic improvements we pursue rain down like badges from the heavens, we’re reminded of former NFL head play-caller Brian Billick when he said, “Son, your potential is going to get me fired.”

Well said, coach.

We’re growing up, learning new ways to do what we do, and often fantasize about making games that players – and we – love so much that awkward poems soon begin filling volumes of spiral-bound notebooks and comment boards everywhere. As fun as fantasizing can be, it does little to help us figure out which games to chase or let come to us.

It’s in moments like those we look in the mirror, flex our scrawny muscles, and take a good, hard look at ourselves. It isn’t always pretty, but it helps us spot and sort our wants and needs. Keeping tabs on our changes early and often is one way we’ll turn our potential energy kinetic and transform ability into duty.

We put our mind to it in many ways, some more abstract than others. For example, we remind ourselves of our principles when impulse steps on the toes of patience (which happened at every winter formal we went to) and ask tough questions about them to help regain our bearings.

Principles such as, “Put the Player First,” “The Story is the Thing,” and “We’re Already Playing,” function more as understanding chaperons than finger-wagging parents on our journey to make games that bring out the best in people, especially when our primitive instincts try to spike the rational “play it cool” punch bowl. As such, we occasionally take on tasks that don’t bring out the best in ourselves. Challenging, sure, but are they worth the cost?

Everybody MOSCOW now!

Practically speaking, we’re getting better how we admit and take to heart the things we do when working on games and game platforms where a rewarding play experience is the desired outcome (which is to say, always). For example, the MoSCoW method is a useful mnemonic tool we use to pick out and prioritize wants and needs during a round of “Name the Requirements!”

And when applied to how we work, they help define the boundaries, roles, and responsibilities on various projects while making our efforts more focused and gameful. Specifically, we poke and prod our answers to the following four questions before, during, and after a project.

What are the decisions / activities we:

• MUST make / do
• SHOULD make / do
• COULD make / do
• WON’T make / do

We don’t always agree unanimously on the first answers, but they lead to more questions that, in turn, prompt deeper and more reasoned responses. It gets a bit Socratic after a while, but we believe some things are more important than reaching consensus. It’s the same idea that lies at the root of our contextual inquiry process: If we know the outcome from the start, then we aren’t making the best game possible.

It isn’t always a pleasant feeling to disagree with someone we respect, trust, and care about; someone whose personality and insights end up making our company stronger and more “mirror-friendly.” We openly share our disagreements with each other because we respect, trust, and care about game players and the work needed to make better games. We care about each other.

And when one of us claims to “know” something about a player or a game or anything without sharing why, it’s a signal for others to ask questions. Empathy and mindfulness go a long way to help clear obstructions when our view of an answer’s merits and facts are clouded by opinions or a belly full of butterflies.

If it sounds at all tortuous and cumbersome, you’re right. We won’t argue with you there. Yet in some weird way, it’s how we keep things simple. Calling on this routine from time to time helps us do the hardest work first so it isn’t as difficult the second time, the time after that, and so on. It helps us get on the dance floor faster so we can perfect our moves throughout the night. It gives us a chance to pinpoint exactly where and with whom to dance next, and allows us to do so confidently. And it keeps us humble because one wrong move could find us flat on our bums.

In short, MoSCoW (Must, Should, Could, Won’t) helps us prepare for and find novel solutions to problems created by time, space, movement, and Principal Skinner’s electrified dance floor.

Twist and sprout!

Keeping a business running when its key players are working together over a span of 3,000+ miles and up to ten time zones between them is loaded with unique challenges. In turn, they have the potential (there’s that word again) to place a crippling strain on getting things done.

We each work within our own domains under minimal or no supervision with responsibilities that shift throughout the day, so even “little things” like passing a design to be marked up and hooked up can make for some tricky hand-offs. And where one of us works alone behind a desk all day, others enjoy the luxury of meeting in a central studio, even if working on a troublesome problem is, itself, not quite a luxurious responsibility.

How do we know, then, that we’re making the best games we can?

Traditional symptoms of being productive (or unproductive, in some cases) include measurable traits such as hours worked, cost per unit produced, revenue generated, net profit, and so on. They make it easy to take a quick glance at the crowd and see how things are going. Typically, a packed floor is a happy floor. But one DJ’s Electric Slide is another DJ’s Teach Me How to Dougie.

In other words, traditional tools aren’t for everyone. And in some respects, they fail to represent what we’re capable of doing.

Collectively, over enough time, they might help us spot deficiencies and opportunities hiding in plain sight. If, for example, we notice after a long project that we spent more time and attention maintaining a game than expected, it’s good to know where along the way we lost the beat so we can adapt and improve. It’s Agile Development 101 (make, test, breakdance, improve, repeat).

At worst, retrofitting an operating framework into our world because it is the most familiar framework might severely impair how we make games. Living by the books to standardize a process in hopes of striking the optimal performance-to-reward balance (“We do X, expect Y in return, and get Y in return) threatens to stifle some of our basic needs. And when decisions are made based on symptoms rather than on the traits to which we as a company are naturally disposed, we end up limiting our ability to fully express our values (“We enjoy doing Z, and will work to optimize the return in relation to our effort until we satisfy a condition”).

We aren’t considering doing an about-face from the system that got us this far. And we aren’t suggesting the old views are less meaningful or important. Instead, we work to augment and edit it with a careful touch and mindful awareness of our nature. We aren’t biologists, but we’ve learned from smart ones that an organism’s growth potential is limited directly by its ecosystem; as fish in a pond, for example. Where our survival and ability to thrive reaches escape velocity, though, is when we identify new methods for investing in outcomes.

In light of ongoing research that suggests we long for purpose (a story we tell ourselves or buy into that frames our lives), relatedness (finding and maintaining close social connections), and expertise within our domain, adopting or creating a model based on more humane conditions might better suit the way our business runs.

It is becoming more apparent, in our practice, that the relation of people, desires, feelings, beliefs, goals, platforms, programs (or anything, perhaps) impacts the success or failure of a game – and game design company – more than the quality of each and every piece within it. And if our moms’ weekly Dancing with the Stars recaps are to be trusted confidently, the old saying “It takes two to tango” endears us to this line of thinking.

It’s a subtle yet elegant step in the move from object-oriented programming and design to outcome-oriented programming and design. On a tangible level, it’s a balancing of short-term gain with our possible, probable, and preferable futures. And for a company who tries earnestly to apply to itself the lessons we learn while making games, the move is one we must become more comfortable and confident making as we moonwalk our way across the floor.

Resilience. It’s a funny one, that word. Just when we think it’s tapped out or overworked, it pops right back up in our faces when we log in to our SuperBetter Secret HQ. That’s right, Natron Baxter is getting SuperBetter at working together so we can make better games.

Let’s start with bad guys. They hide just about everywhere in our offices, it seems. They take many forms, from the echo chamber that is a sometimes wonky Skype call to the nap-inducing cushion of a living room sofa to the ad hoc and wasteful ways of getting things done. We battle these various traps, blockers, symptoms and triggers in the name of finding more rewarding ways to develop games.

And it seems to be working.

When telecommuting tools stand between us, we brush them aside in favor of face-to-face meetings. When the creature comforts of home tempt us to take a break, we find a common space to help us concentrate and collaborate. And when we aren’t clear about why we’re doing what we’re doing, we take a few steps back and see where we went awry before mending the problem.

Ryan Larson, Natron Baxter creative director and resident Milwaukeean, put it best when he said recently, “Something we can’t lose sight of is recognizing that there’s more than the project keeping the group together. There’s the shared experience in that, but there’s also the shared experience of us all being people. In order to appreciate things together, to appreciate each other, we still need that personal connection no matter how many time zones are in between.” Not only are we each working toward individual goals and epic wins, we are each other’s best allies.

Rebounding from the little – and sometimes big – bad guys we encounter is made all the more possible when we turn to our allies for help. In developing SuperBetter we met and worked with several linchpins who, in turn, introduced us to other talented people when the unexpected happened. Our allies, it turned out, were often our power-ups when bad guys appeared.

But sometimes power-ups weren’t people at all. Kat Neville, SuperBetter front-end coder and founder of the Liphook, UK-based web design agency Capra, spends much of her day coding, writing, and designing apps for clients. Her day is loaded with bad guys. Being able to grow stronger in the middle of a 13-hour workday is a priceless luxury for Kat, and the power-ups she uses to plow through them result in better work and work relationships.

So when her Spaniel, Kenny Dogleash, needs a walk, she relishes the time away from the home office to grab lunch and clear her mind. Undoubtedly a simple pleasure, her example perfectly illustrates the effectiveness of good design. As she and Ryan have each said, “The best design works well.” Being able to apply the principles of fighting bad guys on her walk to lunch makes fighting the ones that face her on screen that much easier.

But when it doesn’t, when design feels tedious or antagonistic, finding a remedy as convenient or effective as one might hope is often challenging to the point of exhaustion. And it’s exactly in this moment when resilience comes into play. It tells us to keep going, to iterate, to improve upon “good enough.” It reassures us that we can make mistakes and live to fix them. Put simply, it reminds us how strong we really are and propels us on our quest for an epic win.

Bad guys will always stand in our way of making great games, and confronting them head on is the only way we will win.

Now that you know some of our bad guys, what are yours and how do you beat them?

For us Baxters, we relish the chance to test our design and development principles in a truly participatory, emergent fashion. Understanding that not everyone is keen on corporate theater and ego trips, we attempt to strike that pitch-perfect harmony between doing, showing, and listening. Which is why we owe bucket loads of huzzahs to all who organized and attended our applied gaming mini-workshop in New York City, including hosts Engine Yard and Amazon AWS.

A couple years ago, before the 2010 Game Developers Conference, we made up a game with the aim of helping people make more meaningful connections. We worked from the mantra that doing well in business is about who you know as much as it is what you know, and named the thing Shmoozl.

Having reflected on that experience, and believing that hosting a great workshop is about how we learn as much as it is about what we learn, we set out to share our applied gaming insight by playing and improving it with our workshop attendees. We patterned our two-hour long event after competitive free-divers, going deep on substance and surfacing for context (and snacks) to reinforce the connections we would make between experience and example.

The gist of the game was to list a “Me Word,” a single word that each attendee felt best described their profession or personality, on the back of their lanyard and draw a visual representation of that word on the front. (Pictionary rules applied.) A series of brief interactions among attendees encouraged them to ask insightful questions of each other and avoid spilling the beans outright to their guesser. (Password rules applied.)

Those who correctly guessed the most “Me Words” were top dogs and had their scorecard entered into a drawing for Engine Yard and Natron Baxter products. Attendees had permission to not participate, which several said they appreciated, and all were encouraged to give it their best shot. Everyone neglected the bar, even at our urging.

Overall, the results were positive and promising. There are kinks we need to work out before we play again, as beasts of this nature tend to have, but nothing so severe to warrant tossing this game to the back of the cabinet. What has been your favorite workshop experience or moment? And if you were with us March 1, what was a “miss” in your book? We would love to hear from you.

To make amends and get on the good foot, we will soon open the tap and share our insights and epiphanies while taking an honest look at ourselves and Applied Gaming. Frankly, we want to openly express what it is we do, why we do it, and the ways in which we can make better hard-working games – and most importantly to understand and learn from you, beloved player.

So to get your motor running, the word around the water cooler is that our very own Nathan Verrill, co-founder and resident Stanley Tucci lookalike, is moderating an Applied Gaming mini-workshop tomorrow at Open House Gallery in New York City. Please join us in a hearty round of applause and endless hat tips to the brilliant folks at Engine Yard and Amazon AWS for helping make this possible.

If you’ll be there, come prepared to nurture some important ideas with Nathan. And if you can’t attend, we’ll post a full recap of the event next week for all to enjoy. In the meantime, what playful ideas are you nurturing?

Says Zoran Popovic, director of the University of Washington’s Center for Game Science, “Foldit shows that a game can turn novices into domain experts capable of producing first-class scientific discoveries.”

A humble Baxter bows to the game’s players and designers. Read the full article here.

“One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. (Sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?) The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice.”

Interesting as this may be, what does it have to do with games? If I’m being honest, I’m not entirely sure. I started this post a week ago because I know that there is something important wrapped up in these concepts.  Choice is central to game play; no less than one of the elder statesmen of games, Sid Meier, summed this up when he noted that “Games are a series of interesting choices.”

In the words of Tracy Fullerton, in her superlative Game Design Workshop, choices in games only matter when there are consequences to these choices:

For a game to engage a player’s mind, each choice must alter the course of the game. This means the decision has to have both a potential upside and a downside; the upside being that it might advance the player one step closer to victory, and the downside being that it might hurt the player’s chances of winning. This concept is often called “risk versus reward,” and it is something we face every day in our own lives, not just in games. When Sid Meier says “interesting choices,” what he means is that the game must present a stream of decisions that directly or indirectly impact the player’s ability to win. This is because, in addition to story elements, drama and suspense in games can arise naturally from asking players to make decisions that have weight and consequence .

When we play really absorbing games, the consequences of the choices that we make – though technically restricted to the computers, consoles, or boards that enable game worlds – feel very real. As a result, games can be exhausting exercises: after playing 8 straight hours of Battlefield Bad Company 2, I’d be very suspicious of my faculty for judgement.

At the same time, games can provide framework for exploration of consequences of decisions so that the the next time we encounter a similar decision in real life we are better equipped to make a choice without having to take on the mental burden of trying to weigh the pros and cons of the alternative courses of action.

So, are games things that contribute to Decision Fatigue? Or do they have a restorative function, in effect helping to re-charge my decision making capacities? My guess is somewhere in the middle. And, by avoiding making a decision in this post, I’ve thus spared my limited mental capacity for a place where my decisions really matter: online games.

- Mathias

Masterbaxter Mathias Crawford interrogates Keita Takahashi — designer of the celebrated PlayStation 2 title Katamari Damacy — in a Kill Screen ditty that puts the play just about everywhere. Sez Keita:

“I prefer to make things that are entertaining; not just videogames. That’s why I want to make a playground, and if I’ve got a good idea, of course I want to make games too. I think developers now are too fixated on what’s on the screen. Since your job is to create fun experiences, I think it’s good to expand your horizons. It’s so wasteful not to.”

Round and round they go in the full article.

As we press on with our plan of forced sterilization better living through play, we’ve grown considerably more systematic in our efforts to distill and understand that which has worked (office ham cabinet) and has not worked (office wolf). Heck, we’ve even started writing things down in the hope of archiving the emergent truths discovered on Mr. Baxter’s Wild Ride.

One such scribble has summited the regular pile of drivel. It now stands as a proud declaration, like Tenzing Norgay in an “I’ve climbed Everest” T-shirt, and this declaration – we shit you not – shall henceforth be a part of the contract between Natron Baxter and our clients (folks what whom generally sign far more thoughtfully worded documents).

It’s a critical humdinger, we feel, because we navigate a wobbly slackline when we align game objectives with business objectives. Those objectives quibble like two enchanted ventriloquist dummies sharing a steamer trunk. But ultimately, we believe that a successful game – even one that abstracts the role of the business sponsor – is designed first and foremost to reward and delight the player. And our most successful clients* truly understand when to serve business objectives and when to serve player desire. To wit:
 

A Declaration of Player Stewardship

As co-discovered by Natron Baxter and their sexy, progressive, socially conscious clients (we’re looking at you, Maude’s House of Rugs).

1) We will put the player first, and check our decisions with a simple question: “Who does this serve?” We will only ask for something from a player – their time, their opinion, their hard work – if we offer something equitable in return. Gameplay, brand loyalty, and meaningful engagement all flow from this player-centric design.

2) We will learn what players want (and not presume to know). And sometimes, we will help them discover what they want. Regardless, we’ll treat the entire situation like that creepy tree stump in Flash Gordon, prodding various holes until something bites us. Only then will we say with certainty that players do not want our hand in their tree stump.

3) We will seek authentic, meaningful connections. We will not require players to like us on Facebook in order to play an amazing game; we will let them play an amazing game in the hopes that they will like us on Facebook. Because, um, a Facebook like is the most meaningful connection ever.

4) We will expose our intentions. It’s bad form to leave our business objectives lurking in the shadows like secret code within an episode of Little Orphan Annie, only to squelch the pre-Christmas cheer of a monocular youngster with an appeal to drink his Ovaltine.

5) We will make play voluntary, no matter how much money we spend, or how many hours we fritter away incorporating requests from every department, or the number of ever-deepening wrinkles on the foreheads of our superiors.

6) We will look inwards. If we discover that players are, en masse, cheating, challenging, or rejecting the game, we will first strongly consider what’s wrong with the game. If no one wants to dance with you, check for boogers.

7) We will violate these rules at our own peril, and only under the most compelling circumstances. We shall envision ourselves saying to our spouse “Yes, honey, I’ve been unfaithful … but check this out!”

Signed,
Messrs. Baxter
Principals
Natron Baxter Applied Gaming

Maude Furlong
President
Maude’s House of Rugs

* Cheers, of course, to the insightful, patient clients who have sharpened this appreciation of the fine balance between game and business objectives. And to those writers and designers who’ve blazed the trail with their own versions of a Players’ Bill of Rights, thank you. And to our moms – Doris, Leila, Shirley, Carol, Lena, Holly, Mélisande, and Colleen – we love you. Keep reppin’ that supermax.

Rarely do the Baxters look forward to an all-nighter with tittering glee, but all bets were off at Write All Night, part of the New York Public Library’s “Find the Future” centennial celebration. Library chatter went unshushed, bibliophiles went berserk, dogs and cats … well, you know the drill.

Some 500 alpha geeks (our kind of people, really) spent their Rapture’s Eve tearing through the stacks in pursuit of the curious artifacts in the library’s collection. What they found was not only a connection to the remarkable stories of the past, but also the inspiration to, very literally, compose an epic future. By sunup, they had done just that: the collaborative writings of the 500 players comprised a hand-bound book and the newest tome in the library’s permanent collection.

[The fine storytelling was not reserved to the printed page, either. You can conjure the event by following the #findthefuture tag on Twitter; another heartening recap can be found in this New Yorker blog post.]

As always, the Baxters are as pleased as future punch to have helped sculpt the mayhem with designers Jane McGonigal, the big brains at the NYPL, preliminary game design by Playmatics, and a host of helpful souls, including Play Nice.ly Labs, Moka Social and Green Wire. Thirty-seven jump high fives are in order. And a nap.

Begone, you heavy curtains upon the windows of Baxter HQ! Let our pale skin bathe in sunlight once again! Lo, the beachgoers love it!

Just one in a series of monster launches over the next few weeks, we’re proud to point a link to the iPhone mobile app of AOK, a “social game for social good” more accurately described thusly:

“AOK is a fun and challenging way to get recognized for contributing to, sharing, and becoming aware of the millions of Acts of Kindness already happening somewhere on this planet every day.”

Many moons ago, we were contacted by the talented, enthusiastic producers of AOK to help them sculpt a game-inspired experience that increased mindfulness of acts of kindness while maintaining the intrinsic value of Doing Good. We tucked into our game mechanics bag o’ tricks and designed a system that sat thoughtfully in the background, monitoring and nudging the little behaviors that make a social hero. With the help of many outstanding hands, we’re proud to see that collaborative vision spring to life.

A comprehensive web component and mobile iterations are stirring in the soil. In the meantime, you can read more from the producers of AOK on the Gameful blog, here, and ask yourself: “Can we make the world kinder by playing a game?”

As the boys of summer look confusedly at the slushy drifts obscuring second base, it’s high time to recall the humble origins of our national pasttime, as documented firsthand by one Cyril P. Hooker, the 19th century wharfman many historians now assert to be the true father of modern baseball. From Hooker’s own journal, rescued from the wall of a Cleveland T.G.I.Fridays, he recalls his epiphany of gameplay — and perhaps reveals another invention for which we owe him thanks:

“Gregor and One Ear slouched across the field, braying and chortling in the misty stupor of the previous evening’s drink. Gregor had filled his hat what with handfuls of tall grass and proceeded to chase One Ear with a switch, striking him mercilessly on his ear pudding. One Ear, in turn, collected rocks and debris from the occasional bare patch of earth, and these he used what as projectiles to slow the pursuit of this his slobering [sic] assailant. Were two idiots at play, those, and it warmed my very heart.

I, for my part, avoided the melee at this safe distance, having recently violated the crypt of a man who were buried in freshly pressed trousers. I watched with amusement, tho, and surely began counting the effect of their tussle, what scoring the number of times Gregor agitated the ear pudding. One Ear must have scored the same, for soon his rock throwing increased in haste. It was all Gregor could do to bat away the relentless barrage of pipes, stones, and rodent bones! Enthused as I was by this new development, I began shouting to my beloved oran-utans so as to share in the revelry: “One strike! Two strikes! Three strikes!” And this, I found, increased the fervor still!

Late into the afternoon Gregor and One Ear scrapped, until finally the cruel grip of sobriety indeed suffocated them both. And I, along, bellowed scores and heaped accolades upon these giggling dolts, amused as I was at this game-o-fication of fooles [sic] horseplay, and with my humble aim to increase the engagement of these two besotted employees of the Devil’s workshop.”

So eat sh*t and die, Abner Doubleday.

Smack it on the butt and welcome to the world Teh Daily Scrambler: a Twitter race to unscramble the headlines! It’s a Natron Baxter experiment in ‘gaming the news’ in a casual, self-sustaining way, and all you need to play is a Twitter account and a human brain. First, follow @scrmblr from your Twitter account or check out the challenge headline at tehdailyscrambler.com. To play, simply unscramble the headline — word for word — and tweet @scrmblr with the challenge-specific #tag and your answer. Be the first with a perfect unscramble and we’ll give you props. Your winning answer will also unlock the next scrambled headline, so take a shot at becoming a Newsmaker. That’s better than ice cream!

Have fun and keep in touch.

- The Baxters

Parking lot politics. Good deed safaris. Supermarket scavenger hunts. GPS-enabled truth or dare. The gems created by the participants of Natron Baxter Applied Gaming Workshops could fill a small-but-respectable portion of Liberace’s cape. What started out as a way for the Baxters to empower clients with gameful thinking has quickly turned into the Most Fun We Have All Week. And now we want to Have It With You.

More than just an opportunity to sit in a conference room (oh yeah!), our one- or two-day sessions surface the pervasive power of games, dissect and examine their gooey inner workings, and empower y’all with a process for making games to call your own. We’ll talk storytelling and science. We’ll heap praise (or rotten vegetables) upon relevant industry examples. We’ll do an activity wherein we choreograph a silly dance and try to justify it as an important Applied Gaming learning experience but in reality we JUST NEED TO DANCE. Heck, we almost feel guilty getting as much out of it as we do.

What do you get? Good gameful thinking and an old fashioned good time, including …

Workplace Cheats & Hacks – Share how you’re already “gaming” your day and doing our job for us.

Game Deconstruction – Most games are really the same game; we’ll break down your favorites and analyze the guts.

No-Holds-Barred Complain-o-thon – Bring insights and opportunities to the surface by whining about work. (Personal attacks forbidden.)

Professional Performance – Perform your nine-hour day in ninety seconds. Patterns ahoy!

… which helps us generate a set of artifacts and rules that emerged during the workshop experience, ever an actionable reminder of the collaborative mayhem of those productive hours.

Think about it. Then get in touch.

That isn’t to say we don’t want to know you and prefer you leave—we’re pleased as punch you’ve read this much—rather, the handy dandy tools available these days to marketers, advertisers, and Baxters alike do about as good a job as Picasso at accurately and deeply portraying, well, anyone. They ignore completely (or, at best, represent abstractly) the roles personality and motivation play in guiding human behavior.

Avid game designers and players know the power of compelling stories, and that people play games throughout life. We humbly want to encourage the demographers, ethnographers, and all you other “-ographers” out there to find the stories people are living. Right now. We’ll wait while you check.

No matter how sophisticated the method, analysis or doohickey-of-the-month, Science takes us only so far into the pits of human motivation.

Yes, you can scan our brains all day as we watch cartoons and Top Chef reruns, or respond to loaded questions in unnatural focus groups, and see how different regions twinkle like a shorted out Lite Brite, but you can’t measure our feelings. The experience belongs to us and us alone.

But, you can relate. That’s why you spent good money to rent the fMRI machine in the first place, right?

Sensibility to the Rescue

Since the time we thought we knew it all, we have defined our lives, our world, and our interactions through stories. Even today, expression reigns supreme.

Countless as they are, our telling and retelling of stories tugs our primal genes and guides our lives, instinctively tapping into our inherited unconscious psyche. In other words, we haven’t changed that much over time. Your great great great grandparents lived in a vibrant, lush world (no matter what the black-and-white photos show).

We attempt to reconcile the unknown with the known in a complex version of Labyrinth; keep the ball out of the traps long enough and the solution will eventually make sense. And after enough experience, of repeatedly failing and retrying, we master the task—which isn’t the same as perfecting it—and continue our journey.

And as our civilization advances, so do our stories. Don’t they?

Behold, the Archetype

Roused by the archetypal psychology work of Carl G. Jung, gurus traipse the globe helping companies and organizations understand this very important principle: Character is key and it transcends culture. Lovers in Barcelona are more similar to lovers in Walla Walla than you think.

A lover, for example, cannot merely say the words a lover says in order to woo the object of their affection. They must be love, oozing it from every sappy pore on their amorous little body. And once they’ve done that, they do it some more.

If, after an unsuccessful poetry reading outside their muse’s window they realize s/he has a thing for “rebels”, and they ditch the shtick for a leather jacket and switchblade, they’ll be seen as desperate, a fake.

Commitment matters, sure, but integrity matters more.

In the immortal words of John Locke (the philosopher, not the smoke monster), “The discipline of desire is the background of character.”

Think of all the characters you know: the ornery grandmother whose wisdom feels practical and timeless, the plucky college graduate out to change the world, the office flirt looking for a little fun, or the middle-aged father of two who decides it time to lead the life he never had, but always wanted.

Here Today, Gone Today

In short, people are only moments in time. We live out the archetypes at play in our minds right now, and how we experience the world has little to do with annual salary, owning a home, or making an fMRI display turn green instead of blue. As such, games offer inroads to these archetypes aplenty.

We’ll continue this in another post, but until then, what’s your story, what brought you here, and why are you still reading?

But before we’ll let you borrow the family Camaro, we’ve got to have a talk.

Yes, you do feedback really well. You provide that same psychological nudge that pushes a runner from .9 miles to 1.0 on the treadmill, and instills the same sense of urgency as an hourglass. And by entangling that feedback with ritual play and social motivators, experiences that — OH CRAP I HAVE TO GO PLAY FARMVILLE.

But you can and must do so much more in order to really leverage the power of organized play. Listen, we know you don’t need a lecture. You already have some way smart people nurturing you out of your awkward adolescence. We just want to help.

Remember Jesse Owens? Sure you do. In the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, he ran right past Hitler and yanked off both sides of his mustache. Remember his time in the 100m dash? We didn’t think so. As Bob Costas will tell you, in the game-within-a-game-within-a-sponsorship opportunity that is the Olympics, the human narrative is the thing that engages, resonates, and persists. So consider this the next time you swing your Gamification hammer:

1. The Story is the Thing

Brands that tell stories are easier to love, easier to evangelize, and easier to forgive. And games that tell stories are better designed to elicit authentic curiosity and emotional investment (not just collecting obsession). Now, does every gameplay experience require a ten-thousand-year creation myth? Of course not. But how can a gameplay experience tell the story behind a mysterious tattoo – rather than leaning on the tattoo itself for meaning?

You see, Gamification? We only want the best for you.

Now, we know you like to think of yourself as the life of the party. You may say to yourself “hey hey, when I show up, I bring the play and that brings the engagement.” But chances are, whatever website or process or product you’re fixin’ to gamify already has scores of people deeply engaged in gaming it. Heck, you might be downright redundant. Shopping is already a game. Parking is already a game. Pretending to be busy while Bill Lumbergh trolls the office? You get the picture. What we’re saying is …

2. People are Already Playing

We know that people have a predisposition for play. Ever heard of Homo Ludens? Stop giggling. Couple that with the incredible lengths that people already go to in order to hack systems, bend rules, and shirk duties. Please stop giggling. See, we think the best games are emergent, not foisted upon systems. And that if you really wanted to be the life of the party you’d make more rewarding the game that’s already there.

You’re a smart kid, Gamification, but we need to know we’re on the same page.

There’s no doubt you’ll be seen around more and more as you grow up, so it’s important that you realize that people will be influenced by you, for better or worse. While it’s points and badges today, curly-haired folks smarter than us feel that games can and will address major problems within our society. Do you think a few trivial badges will do it? Nope. The real power of games comes from the way that they organize forces and interests, frame experiences, and encourage strategic discovery. Yep,

3. Games Can do Difficult, Meaningful Work.

What? At the first mention of “difficult work” you’re turned off? Did you think you’d get by slinging virtual burgers your whole life? Gamification, I guess I expected a little more from you.

Why can’t you be more like your brother, Applied Gaming?

In an upcoming series of posts, we’re going to take a hard look at the trend of Gamification, smack it on the backside a little bit, and identify how our position has changed over the past couple years. We think that now more than ever there’s meaning to this Applied Gaming thing, so we’re going to call out the major differences from Gamification one at a let-there-be-no-mistake time.

As we draw our breath, rocket surgeon Umair Haque gives us some background with his whip-smart post in the Harvard Business Review. Read the whole thing, but from the article:

“Of course, there are at least four big problems with gamification. The first is, as game designer Margaret Robinson has incisively pointed out, most gamification is just “pointsification.” In my terms, there’s no real market mechanism (in her terms, “hard, meaningful choices”) at the heart of said game, just the accumulation of bits. The second problem is that too much gamification is about zero sum games: often, for me to win, you’ve got to lose. For example, many “gamified” sites simply offer a fixed number of badges, trophies, or other trinkets, to the first N participants that, for example, visit six different pages. That’s because, third, many games are relying on — or worse, trying to create — artificial scarcity …”

Kindasortamaybeyes. We’ll take a look at what we think Gamification does right, what it needs to improve, and what we think Applied Gaming (already) does better. [+10 points for drawing a line in the sand.]

We believe in the deliciousness of guacamole.

We also believe in the power of games to do good for the world. We collaborated in the creation of EVOKE, Coral Cross, Survival Horizon and the Foresight Engine with the hopes of affecting actual, tangible change. And that’s why we believe in Gameful — which saw its closed alpha launch this week — as a profound source for world-changing games and the scrappy upstarts that design them.

Selfishly perhaps, we want to get from Gameful what (probably) every member does: invigorating conversation, creative collaboration, critical discussion, and, yes, the opportunity to turn good ideas into great games that people want to play and clients are willing to fund.

What we plan to give is everything we’ve picked up along the way. We will offer insights and admit to our mistakes. We will identify patterns in discussion and connect unlikely collaborators. We will mediate arguments and highlight agreement. All of which, we feel, is simply part of being a good and gameful person.

There are lots of places to discuss serious games, and even more touting the Gamification fad (admittedly, we have little confidence in the longevity of Gamification, for as much as we think it is important to explore and understand). But in the spirit of Gameful we think there is something wholly unique.

In addition to technical and aesthetic contributions, Natron Baxter is minding the early incarnations of Gameful’s Applied Gaming experience — because, well, we believe that Applied Gaming is the evolution of meaningful engagement. It’s our interest to differentiate from the principles of Gamification, and illustrate how thoughtfully applied game mechanics offer unmatched usability cues, nudge and ritualize behaviors, and warm the very cockles of our hearts. Moreover, we hope to collaborate on the winding narrative of Gameful, and latch onto the very human need to not only play games, but to tell and be told stories.

Frankly, it feels like all these things are possible, and thanks in no small part to our co-conspirators Jane McGonigal and Kiyash Monsef, as well as our Chief Architect, Keith Turner. We’re honored to hover in the same hot air balloon as those chums. And we’re pleased as punch to have you along for the ride.

More soon …

Cheers,
The Baxters

It’s been a hot week for the Baxters, with two launches in four days and twice as many Pepcid. A particularly emphatic “huzzah!” goes out to our friends at IFTF, with whom we developed and road-tested the Forecast Engine v1.0 on behalf of the Myelin Repair Foundation, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and futures-thinkers everywhere.

Participants in the limited-run event were asked to ruminate on one simple yet profound question: “How would you advise the President to reinvent the process of medical discovery?” With tweet-length microforecasts (1500+ in 24 hours), players then speculated, collaborated, and investigated a stream of dynamic and increasingly diverse ideas. Inspired by the TweetDeck format, the game empowered players to interact with a deluge of content, bounce across abstract ideas, and follow threads of support and rebuttal.

With its smart dose of Applied Gaming, we’d call the Foresight Engine strangely addictive (that is, if we could figure out the difference between the proper usage of “addictive” and “addicting”).

More insight on the intent of the game, industry commentary, player feedback, and a game summary are roundabouts that there internet and on the Twitter.

We’ll hit the ignition on the Foresight Engine v1.1 November 9-10, with upgrades to site usability and numerous bug fixes. We hope you’ll join our cadre of R&D renegades. Or perish!

Later this month I will be leading a panel at West Coast Green — a conference in San Francisco that brings together leaders in the field of green technology. Entitled “Power Up: Changing the Real World with Games” (thanks to Nathan for the great name!), the goal of the panel is to share examples of different games that have been designed to address systemic problems in the environment and green space. I will be joined by Professor Byron Reeves of Stanford University and Dr. Tad Hirsch of Intel’s People and Practices group, who are both strongly interested in this space.

The goal of the panel is two-fold. First, I’ll be talking about E=H2O, a game that we recently ran at the Institute for the Future in conjunction with the IEEE that was designed to get players to think about how their lives would change in 10 years as a result of the future challenge of providing water and energy to an growing population that increasingly relies on abundant quantities of these resources.

Second, and the reason why I am writing this post, is to address the question of “why use games for real world change.” I’ve written a bit about this in the past, but this is a good opportunity to draw together some disparate threads and make one argument for the power of games.

Games have traditionally been associated with leisure time – as something we play to get away from the real world, and that by stealing away our “productive” time, in effect pull us away from changing the world. But, as likely comes as no surprise, I believe that the world needs *more* games – games that don’t provide escape from the challenges that we face, but rather that are designed to connect us to these real world problems.

A lot has been said in the press about games and their ability to tap into human desires for progress and measurable success and though there is undoubtedly a lot to this – which is why companies like foursquare are so popular right now, in my talk I would like to push the envelope a little and briefly cover three reasons why I think games are an ideal technology for helping spur real world change. These are not new ideas, and draw heavily on work done by the usual cast of characters – Jane McGonigal, Ian Bogost, Tracy Fullerton, etc., but my hope is that grouping them together will be useful to people who are looking to persuade their colleagues, friends, or even themselves, that games can be used for more than escape. I’m not trying to explain how games might be used to change the real world, but rather I am interested in why games have such a hold on us.

My Three Reasons for Games are:

1. They provide an equal playing field;
2. They provide a space for shared attention and experience; and
3. They provide freedom to play, experiment and fail.

1. Equal playing field.

For me, the single most powerful thing that games provide is a space in which the concept of fairness is far more tangible than generally experienced throughout the rest of our lives. Many games take for granted a level field of play and present even starting conditions to all participants. There is no guaranteed equality of outcome, but in these games there is equality of opportunity.

This equality of opportunity is something we strive for in other, more complex systems that we interact with on a daily basis. When we go to school, work, or the DMV, among countless other examples, we want outcomes that clearly link to our actions. Although our merits at work may become lost in office politics or corporate bureaucracy, in games we can reasonably expect that the operating principles of the game system will ensure that our skill in playing the game will come to the fore front. (In many games chance plays a fairly prominent role, but in a well designed skill will triumph over chance. For a more complete discussion of this tension, I recommend you read Caillois.)

2. Space for shared attention and experience

Anyone engrossed in a baseball pennant race (go Giants) will be familiar with my second reason for why I think games are powerful tools changing the real world: games let us experience similar emotions as our friends, coworkers, and even strangers.

By letting us experience a shared sense of anxiety at missing the playoffs, or the joy of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat in a particularly heated game of Settlers of Catan, games give us a common ground for conversations, and a strong way to relate to others.

In this sense, games are great at creating instantaneous communities – communities that, because they are linked by experience, are often much more related than communities based on the happenstance of things like location.

3. Freedom to play, experiment and fail.

Finally, and in my mind most powerfully, games provide us with spaces to fail – and to learn from our failures. I wrote about this a couple months ago, but to sum up my previous post, since games occupy a privileged space that is nominally considered outside the bounds of “real-life”, we are not as afraid to fail in them. In my real life I, like most people, am extremely concerned with making sure I don’t screw things up – at home, school, work, I really don’t want to fail. In games, I lose all the time, and its no big deal because I can learn and develop as a result.

In short, games provide an equal playing field; a space for shared attention and experience; and the freedom to play, experiment and fail. Though there are many more reasons to use games in the real world, I think these are the most powerful.

If you plan on attending West Coast Green, be sure to check out my panel!

Guest Baxter Mathias Crawford is a researcher at the Institute for the Future, and part of the team behind Signtific Lab, the massively multiplayer thought experiment. His current passion and research is in the art and science of game design.

If the Baxters owned a spotlight, we’d shine our Batman-esque call to arms against the stormy night sky. But we don’t own a spotlight, so Nathan will have to hold his iPhone behind a Jell-O mold. Set that screen brightness to maximum, comrade!

We’re living in an imperfect world, they tell me, and we need help to right the listing ship. We know there’s something to this “game” thing — and that thoughtful games can make the world a better place — so we’re drafting an army of innovators and optimists to leverage games for the betterment of humankind (sorry chinchillas!). Our “secret” HQ is currently at gameful.org, but we’re moving it into an extinct volcano just as soon as we install the wainscoting.

Get in deep here, and help us kick it off proper here.

Um, any aesthetic similarity to Shmoozl is purely coincidental.

Much to the chagrin of our legal counsel, we wanted to assure that every Certified Baxter had an equal say in the goings-on of our fledgling effort. What if, the esteemed esquire cautioned, voting resulting in a work-mucking tie? Would Veep Biden swoop in and resolve the impasse? Bah, we said. Lawsuit, he said.

So, because we take our fun-loving principles seriously, we compromised accordingly:

Resolution of Voting Stalemate

For any action, decision, or event that requires vote of or approval by Members holding a Majority Interest, if the vote results in a vote where a Majority Interest does not exist in support of or in opposition to the action, decision, or event, the Members agree that the vote will be resolved through the following means:

Where the Members’ votes are divided into two groups, each group of Members shall nominate one Representative.

The Representatives of each opposing group of Members shall play each other in three (3) total head-to-head games of Ms. Pac-Man.

After three games, the Representative with the highest total cumulative score, inclusive of all games, shall be granted temporary executive and directorial power to take (or not take) the action, make the decision, or cause the event to occur (or not occur) as he or she sees fit to decide. All Managers and Members shall abide by that decision.

The games of Ms. Pac-Man shall be played on the same standing arcade cabinet, concurrently (in two player mode) at a time and location of mutual agreement—such agreement shall not be unreasonably obstructed or withheld.

Both Representatives must agree to the fitness of the particular Ms. Pac-Man cabinet before head-to-head play begins, and are permitted one (1) one-player practice game in order to determine that it is functioning properly. Should either Representative reasonably assess that the game is malfunctioning, he is required to state so before head-to-head play begins, at which point both Representatives agree to relocate or postpone to a reasonable location or time, respectively.

Representatives are forbidden from deliberately interfering with each other’s play in any way, including physical contact, unreasonable noise, deliberate distraction through cigarette smoke, liquids, etc.

Should play be interrupted, the Representatives agree to tally the score of their last complete game and resume as circumstances permit.

Where the Members’ votes are divided into more than two groups, each group shall likewise nominate one Representative.

The Representatives of each opposing group of Members shall play three (3) one-player games of Ms. Pac-Man, in sequential round-robin format, with each representative playing one game in a row. All other aforementioned caveats apply.

If a suitable Ms. Pac-Man arcade cabinet cannot be located, the Representatives shall agree upon a reasonable alternative Ms. Pac-Man platform, such as a cocktail table unit, console, or emulator.

If a suitable alternative Ms. Pac-Man platform cannot be located, the Representatives shall play Missile Command.

… which, based upon the look on our lawyer’s face, might not exactly withstand legal (or investor) scrutiny.

(photo from the spiffy Rotheblog.)

Overcoming obstacles, trial and error, and having to make meaningful choices are some of key tenets found in games. As Ian Bogost puts it, “most games require some non-trivial effort to play. Challenge and effort are often cited in definitions of games, as is a tendency toward meaningful interactivity.” What is more, as NYU’s Jesper Juul has noted, “failure is central to player enjoyment of games …. However, it is notable that failure is more than a contrast to winning – rather failure is central to the experience of depth in a game, to the experience of improving skills.” By relating failure both to a capacity to learn from mistakes, and to develop one’s skills so as to further enjoy the game, Juul identifies constructive failure as a key reason for why we play games. [As an aside, it turns out that I make a lot of mistakes when playing games, so reading Juul's paper was a big self-esteem booster for me. You can imagine how it felt to learn that all my game-related failures were actually a good thing!]

Given the centrality of failure to creating deeper, more engaging games, I find it puzzling that articles that purport to explain how to “use game mechanics to power your business,” stay well away from addressing the fact that mistakes can and do happen in the real world. The generations of gamers that are now firmly entrenched throughout all levels of society are perfectly primed to be the most responsive to games that incorporate mistakes into their structures, so why aren’t we seeing applied games being built with failure in mind?

Bogost writes about two elements of social games that disturb him: compulsion – exploiting human psychology in order to elicit particular actions (actions which make companies money), and optionalism – as he writes, the, “gameplay in social games is almost entirely optional. The play acts themselves are rote, usually mere actuations of operations on expired timers.” Another way to frame these features is to think of them in terms of how they relate to failure.

In games like Farmville or services like Foursquare, behaviors that are rewarded are entirely compulsive. In the frame of these games, “failing” is akin to not completing. In foursquare, failure literally isn’t even an option. Although a user can “lose” her mayorship, being stripped of status is not generally of any real consequence. Check in some more, you might get the badge back, but since the game never ends, if you ever stop checking in you lose.

The problem with this is that compelled behaviors don’t teach us anything about the actions themselves, for example, like whether there is a better way for us to do things. Rather, they teach us that the only path to success is conditioned response to incentives. What many of these ‘games’ are, then, are beautifully stylized positive feedback systems. These systems offer no nuanced player experience. Every player either buys into the point structure, or they are left on the outside. These games don’t seek to engage their players, but rather to incentivize them to perform particular actions.

Obviously, points do work as incentives for some actions. We all want credit cards with points, and when done right a point-based representation of participation on a website can be engaging and fun. But there is a great opportunity, and need, for games that facilitate learning in the workplace, not just with a points mechanism, but with something deeper. Learning leads to people doing a better job, being more productive, and being more satisfied with their jobs: In short, everybody wins.

As more organizations attempt to bring game mechanics to the wider world, one of the central challenges that to be faced will be in how to make mistakes mean something. Making mistakes isn’t good; learning from them is, and key to missions like making the workplace more fun is making it a place where mistakes can be both made and learned from.

To quote again from Juul, “that failure and difficulty is important to the enjoyment of games correlates well with Michael J. Apter’s reversal theory, according to which people seek low arousal in normal goal-directed activities such as work, but high arousal, and hence challenge and danger, in activities performed for their intrinsic enjoyment, such as games.” If games are to be used to make things like work more fun, we need to start by creating workplaces in which it is ok to take risk – to take on challenges in which success is not assured. There will be failure – lots of it – but with these mistakes will come an environment that rewards true learning and development of its participants, rather than rewarding a predetermined series of actions.

Guest Baxter Mathias Crawford is a researcher at the Institute for the Future, and part of the team behind Signtific Lab, the massively multiplayer thought experiment. His current passion and research is in the art and science of game design.

The announcement of Epic Win, an upcoming iPhone application spread across the Internet last Friday, was heralded as a new way to make every-day tasks more enjoyable and compelling. Epic Win takes traditional elements from RPGs – quests, XP, rare loot – and layers them over the demands of daily life, with the expectation that the application will inspire us to “Remember that birthday card, send that email, or drag ourselves to the gym on a regular basis.”

As Jane McGonigal mentioned on twitter, Epic Win isn’t the first to attempt to apply lessons from RPG design to everyday chores. Chore Wars, which launched in 2007, “lets you claim experience points for household chores. By getting other people in your house or workplace to sign up to the site, you can assign experience point rewards to individual tasks and chores, and see how quickly each of you levels up.”

Since the details of how Epic Win sets experience point values for goals, or structures larger quests, its not possible to comment on their application. Chore Wars, therefore, is an excellent starting point for a discussion of what works, and what doesn’t, when companies try to make applications that leverage ideas from game development.

Points and Badges Don’t Mean Games

On the New York Times Bits Blog Nick Bilton notes that, “Everything seems to have a game element to it these days.” I’ve written elsewhere about the dangers inherent in the ever expanding number of external incentives that are springing up to encourage behaviors as diverse as frequenting specific restaurants, to watching particular television shows. The common thread for most of these services is that the “game element” implemented consists of mapping points to a pre-set list of activities. When the user completes tasks they are given points, which are further rewarded by badges for meeting certain levels, or for certain behavior patterns.

An eloquent critique of these systems is offered by Game Developer and Georgia Tech Professor Ian Bogost, in his Gamasutra article “Persuasive Games: Schell Games“:

“[W]ho cares about deliberation if we get the results we want? If achievement-like structures can get kids to brush their teeth or adults to exercise more, why does one’s original motivation matter?

Because to thrive, culture requires deliberation and rationale in addition to convention. When we think about what to do in a given situation, we may fall back on actions which come easily or have incentives attached to them. But when we consider which situations themselves are more or less important, we must make appeals to a higher order.

Otherwise, we have no basis upon which to judge virtue in the first place. Otherwise, one code of conduct is as good as another, and the best codes become the ones with the most appealing incentives. After all, the very question of what results we ought to strive for is open to debate.”

In this light, it seems odd that a single person’s to-do list would benefit from an application that provides pre-defined levels points and virtual objects for, e.g., sending emails. Undoubtedly the reason why I’ve, for example, not gone to the gym is based on factors such as my level of fatigue, the other tasks I need to complete, or because I’ve already gone four days in a row. In short, it is a dangerous practice to layer incentives on top of actions without taking into the reasons why I haven’t just completed my to-do list in the first place.

To this end, one of the most important things that Chore Wars does differently than the recent crop of real-world games is that it puts the game’s player-community in charge of what actions are rewarded, and what value particular actions have. By allowing players to co-develop objectives, and giving them the opportunity to compete, or co-develop strategies, with other players when completing objectives, the game’s system does not rely on rote completion of tasks in order to get points. Instead, players can negotiate “what results [they] ought to strive for,” – which, I think, is where the true power of bringing games to real life lies.

When applying RPG dynamics within companies, it is all too easy to draw up a list of tasks, corresponding XP, and badges, and call it a day. What we learn from Chore Wars, however, is that in order to meaningfully use these mechanics in the workplace it is essential to involve employees in helping set the objectives and rewards for quests.

So, will it be more like Foursquare or Chore Wars? I am very interested in seeing where Epic Win falls on the Gaming the Real World spectrum.

Guest Baxter Mathias Crawford is a researcher at the Institute for the Future, and part of the team behind Signtific Lab, the massively multiplayer thought experiment. His current passion and research is in the art and science of game design.

“Greed is bad,” says Conspiracy for Good, a curious blend of ARG and multimedia participatory storytelling from Tim Kring and Co. And they have the fictional proof!

It’s been interesting for the Baxters to compare Conspiracy for Good with our previous effort, Evoke, because on many levels they are, well, the same dang thing. Evoke was surely not the first social innovation game (nor clearly will it be the last), but as the category sees more and more entries we’re able to better understand where the true innovations lie, how the mechanics of interaction enhance the experience, and the role of storytelling (and suspended disbelief) as a super-engagement gravity well.

To that last point, Conspiracy for Good places itself on an interesting point of the fiction / non-fiction spectinuum. Its central storyline — that greedmongering megaglobalcorp Blackwell Briggs is soon to “enslave” the citizenry of the UK by appropriating CCTV systems for nefarious means — is just close enough to headline fodder to be believable-ish. And though its very format (and a few overt disclaimers) make clear that the experience is a work of fiction, that doesn’t prevent a few whistleblowers from “exposing” the Conspiracy as such. For better or for worse, Evoke sacrificed that suspended disbelief by telling the story through a graphic novel (viva la Jacob Glaser!) set in 2020.

But at least we didn’t didn’t have folks pointing to our cell-shading and crying “fake.”

We find it a bit inconsiderate when folks yap away on their cell phones while on crowded public transportation, but if they’re playing with Megaphone, at least they’re being artistic and inconsiderate. (How very Dada!)

We dig Megaphone for freeing gameplay from the constraints of computer and console, and transforming the mobile device into a game controller. After all, the humble celly is one of The Big Three at Natron Baxter Applied Gaming and is, along with computers and payment cards, one of the most common ways people engage the digital spirit world. The engagement power of their voice-art example seems a bit limited, but it cracks open possibilities nonetheless.

Cheers, you Megamen and Megawomen!

Despite the potential for meaningful idea exchange — unlocking the intellectual capital and proprietary knowledge of the workforce — most KMSs simply don’t encourage employees to share their knowledge. In our experience, these systems fundamentally fail in reconciling convenience and reward. (Putting it mildly, KMSs are ******* inconvenient and unrewarding.)

Sure, any KMS must provide meaningful on-demand content. And it must be customized to the culture and motivation of its users. But game mechanics (and usability best practices) provide a few general insights on improving effectiveness of collecting knowledge by increasing convenience and reward.

We call this evolving list of KMS design principles “Zipline,” inspired by Robert De Niro’s supertechnician Harry Tuttle in the bizarre masterpiece Brazil.

Capture the Flash – Everyone is busy. Even the prospect of keying a 50 word insight is off-putting to a high-demand, high-value employee. Yet, meaningful microexchanges happen constantly. Thus, a KMS should accommodate even the tiniest sparks of genius. Tweets. IM slang. The thumb-gesture that follows “which way is the men’s room?”

Spread it Around – Despite the incredible value of centralized knowledge, it’s infeasible to expect the human animal to religiously transcribe their every knowledge sharing experience. A KMS should reach into the interactions of the organization and capture insights as they happen. This might be a dictation app on the company Bwackbewwy, a simple “promote this” button on an email thread, or a spider that crawls the company forums in search of particularly useful content. Adding content to the KMS should require no more information than generating the content in the first place.

Try Crowdsorting – With an increase in good content comes an increase in bad content. But any good system can separate the wheat from the chaff with a thoughtful rating / pertinence engine. To align these ratings with usability practices, attach the simplest-possible thumbs up / down to virtually everything — and appropriate button-clicks (like closing a window) for rating purposes.

Use the Buddy System – A wealth of insights pass between mentors and apprentices, and vice versa. This corporate symbiosis also begets a sense of shared responsibility. By overtly pairing colleagues — and assembling larger teams with coordinated objectives — users are motivated by their feelings of mutual investment.

Make ‘Em Proud – As a matter of framing, KMSs should play to the egos of thought leaders while encouraging the participation of new employees. A thoughtful reputation engine accommodates the lot. Points for every interaction, real-time leaderboards, and tangible goals ignite collaboration and competition. Additionally, closely connecting career development to KMS reputation blends the powers of social and professional recognition. Should meaningful knowledge sharing earn extra PTO? Hell yes!

Keep it Optional – It may seem counter-intuitive, but non-obligatory KMSs better reflect the principles of authentic engagement. At they very least, participation reflects a genuine desire rather than a begrudged requirement.

Watch the Clock – Compelling game narratives blend user-triggered and universe-triggered events, creating a rhythm of engagement. In our previous designs, we’ve broken these event types into “quests” and “missions,” respectively. A good KMS follows suit, offering increasingly difficult challenges to be completed at the user’s pace, as well as daily / weekly “lightning rounds” to encourage mass contribution to a particular topic.

We’ll keep this list growing (and shrinking, when we thrash our own suggestions). In the meantime, sharing your joyous or woeful tales of a KMS will fetch you some shiny +1s, courtesy of the Baxters.

We owe many an insight to the efforts of Jamie Madigan’s The Psychology of Video Games blog, wherein the nimble-thumbed expert bridges brain and BFG, and Immersyve’s Player Experience of Need Satisfaction (PENS) model. For our colleagues and clients current and future, this stuff is required reading.

It’s a shame we haven’t tipped our hat to these thoughtful cats earlier; hopefully this post makes up for lost time.

h/t @kevinsyli

What ho! A Baxter spotting in Australia has us kissing the blarney stone! In the March 25th issue of Melbourne’s The Age, Baxters Nathan and Matthew pull their best Muppet impressions and evangelize Applied Gaming with only slightly less authority. That’s a spicy meat-a-ball!

We’ll post a link to the article as soon as it’s online; in the meantime, enjoy the old-timey scan.

(Cheers to Nathan’s pal Down Under, @smashmiek, who tipped us to the article via Twitpic.)

Gameslinger (and honorary Baxter) Jesse Schell foresees the “Gamepocalypse” — a time when life and game blur into an indistinguishable engagement goo. His momentum-confirming interview is peppered with anecdotes and harbingers of an Applied Gaming future. We have similar visions of the Gamepocalypse, to be sure, but occasionally ours are of the thermonuclear-playground-on-Judgment-Day variety.
 
Perhaps we’ve grown overly sensitive to marketing’s unwanted intrusions (ham-handed games could certainly poison authentic fun with cold-blooded commerce). Or perhaps we watched Wargames at a particularly impressionable age. But we reckon our nihilistic concerns stem from our love of red velvet cake and our dread of game fatigue.
 
Frankly, for as much as we hope to augment work, school, and life with the engagement power of games, we’re incredibly wary of the adverse effects of overconsumption. As with that most lusted after slice of cake — buttressed with berms of buttercream frosting on three sides – sometimes a richly rewarding experience can turn you off to the notion of cake altogether. Seriously.
 
For instance, to say that this Baxter has been dabbling in Words With Friends for the iPhone is to stretch the word “dabbling” far beyond Webster’s intent. She’s a beaut of a casual game and right up my alley. But I found the reward of playing soon supplanted by the anxiety of not playing and then not playing well enough. Indeed, my addictive personality (which I prefer to call “engagement-prone,” thankyouverymuch) glommed on to a Scrabble clone, even, and promptly sucked the fun right out of it.
 
As worker/players enter a new gameplay environment (particularly one that sponsored or mandated by an organization), they might face huge and discouraging disparities between experience players and noobs. Inevitably, in-game payoffs become tedious (designed, as they were, to satisfy short attention spans). And as game performance maps to job performance, with it might come the baggage of work-related stressors. As we are attuned to the engagement power of games, so too are we to their imperfections. When we expand the notions of game anxiety and game fatigue to the scale of the Gamepocalypse, we cannot help but consider the distopia.
 
We hope that our game design principles — such as ambiance and player discretion — make our concerns unfounded. But just in case, we’re playing a game of Stock Up on Canned Goods.

Instead of traditional grades, game design students earn experience points from their Indiana dungeonmaster. According to Professor Sheldon, “the elements of the class are couched in terms they understand, terms that are associated with fun rather than education.” We couldn’t have said it better.

The idea resonates with the Baxters who, neck deep in a hoppy North Pacific IPA, speculated about a future workplace with similar game bent. After all, what is a quantitative performance review if not an opportunity to level up?

We’re interested in discovering how Sheldon’s system accounts for qualitative measures (style points?), and it looks like we’ll have the opportunity to ask him directly: the innovative prof has invited the Baxters to sit in on a game design class. Look for our report in a mid-April post.

h/t Escapist Magazine

Shmoozl encourages players to press flesh with new and interesting people, and reward recommendation badges to the most remarkable of the bunch. That recommendation badge lets other players know that, hey, this is definitely someone worth engaging. And just like your LinkedIn profile, multiple recommendations imply a level of wholly uncommon cred. Essentially, Shmoozl empowers players (and non players) with a real-time, organic, visual recommendation system to better identify potentially meaningful connections within a daunting crowd of 20,000+ game hounds.

Players are also encouraged to bounce over to the mobile-minded Shmoozl microsite and register their unique Shmoozl player ID. Not only can they publish their LinkedIn and Twitter details to keep connections alive with other players, but every time one of their recommendations also registers, the originating player nabs an entry in our random drawing for a nifty Shmoozl prize. (Players can rest assured that Natron Baxter will never spam them with marketing blather, either. Registration isn’t required to play, and you can provide as much or as little information as you’d like.)

Shmoozl is designed exclusively for attendees of the GDC, and is initiated the old fashioned way: with a handshake. So while you’re nursing your Nintendo thumb, keep an eye out for Mr. Natron Baxter himself. He’ll supply you with your Shmoozl starter pack and help get you connected.

Throughout the GDC, we’ll post status updates and additional clarification in the comment thread of this post. You can also track the whereabouts of Natron Baxter on Twitter.

[Jah love to the log-gnawers over at Busy Beaver Buttons for their heroic buttoneering.]

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.

Woggers of the world unite!

We’re loving the like minds over at Fitbit, even if their diminutive health monitor has gotten tangled up in production. The nifty personal device — a hybrid pedometer and Nike+ doohickey — “keeps track of your movement, distance traveled and calories burned.” Then get this: the wearable sensor provides simple, real-time feedback using a flower metaphor. Naturally, healthy activities equal a healthy plant. And six-pack abs!

The Garden, our ambient gaming overlay, clearly had a similar muse (we’ve even gleaned a bit of our philosophy from the article’s own BJ Fogg).

But since we Baxters find the most power in the collective, we’re looking forward to seeing how Fitbitters can leverage a Nike+ style community. As we iterate our signature product, for instance, we’re continually discovering unexpected value in spontaneous relationships between Gardeners. With overlapping social media functions — adding friends, creating teams, challenging others — the Fitbit would be a exemplary motivator in this wacky growing industry of Applied Gaming.

The two-peso version is this: How you involve your audience changes your role as an author.

Sweet potato casserole! Wild, right?

Well, it depends.

On the One Hand

Audience as active producers in a narrative is a novel idea. It brings to the virtual world the laws of the real world. It’s a wholly active-reactive ecosystem with a consequence to every decision; small, big, or non-existent.

And so much of what we do here at NB is tethered to that principle.

Full participation exists in the narrative world from the beginning because the real world exists. Instead of wasting energy attempting to repel and maintain separation between the two, their diligent fusion creates significantly more powerful experiences and rewards.

So it isn’t about recreating or transplanting the real world in the virtual one. That’s disingenuous and sure to result in near-immediate rejection, faster than a bear heart in a labradoodle.

But when fun, lush applied gaming worlds connect the audience – be they data entry workers, home insurance or mortgage agents, video game testers, or whoever – in meaningful ways to their tangible world, the result isn’t simply augmented, it’s supplanted.

On the Other Hand

“Know your audience.” And not the superficial demographics. You might as well admit you live by your stereotypes at that point. Instead, truly know them.

Budget the time, spent the money, review your discoveries free of bias because you owe it yourself, and them, to maintain vigilant diligence.

If the audience gets the feeling they’re simply being led through an exhibition, kinda like a second trip through Epcot Center, then you and the narrative world are prone to slow-slicing. Death by a thousand cuts. Whatever you prefer, the whole bird gets carved to pieces.

And, yes, there’s an opportunity to discover while in the most hostile of environments, but our belief is that the workplace is already hostile enough. Why add to it?

There will always exist an element of subterfuge, meaning, people will find ways to get their kicks exploiting or exposing the soft spots in any system. But that’s okay. It’s a behavior that can be rewarded. Some high-profile hackers have found employment within various security organizations doing exactly that.

Remember, fun is not the enemy of work.

Color us engaged!

Concerning our, well, concerns Mr. Reeves grappled diligently, offering much appreciated insight into what is an ever-increasingly faceted puzzle.

Illuminating a workforce, transforming industries, and respecting cultural idiosyncrasies requires a conscious and consistent design approach.

And rightfully so. The inherent power of applied gaming lies in the customizable nature of games themselves.

Defining and conveying rules, building safeguards, and designing expressive worlds require approaches inspired by, and designed in tandem with, the natural environment.

Self-regulating by and large, our involvement within it encourages its evolution and, in turn, our own.

But, observing and modifying behaviors are incredibly delicate tasks, ones that benefit from multiple participants working collaboratively, overtly or as disparate parts within a system, to read, react and repair.

As “The Garden” grows and our affiliation with applied gamers strengthens, we can collectively bring into focus our requisite principled approaches.

Thanks, Jai!

We’re excited to hear Reeves further describe his vision, and discuss with him some of the concerns that’ve emerged among the Baxters, including …

We’re with you on the gameplay bit, but why the focus on full-on virtual worlds? We think the real one can be pretty damn engaging.

How do designers / organizations account for the weight of “skinning” tasks and avoid the diminished efficiency that putting everything “in world” might bring?

When does the worker / player become too engaged? How can game platforms account for the possibility of unhealthy obsession?

… and other ad hominem attacks.

If you’re in the Bay Area, consider sharing an evening of pinot grigio and gentle nodding with Good Sir Reeves and your local Baxter. Details here.

Do you have a game face? A guitar face? A needle-threading face? You bet you do. It’s that contorted, emotional expression you don’t even know you’re pulling because you’re absolutely engaged in something else. And as Robbie Cooper’s fantastic snaps illustrate, your game face may look a bit odd, but don’t going feel embarrassed — because we Baxters think you look beautiful.

“Successful businesses in the future will redesign work from the gamer’s point of view.”

[From Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete by Byron Reeves and J. Leighton Read, Harvard Business School Press]

Yep, games are already informing the design of work. And friend, it has only just begun. As Reeves and Read express in their book, an army of gamers is penetrating the workplace, fueled by Red Bull and access to a sophisticated online gaming industry that is “staggeringly, stunningly big.”

Reeves and Read explore how the complex virtual worlds and cultural structures engaging this large swath of society will inevitably inform the structure of work. After their first illustrative story, it’s easy to conceive how avatars, guilds, and quests will invigorate employees and orient them around clear personal and organizational tasks. To us, it sounds like heaps of fun.

But while virtual worlds will eventually become the workspace for a large number or worker / players, we at Natron Baxter think you can engage your massively multiplayer workforce right now. Research suggests that even the simplest game inspired mechanisms — like forum ranks and LinkedIn’s profile completeness bar — can bring appreciable results. That’s why our explorations focus on ambient, complementary game overlays to existing enterprise systems. By using connectors to MS Outlook and SharePoint, for example, and tying key performance indicators to game events, we can provide feedback, objectives, and rewards without reinventing work. (For an example, see Garden Sneak Peek: Notifications.) Like it says up top there, every effort can be made rewarding.

As we’ve taken the book as an opportunity to orient and differentiate, we’ll be posting additional bits as we continue to chew on Total Engagement. Cheers to the authors for rallying around the serious power of games. Buy their dang book.

Keywords: Enterprise 2.0, Employee Engagement, Employee Feedback Systems, Games