A reported about the new IKEA TV that will be available in Europe end of this year… now see how you can assemble it!

After writing the Dutch version of ‘A Brand New Playground (Laat met je merk spelen) in 2009 I was fortunate enough to get involved in some pretty cool and prestigious serious game projects and I never left the scene ever-since.

Projects I was involved in (together with IJsfontein – I was merely just a consultant) involved challenges like change management, internal branding (ABN Amro) and giving companies insight in the logistic consequences of both air- and waterfreight (Air Cargo Netherlands / Schiphol Airport and Port of Amsterdam). Now, three years later I found that the hardest part is not just translating the essence of the problem into a cool and effective game concept, but to get all parties involved, determine the Decision Making Unit within the organization and actually ‘getting the job done’!

One of the recent projects I have done involve an organization of 2.500 people and I started this project about a year ago. Their challenge is to teach all their employees the potential consequences of their actions and behavior induced by the recently released ‘code of conduct’. In banking terms this is called ‘compliance’. We’ve proposed multiple concepts to the Decision Making Unit that exists of 8 different people from 5 different departments (Finance, Communication, Legal, Human Resources, Risk & Control Management) and after 7 months we still haven’t started production. Why? Mostly fear and too many people involved I guess. A serious game has so many aspects that on one hand you want to involve enough people to get the right information and the right clearance.

On the other hand, you don’t want to make them feel that they can actually determine what’s going to be leading in the gameplay. This is a sensitive and challenging task for the ‘producer’ of the game.

The key learnings in this project were the following:

1. Downsize the DMU to the smallest possible group, preferably a maximum of three people, including the budget owner and / or CFO.
2. Don’t let your client get involved creatively. It is not their expertise to come up with a good game concept, it’s yours – so fight them off your turf or it will become too complex.
3. Keep the pace going and force decision making during milestone meetings. Employees of big companies tend to involve loads and loads of collegues and every person has his own opinion about all sorts of stuff (and expertise). Manage this well and you will be happy 😉

To give you an insight in the concepts we have proposed, it varied from playing the ‘mean manager’ giving you the opportunity to use every trick in the book to become the biggest and best company of the country serving you scenario’s and dilemma’s in which you have to choose between the ‘easy way’ that would make more profit for the company and becoming filthy rich, and ‘the hard’ way that involved more tenderness (devil versus angel). In this way we wanted to challenge employees to explore multiple roads towards the same goal and let them experience how this would effect their sense of ‘righteousness’ and ‘fairness’ scoring points for ‘revenue’ and ‘reputation’ (integrity). Unfortuntely this proposal was canned out of fear. Another idea was to build a ‘TV show’ with all sorts of dilemma’s and questions to focus more on ‘knowledge’. A fairly one-dimensional concept, comparable to the current e-learning stuff that we hate. 😉

Eventually we’ve created a quiz-kind-of-game where your goal is to become a ‘Zuperhero’ setting the right example for the company and co-workers. It will be a mix of knowledge based questions and dilemma-based scenario’s with specific mechanics. It should be cool!

I expect this game to go live in September this year and then it has been 18 months since we pitched the idea to our client, but believe me: I will be very happy let you know what we’ve done by then!

Concluding I can say from my experience that running serious gaming projects is mostly about managing expectations, involving experts from within the company, making them feel important enough to share their expertise as well as keeping them distant enough by showing yours… 😉

To all my followers on this blog:

I will be in Silicon Valley from May 26th until June 2nd if you want to meet up.

After that I will be in L.A. (Los Angeles) for the E3 and meetings from June 3rd until June 5th.

Send me a TWEET @BartHufen or email at barthufen at brandnewgame dot nl

Then (if I am still alive after 7 days of gaming shizzle) – I will drive my (rented) Dodge Challenger to Vegas with my best friend Lorence – so join me then if you want to get drunk 😉

Let me know!

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Although I am not a great fan of IKEA – I think they just invented a BRILLIANT proposition for households world wide… well done! As long as the sound is good and I can hook up all my apple shizzle and PlayStation 3 … I’m sold!

>In my new book – I will be writing about how games are used in a business context, like playing at work for training purposes. The funny thing is that people in a work-environment are not used (and likely) to change. It’s remarkable that in games actually – we tend to try to reach the same objective in different ways even if it means losing a few lives (die trying). So in games we are very ‘open to change‘ and eager to learn.

A friend of mine is graduating at the University of Utrecht on a thesis about the effectiveness of games as a tool for internal communication and her opening quote is striking, because it defines exactly why I think using games in business environments is so effective. The words have been said by Henry Ford and goes as follows:

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. 

I am going to read the thesis now and I promise you will soon see a post here including the summary of the effects of games as an internal communications tool.

 ‘Laat op je werk spelen’ (A Business Playground / playatwork / workinplay)

Thanks to Newzoo and Distimo research. 

 

• Share of paying players has grown 35% to 37 million Americans
• iOS takes 54% of the revenues from mobile games, iOS games gross 5 times more and Android games in the US
• The majority of money is spent in-game: 91% of revenues for both iOS and Android
• 68% of Americans plays games on a smartphone, of which 19 million (28%) plays on an iPhone
• iPad dominates the tablet space and is used to play games on by 60% of tablet users

• Share of paying players has grown 24% to 9.2 million Brits
• iOS takes 61% of the revenues from mobile games, iOS games gross 16 times more and Android games in the US
• The majority of money is spent in-game: 91% of revenues for Android and 85% for iOS
• 75% of Brits plays games on a smartphone, of which 4.9 million (27%) plays on an iPhone
• iPad dominates the tablet space and is used to play games on by 71% of tablet users

• Share of paying players has grown 29% to 7.8 million Germans
• iOS takes 61% of the revenues from mobile games, iOS games gross 8 times more and Android games in the US
• The majority of money is spent in-game: 73% of revenues for Android and 78% for iOS
• 69% of Germans plays games on a smartphone, of which 4.1 million (25%) plays on an iPhone
• iPad dominates the tablet space and is used to play games on by 64% of tablet users

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As I wrote in ‘A Brand New Playground’ this just MIGHT be the future of glasses and technology…

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Frogger… who didn’t play it when (s)he was young? Now you can play the ‘real-life’ version in a fusion with the original arcade classic! Check out the video!

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Look at the reaction of these two lovely people when they find out they used to be playing the same game and the guy was actually member of the legendary ‘Method’ guild… brilliant!