Are there good design rationales for NOT putting the learner in first person perspective within the game? Absolutely.

One game that we designed from a third-person perspective was The Change Game. The organizational problem was employee resistance to change and the game was designed as a reflection on resilience factors that, when missing, would contribute to change resistance. Putting the learner in a first-person role ran the risk of making the game too personal…instead, the learner observed other character interactions from a third-person perspective, then identified which of the seven resilience factors the characters were not exhibiting. After observing the character scenarios, learners were asked to reflect on similar situations they had experienced and how they responded, encouraging them to learn about resistance and resilience from the game scenarios and then apply that knowledge in thinking about their own behavior. In this way, the third-person perspective allowed the game to achieve the learning goals without making learners feel defensive or accused of bad behavior.

Recently, discussions with organizations who are looking at games to address the subject of mental health within the workplace have led to similar proposed game structures. Because mental health topics sometimes carry negative stigmas, approaching them in less personal or less potentially confrontational ways is important.

Whenever a topic has the potential for the learners’ emotional response to get in the way of achieving the learning goals, changing the player perspective within the game can distance the learner from feeling the game is about him or her and allow for better insight and perspective on the information and learning you are ultimately designing the game to convey.

About the Author
Koreen Olbrish, Ayogo VP of Learning Design, creates games that demonstrate the untapped potential of immersive learning design.

If you were in a learning environment like that, you’d probably be playing a game.

Untitled by Job Koelewijn

Learning, in its organic state, is our brain constantly making sense of data and sensory input in the context of our previous knowledge. In other words, we learn through data analysis and much of the data that we analyze to make sense of the world is in the form of feedback to our actions. Without feedback, we are left to make assumptions about our performance, whether a success or failure.

Games are built around the same dynamic of constant input and response; in essence, they are data analytics engines with an overlay of rules, competition, and (hopefully!) fun. If learning experiences paralleled game experiences, everything we did would be collected as data that could be analyzed over time to show improvement. Learning now is measured in infrequent and sometimes overly simplistic ways that don’t actually show what people have learned (i.e., multiple choice tests).  Because live instructors do most of the learning evaluation, there is a limit to the amount of feedback and assessment that can be reasonably provided. Elearning is more scalable, but the structure for most traditional elearning has modeled didactic classroom instruction: content presentation, knowledge checks, content presentation, and comprehensive knowledge assessment.

The opportunity in gaming for learning is to capture massive amounts of data, provide continuous, specific performance feedback and allow learners (players) to apply knowledge in context. As technology improves to more effectively capture different types of data and performance, gaming has evolved to leverage that data. The Xbox 360 Kinect is a recent example of how motion capture can now be used to collect new types of data and measure performance.

Game design is keeping up with technology, creating new and creative ways of collecting data to analyze and provide performance feedback. Learning experience design should look to game design to evolve (or catch up…) to provide our learners with the same types of data and feedback to reinforce positive behavior change and improve performance.

About the Author
Koreen Olbrish, Ayogo VP of Learning Design, creates games that demonstrate the untapped potential of immersive learning design.

We all want to have fun…I’d venture to say we all want to have more fun than we’re having now. We dream of our work being more fun, of having fun on vacation, even just infusing a little fun into everyday tasks. Its true that fun is subjective; what someone may consider a chore, others might get great joy from (for example, driving…I love it! other people, not so much…).

Fun is also an attitude. You know that expression “you make your own fun”? Truer words never spoken. Everyone knows someone who’s a killjoy…as soon as he or she walks into a room, all the air is sucked out. We also all know someone who is like a ray of sunshine, who we love to be around because of the energy and attitude that the person infuses into even the most mundane tasks. I had a cousin who could make even standing in line at the bank fun. We gravitate towards those people because we want to have fun, be happy, and enjoy life.

What bothers me most about the concept of fun is how it is handedly dismissed in many professional environments. For years, I couldn’t talk about games for learning to potential clients, or at least I didn’t call them games. Why? As soon as they heard the word “game,” they dismissed anything else I had to say. Most companies wanted “serious” training and the idea of learning through a game, or for learners to be having fun…*gasp*! Well it was just never going to fly, because learning was already devalued in most organizations as a cost center, and then start calling it FUN?? Anyone who wanted to be taken seriously was not going to start throwing around the F word.

Within the last 9 months, I’ve seen a shift in the market. I get requests for proposals from companies who are specifically looking for games for learning. Many are still tentative, nervous; they’ve heard about badges and gamification but they aren’t sure what that means for their training initiatives or how game dynamics might improve learner motivation and engagement. Most organizations approach games very seriously, sometimes to the point of taking all the potential for fun right out of them.

Fun can be serious and challenging and look an awful lot like work, just ask any athlete. The attitude, the expectation that even when we face our most difficult challenges and most serious subject matter, that human beings strive to be happier and have more fun…these ideas don’t have to be in conflict. Nathan Verrill recently gave the keynote at LEEF titled “Work is not the enemy of fun.” He talked about how immersive games can be designed to address even the most serious social and business issues while fostering opportunities for fun to get (and keep) people’s attention. Jonathan Richman made one of the most resonating points about marketing in a presentation at ePatient Connectionslast fall: you aren’t just competing for attention with your competitors…you’re competing withLOLCats. These presentations reinforced my opinion that in a world where there are so many distractions, competing media streams, and ways that we can choose to entertain ourselves, our business goals, and for learning professionals, our learning goals, must be addressed with strategies that account for human motivational drivers and the environmental context that we’re operating in.

My conclusion? Fun is the new strategic advantage.

Organizations should be embracing fun. Organizations who close their eyes to this necessity the will suffer for it because employees and even customers will seek out fun where it exists. You want to attract and retain the best talent? Create a workplace that they are happy to jump into every day. You want people to be engaged in learning activities? Design relevant training that people look forward to participating in. You want to attract and retain more customers? Create a company that’s a pleasure to do business with.

After all, who doesn’t want to have more fun?

*This article was originally published here.

About the Author
Koreen Olbrish, Ayogo VP of Learning Design, creates games that demonstrate the untapped potential of immersive learning design.

As with all learning strategies, design is the key. There is well-designed classroom training, and there is bad. There is really effective e-learning, but there is also a lot of crap. And…there are good, engaging, effective and (gasp!) fun games…and lots that aren’t. At its essence, the difference comes down to design.

Image by rocket ship

Achievements are one of the mechanisms used in games to help players gauge their progress. Sometimes they are called badges, sometimes they are in the form of rewards in the game (access to special content, etc.). Achievements are used in games as “mini-rewards” to let players know that they are making progress towards the end goal. Maybe its simply a level up…but achievements let the players know they are making progress towards their goal, often in this context its winning the game.

Why aren’t achievements used more in training? How do learners know how close they are to achieving competence in applying their knowledge toward a goal? Why don’t we view the stepping stones of a learning path as a series of small wins instead of series of completions?

Perhaps its because most training isn’t provided in the context of behavioral objectives, or even business objectives. Perhaps its because training, courses and modules, and its completion, are actually viewed as the end goal. We focus very much on the battles, without communicating what constitutes winning the war.

Think about what we are rewarding when we track completion. The goal of training is to collect completion achievements. Sure, maybe you need to get 80-90% of the questions right, but then that is just some detail added to the completion goal. Our goals should not be to have people prove they sat in a class or finished an e-learning module. Our goals, the “boss level” of this game, should be performance goals, and our training opportunities simply steps along the path to support behavior change and performance improvement. If we aren’t making the connections for our learners between the training they are asked to complete and how that training maps to steps of achievement as they are working towards their performance goals, how do they know what they are working towards, or how close they are to achieving it?

Have you identified performance goals for your organization’s training curriculum? If not, what game are you asking your learners to play?

*This article was originally published here.

About the Author
Koreen Olbrish, Ayogo VP of Learning Design, creates games that demonstrate the untapped potential of immersive learning design.

Technology is now enabling us to interact and communicate with each other in very different ways. Not only that, but everything we do online can be tracked.

Think about learning experiences as things that people DO to learn how to do or get better at something. I’m not talking about didactic content presentation, nor am I talking about review and recall exercises (although, in the lowest implementation of learning experiences, they are often thought of as such). Learning experiences, at their best, are authentic practice and application of knowledge and skills in context.

Image by Tom Bojarczuk

Activity streams are a flow of information about what people are doing or engaging with. Twitter is a kind of activity stream, although its an “opt in” stream where people select what they want to post. Other activity streams, like the news feed feature on Facebook, automatically populate with what someone is doing. If you scan your news feed in Facebook, you’ll see status updates, what people are reading, what music people are listening to…and then you can engage with them real time.

What if you could take the information collected in people’s activity streams and recommend learning experiences to them based on their interests or what they are doing? Better, what if activity streams collected performance data from online learning experiences and then recommended additional learning experiences based on their strengths and weaknesses? This is the basic concept behind personalized curriculum; our learning experiences can now be recommended and filtered based on our past performance and demonstrated competencies or skill gaps.

Games already do this in the form of “leveling up.” In order to move on to higher levels, you need to prove competency in the lower levels. In games, however, the leveling up path is linear and consistent across all players. The opportunity for activity streams and learning experiences is that no two people’s learning paths will look the same. Instead of a leveling up path, learning will resemble more of a web, with each learning experience connecting different skills and knowledge sets.

Still, we need to measure competency, and that’s where game mechanics can support this evolution to personalized learning. Collecting learning experiences, much like collecting achievements or badges, is the first step. The second step is showing skill progression, the gradual “leveling up.” The third step is showing mastery in context, or in gaming terms, the “boss level.”

As we find ourselves more closely connected with each other and with information, we need to rethink our relationship with learning. In an age where anyone can know anything in a matter of minutes just by typing in keywords into a search engine, what’s valuable is learning how to apply that information in meaningful ways. Activity streams can provide information on what people need to know or do better and learning experiences can create the opportunities for people to build competencies. Wrapped in a game, achievements can be measured and rewarded.

Maybe instead of degrees and certifications, we should think in terms of “achievements unlocked.”

About the Author
Koreen Olbrish, Ayogo VP of Learning Design, creates games that demonstrate the untapped potential of immersive learning design.

Image by Mark Brannan

I’ve written a lot in the past about design considerations (here and here) and lessons learned (here) for alternate reality games (ARGs) for learning, but another important question to address is: what are ARGs good at teaching?

This is a multi-layered question, as ARGs are complex learning experiences and most are not designed as a simple linear process like you would see in a typical e-learning module. Because ARGs are storyline driven and depend on learners to engage with the content to complete the game tasks and/or inform their game decisions, it is important to consider two key questions when determining whether an ARG is an appropriate learning activity.

1. Does learner interaction with the content positively impact the learning goals?

This is a basic, but important question. Sometimes you just want people to know something, or do something differently. Company policies, learning a new process…these are training initiatives that are important, but they don’t necessarily require learner interaction nor are they subject to interpretation. There are a lot of topics, however, where learners actively engaging with the content is critical to learning it. Think about topics like leadership development, project management and team communication, sales strategy, or quality assurance review. In all of these training areas, learners get better by practicing and engaging with the content. Designing an ARG that encourages critical thinking and learning by doing is a great application of an ARG.

2. Is it difficult to get learners to engage with the content effectively in other formats?

Sometimes its difficult to motivate learners to engage with content. Most training professionals don’t like to admit this, but we all know its true. Training exercises can feel forced, and often it depends on each learner’s personal motivation to get something out of the training. One reason for this may be that the delivery mechanism of the training isn’t appropriate or creates barriers to learning. For example, can you develop a sales strategy for your customers after watching a PowerPoint presentation on developing a sales strategy? Can you lead a team after an e-learning module on leadership skills? Will you know who to contact or where to find the information critical to your job after sitting through your HR orientation? Probably not. And that’s because the format of the training doesn’t provide you with the proper opportunities to practice or the motivation to engage with the tasks. ARGs can be designed to address almost any topic or content in a way that allows for more interaction and with an overlying competitive element that provides additional motivation to learn and engage.

ARGs allow for flexible design that can encourage problem-solving, communication skills, leadership skills, information gathering and critical thinking skills. Do you have a need within your organization to help learners practice these things? An ARG can help.

***

*This article was originally published on Koreen’s blog Learning in Tandem.

About the Author
Koreen Olbrish, Ayogo VP of Learning Design, creates games that demonstrate the untapped potential of immersive learning design. By applying her background in experiential learning and technology for education, Olbrish advocates new ways of leveraging technology for enterprise learning with emphasis on performance improvement and behavioural change. She has strong ties to education, having received her M.S. in curriculum and instruction from Penn State University and helping start Freire Charter School in Philadelphia in 1999. Her recent experience has been in the development of enterprise learning solutions, with particular expertise in simulations, games and the application of virtual worlds for learning.

For more information about how games can be used to educate and motivate, please contact Michael Fergusson: michael (at) ayogo (dot) com or Koreen Olbrish: koreen.olbrish (at) ayogo (dot) com.

So what is an ARG? And how can you use them to help people learn?

Alternate reality games (ARGs), also sometimes called pervasive games, are designed to combine real life and digital game play elements. Typically, ARGs are “tracked” online but the actual game play consists of real life activities. There are many entertainment-based examples (eg, I love bees, The Lost Experience, Numb3rs Chain Factor) and emerging examples of ARGs for serious purposes (eg, Urgent Evoke, World without Oil). A new area of focus is how ARGs can be leveraged for corporate training.

I’ve seen a lot of confusion in the term ARG–some people use “alternate reality games” and “augmented reality games” interchangeably.  For a point of clarification, alternate reality games refer to game play that integrates real life and online game play; augmented reality games refer to games where there is a technology overlay on reality that contributes to play (think the 1st down line on televised football games).

Its difficult to make generalizations of what an ARG is or looks like for learning. Just as there are an unlimited number of games and rules for game play, the same is true for ARGs. Designs could range from something very simple (eg, a scavenger hunt) to something very complex (eg, large scale, problem-based learning leadership development). There are, however, some basic design principles and “lessons learned” that have become apparent as we have designed more and more ARGs for corporate learning.

• Design is the key: just as with any game, ARGs are most successful when they are designed for the type of play and outcomes that both make them fun and engaging as well as focused on achieving the desired goals. This is not instructional design; this is game design with learning goals. A huge misconception is that because you’ve played games, you know how to design them. Don’t underestimate the amount of time, energy, thought, and expertise that it takes to design a fun game, let alone a fun game that accomplishes your organizational learning goals.

• Technology drives the experience: you shouldn’t underestimate the importance of the game design, but neither should you underestimate the importance of having a solid technology plan for driving and tracking the game play. Much of the basis of a good game is the mechanics–you can’t play Yahtzee without dice or poker without cards. Technology enables game play and is an essential element of what makes an ARG successful.

• What’s your story?: everyone loves a good story. The most successful ARGs embrace storytelling as a key element of the game play. For corporate training initiatives, the storytelling elements can either mirror real-life scenarios or be more of a fantastical overlay. Strategy for the storyline should align with the design and objectives, but should not be overlooked as a critical aspect of the experience.

• Stick to the point: yes, it might be fun to plan an ARG with a Mission Impossible theme, but it might not be appropriate for a game focused on team building. Make sure that your design is led by and focused on your learning objectives. Recognize that anything that doesn’t support your goals might distract from them and be strategic about what you focus on to reduce cognitive overhead.

• Follow the rules: people play games to win, and rules dictate what you need to do to win. Part of the complexity of game design is setting rules of play to balance game play at the sweet spot between “too hard” and “too easy.”

• Play to learn not learn to play: beware of designing game play rules that are so complex that there’s a significant learning curve to figure out how to play the game. Unless, of course, the goal of the game is to promote critical thinking skills…then it might be appropriate But in general, ARGs should be designed with clear rules of play to help players focus on the content and accomplishing the learning goals instead of figuring out how to play or win the game.

• Should you keep it on the down-low?: in the past, part of the intrigue and appeal of ARGs is that they have been secret or subversive, which created an atmosphere of being “in the know.” But for learning, you probably don’t want your training experiences to be secret, but it might not be a bad idea to think about how you can still create that feeling of subversiveness. Secret clues, bonuses, and secret codes are all examples of ways that you can create a “secret” feel to game play.

Corporate training initiatives and live events and conferences are great opportunities to leverage the strengths of ARGs at a comparatively low cost. How would you rather learn and network with your peers? What kind of shared experiences could an ARG provide as a basis for learning and relationship building? The possibilities and opportunities are endless.

 ***

*This article was originally published on Koreen’s blog Learning in Tandem.

About the Author
Koreen Olbrish, Ayogo VP of Learning Design, founded Tandem Learning (a division of Ayogo) to demonstrate the untapped potential of immersive learning design. Applying her background in experiential learning and technology for education, Olbrish advocates new ways of leveraging technology for enterprise learning with emphasis on performance improvement and behavioral change. She has strong ties to education, having received her M.S. in curriculum and instruction from Penn State University and helping start Freire Charter School in Philadelphia in 1999. Her recent experience has been in the development of enterprise learning solutions, with particular expertise in simulations, games and the application of virtual worlds for learning.

For more information about how games can be used to educate and motivate, please contact Michael Fergusson: michael (at) ayogo (dot) com or Koreen Olbrish: koreen.olbrish (at) tandem-learning (dot) com.

You’re a wine salesperson and have just been assigned to a new territory—the Roots Hotel. There are four potential customers within the hotel: a fine dining restaurant, a casual restaurant, a bar, and the hotel catering service. Each customer has different menus, clientele, price points, and of course, their own unique personalities and biases. You need to know your product portfolio inside and out and determine which of your wines would be best to position for each of these four customers.

This may appear to be a typical challenge for a wine salesperson, and you’d be correct. It was also the plot of Constellation Academy of Wine’s alternate reality game (ARG) for learning, Que Syrah Syrah.

The Art of Storytelling

ARGs are games that are driven by storyline and typically supported through some type of online game portal that manages the game. Playing the game, however, requires that you interact with characters, other players, and storyline elements that might be online, but may also be found in aspects of your “real” life. Websites, social media tools, media broadcasts, phone calls, text messages, and sometimes person-to-person interactions are all potential elements that move the storyline along.

ARGs are sometimes called pervasive games or transmedia storytelling. What is consistent among all of these definitions is that a story drives the game play and players are performing activities that mirror their real life.

There tends to be confusion in the term ARG—some people use “alternate reality games” and “augmented reality games” interchangeably. For a point of clarification, alternate reality games refer to game play that integrates real life and online game play through a storyline that seeks to engage learners in an experience that seems real; augmented reality games refer to games where there is a technology overlay on reality that contributes to play (think the first down line on televised football games). The really confusing part comes in when augmented reality is used as part of an alternate reality game. To keep them straight, think about the word meanings; alternate reality seeks to create a different reality for game play purposes, whereas augmented reality adds additional information on to real life environments and objects.

For Constellation Academy of Wine, an ARG was the perfect format to address their learning goals in conjunction with their National Sales Meeting. The game storyline required learners to practice their selling skills, refine their use of internal sales resources, and improve their product knowledge in order to maximize their sales potential to their customers at The Roots Hotel.

So what does an ARG look like? That’s a tricky question to answer, as the structure and format of ARGs can be as varied as their goals.

There are some key terms related to ARGs that differentiate them from other types of serious games.

• Puppetmaster. In an ARG the puppetmaster is the master controller of the game experience. Usually, the puppetmaster is also the game designer. As part of the responsibility of managing the game play, the puppetmaster watches how players are engaging and interacting with the storyline and makes adjustments to the story, scoring, or game mechanisms as necessary to keep players focused and addressing the goals of the game. Because ARGs are played with the real world as the game environment, the puppetmaster’s role is absolutely critical to keeping the game and players on track.
• The Curtain. Much like the curtain behind which The Wizard hid in “The Wizard of Oz,” the puppetmaster operates behind a theoretical curtain that separates the game management activities from the game play environment. The curtain is the veil that provides the illusion that the game is playing out naturally, and when it is managed well, the curtain masks the existence of the puppetmaster.
• Trailhead. This is a clue that leads players into the game. For marketing and media brand ARGs, lots of such clues are typically provided to attract as many players as possible. For learning ARGs, the same theory could be applied, especially for event-based ARGs.
• Rabbit Hole. Another name for trailhead, this term is more commonly used when there is one specific entry point for an ARG.
• TINAG, or “This Is Not A Game.” TINAG is commonly used to describe the tone of an ARG. The goal in the design is to create an experience in which the players don’t necessarily feel like they are playing a game. The actions they take, the decisions they make, and the puzzles they solve shouldn’t be extraneous to the storyline. That said, many ARG themes have a more fantastical feel, so the designer’s responsibility is to create a game experience that mirrors realistic activities as part of the game play even when the storyline makes it clear that the game is not “real.”

ARGs and eLearning

It is difficult to make generalizations of what an ARG is or looks like for learning. Just as there are an unlimited number of games and rules for game play, the same is true for ARGs. Designs could range from something very simple (e.g. a scavenger hunt) to something very complex (e.g. large scale, problem-based learning experience).

ARGs have been around for many years, although predominantly in the entertainment industry. One of the first widely recognized successes was I Love Bees, a game developed for the release of the video game Halo 2. In this game, the rabbit hole was a fairly poorly designed website, ilovebees.com, which triggered a message screen to open, which “began” the game. The success of I Love Bees can be attributed to its design: a puzzle-based game that required players in different geographical locations to work together to collect clues that, when put together, helped players to win the game.

Think about how this type of design translates in the corporate learning world. Players on a team that all possess different knowledge, skill sets, and expertise working together to accomplish tasks sounds a lot like most project-based work, right?

There have been numerous other examples of entertainment industry ARGs, but a second wave of ARGs began to focus on games for raising awareness and educating people about social issues. Urgent EVOKE, first launched in 2010, is a game that facilitates partnerships to develop creative solutions to urgent social problems. Developed by the World Bank Institute and directed by Jane McGonigal, EVOKE is a recent example of an ARG whose players have translated their game play into real projects, businesses, and efforts to save the world.

ARGs aren’t just for entertainment or to address social issues. Because of their unique design elements, ARGs are a perfect solution for organizations that want their employees to not just be exposed to new content in a classroom setting or an e-learning module, but to practice applying that knowledge in an immersive environment. The storyline-driven nature of ARGs allow for the creation of engaging scenario-based learning, and with the overlay of game mechanics to drive motivation and learner engagement, ARGs create opportunities for authentic practice in realistic contexts.

About the Author

Koreen Olbrish founded Tandem Learning (a division of Ayogo) to demonstrate the untapped potential of immersive learning design. Applying her background in experiential learning and technology for education, Olbrish advocates new ways of leveraging technology for enterprise learning with emphasis on performance improvement and behavioral change. She has strong ties to education, having received her M.S. in curriculum and instruction from Penn State University and helping start Freire Charter School in Philadelphia in 1999. Her recent experience has been in the development of enterprise learning solutions, with particular expertise in simulations, games and the application of virtual worlds for learning.

*This article was originally published in eLearn Magazine in August 2011

For more information about how games can be used to educate and motivate, please contact Michael Fergusson: michael (at) ayogo (dot) com or Koreen Olbrish: koreen.olbrish (at) tandem-learning (dot) com.

We’re really excited to announce today our agreement to acquire Tandem Learning, a learning company that develops serious games and immersive learning solutions. Tandem, which has been in business for nearly 4 years, has established itself as a leader in using new technologies and developing new methodologies for organizational training.

Education is an integral component of our commitment to improving lives through games. The acquisition of Tandem Learning further expands our repertoire of learning and training tools and expertise. Koreen Olbrish, Co-Founder and CEO of Tandem Learning will join Ayogo’s executive team.

“From the beginning our mission has been to grow Ayogo into a leading provider of serious games that motivate and educate, and today we took another big step forward.  With Tandem, we get new expertise and relationships. We’re excited for our current and future customers who will now get a more robust offering from our combined companies,” said Michael Fergusson, Founder & CEO of Ayogo.

“We’ve worked hard to establish a track record of finding new ways to create engaging learning experiences which deliver measurable results for our clients.  We’re thrilled that Ayogo recognizes what we’ve built and has decided to make Tandem a part of their organization,” said Jedd Gold, Co-Founder and President of Tandem Learning.

Olbrish added “This acquisition is a win for us, for Ayogo, and for our clients.  Together, I believe we have a unique and compelling offering for organizations looking to incorporate game-based learning into their initiatives. We will continue to find ways to innovate to the benefit of everyone we work with.”

Welcome to the team Tandem Learning!

Courtesy of Flickr's janusz l

I’ve been thinking about the concept of “social games with a purpose,” since I went to a gaming event last month in Vancouver. That’s where the idea of was first introduced to me, and I thought it’d be interesting to explore this topic further. Why? Because games are typically seen as entertainment, however it seems they can they also be used as tools for changing behaviours, learning new skills and even saving the planet.

Games With A Purpose

What does it mean when we call something a game with a purpose and how is it different from just a game? A game with a purpose is defined as a game played on the computer in an entertaining setting that serves some purpose for the person setting up the game. The player usually does something that she would otherwise not willingly do just because she can do it. The idea is that when you’re playing these games it’s not just about having fun, but it’s also about doing something in the game that has meaning in a real-world context. An early example of a game with a purpose or GWAP, is the ESP game. In that game, players had to identify images and label them because image recognition was something computers couldn’t do back then. The game made humans willingly perform a task that they otherwise might not have wanted to do (identify images) because it was part of a game.

Tools for Change

As we’ve explained in previous posts, when we enjoy learning, we retain more because we’re more engaged in something that is meaningful. From a scientific perspective, the goal of game developers is for players to achieve a deep state of focused motivation or something called Flow (the term was coined by Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi). Why? This is where players get “hooked” in the game. It’s also believed that this element of Flow is what makes games such a great candidate for changing behaviours.

So what kinds of Facebook games are we talking about? Some more common casual games with purpose have been used in science-related fields. Researchers at the Children’s Nutrition Centre of Baylor College of Medicine created a successful PC game that helped kids improve their lifestyle. (They used the game as a mechanism for kids to discover and distinguish between fresh fruits and vegetables, and junk foods that just had fruits in them.) The game utilized “fun” and interactive gameplay to motivate the kids to make the right choices. For us, we’re currently working on a motivational and educational Facebook game about how to improve eating and exercise habits. The purpose of the game is to teach players how to estimate the nutritional value of foods in order for them to make the right choices. The game will also encourage players to make concrete positive changes to their nutrition and fitness and activity regimes. (Through a series small actions, completing “missions” and using achievements as a way to encourage particular player behaviour, we hope to encourage actions within the game, which indirectly improves health.)

Besides games that encourage learning skills, there are also Facebook games that use gameplay to address “unsolved” social issues in the real-world, like poverty, education, health and climate change. Lil’Green Patch is one of those games that combines environmentalism and gaming. The more actions that players complete in the game (tend to their and their friends’ land), the better the outcome for a real-world problem (advertisers will donate money to saving the rain forest). Who would’ve thought that nurturing patches of virtual land on Facebook could raise more than $320,000? What are your thoughts about using social games to motivate us to positive action? Leave us a comment or contact us.