A free game? Sure! No strings attached? Nope! A freemium model with in-game purchases? Hell no!

Our game Power Play provides a perfect experience to play with a colleague if you wonder how you can use a serious games to:

1. Address compliance / code of conduct issues
2. Discuss complex or sensitive situations on the work floor
3. Give insight in the consequences of peoples actions
4. Want to bring company values to life
5. If you love Hearthstone, but are looking for a ‘serious game’ alternative 😉

The game is relatively easy, watch this video for a short (5 minute) explanation or read on…

As soon as you register, you can enter the game and start by choosing either an opponent or a ‘file’. A file is a situation you would like to practice. You can experience how your actions will affect the situation at hand. For instance if a colleague is scared to address a certain situation you probably require a certain level of ‘bravery’ to ‘unnerve’ this situation effectively. The game works in turns, so as soon as you start playing for a certain file, you and your opponent receive a set of cards that represent actions. These actions cost a certain amount of energy and have various impact on your company values. In this case these values are 4 key processes that influence the impact of your actions. They are: will-power, knowledge, abilities and guts (bravery). Each turn your energy level grows and you play more actions – that hopefully unnerve the situation before your opponent saves the day…

Just practice together and let us know how your experience was through Twitter @BartHufen #powerplay #gamification.

This product is based on a game we developed for ING Insurance (now called NN Group) which was released in 2015, 2016 and 2017.

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The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) interviewed researcher, game designer and author Jane McGonigal. Her newest book, “SuperBetter,” which releases September 15, explores a decade’s worth of scientific research into the ways games—including video games, sports and puzzles—change how people respond to stress, challenges and pain and how to cultivate new powers of recovery and resilience in everyday life simply by adopting what McGonigal calls a more gameful mindset. Read the interview below – with a big thanks to ESA for sharing! 

1. Please briefly introduce yourself and your work.

I’m a researcher, author and game designer who has spent the past 15 years trying to prototype and provide scientific evidence for the ways in which games can help us become the best versions of ourselves: happier, braver, more resilient, better problem-solvers and better allies to our friends and family.

Most recently, my work has focused on how games can improve mental and physical health. There’s a rapidly growing body of evidence in the scientific literature that ordinary video games can be a powerful tool for treating depression, anxiety and even chronic pain. I’ve spent the past five years researching this topic – I’ve read literally more than 1,000 studies in the fields of neuroscience, psychology and medicine.

Now, I’m publishing my “SuperBetter” book to help get this entire, emerging field of research into the hands of the game-playing public and also game developers. I want the public to understand how video games can be played with purpose – that is, with the knowledge that you’re not just having fun, but you’re also developing important psychological resources, like creativity, determination, optimism, curiosity and resilience in the face of setbacks. And I want game developers to understand how to make games that bring even more of these benefits to their players.

2. How did you first become interested in working with video games?

That’s a very long story that starts with me researching and making games as a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, although I guess it starts even earlier, when I was 10 years old and designed my first video game with ASCII art on a Commodore 64 computer.

But the really pivotal experience for me, more recently, in guiding me to the work I’m doing today was the mild traumatic brain injury that I suffered in 2009. Thirty-four days after the injury, I decided to try to bring my game designer skills to the problem, and I invented a game to help my brain heal and to deal with the severe depression and anxiety.

That has been a real turning point in my game development career, as that game (SuperBetter) has now been used by half a million people to improve their mental and physical health and has created some amazing research opportunities for me with organizations like the National Institutes of Health. All of this has convinced me that game design is going to be one of the most important areas of research and discovery in medicine and clinical psychology over the next decade.

3. What excites you most in your day-to-day job?

Data! Scientific data is what excites me. Every time a new study on the real-life impact of gameplay comes out, I devour it.

Even more exciting is doing original research and seeing the results. For example, with SuperBetter, we’ve done two major studies so far. First, a randomized, controlled study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania found that playing SuperBetter for 30 days significantly reduces symptoms of depression and anxiety, and increases optimism, social support and players’ self-confidence. The study also found that people who followed the SuperBetter rules for one month were significantly happier and more satisfied with their lives.

More recently, a clinical trial funded by the National Institutes of Health and conducted at Ohio State University Medical Research Center and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital found that the SuperBettergame improves mood, decreases anxiety and suffering, and strengthens family relationships during traumatic brain injury rehabilitation and recovery. Honestly, there is nothing more exciting than getting solid scientific evidence that a game you’ve made is changing people’s lives and helping them get happier and healthier from extremely difficult challenges.

Note from myself: It is interesting to see that Jane is addressing the four quadrants I always use to determine our key drives for game design: physical, mental, emotional and social elements. You can find them in the handouts (slide 34) for the Gamification Workshop presentation on this page. Of course these are based on the Insights model, which are based on Quinn… But I guess we – as human beings – are always looking for rational (mental), physical, emotional (social) and spiritual challenges: or active and passive events. Often spiritual is left out in favor of social. Maybe social can be the opposite of spiritual? Spiritual meaning: inside my mind, where as social means: outside my mind in interaction with others…?

4. Where do you see video games in 10 years? What broader applications across society can we expect in games’ future?

A decade from now, ordinary video games will be understood as an important tool in creating mental health and well-being. I forecast with very high confidence that games will be used to treat depression, anxiety, pain and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a complement to, or in many cases be prescribed in lieu of, pharmaceutical treatment.
Note from myself: Obviously Jane is talking about serious games here. Since 2010 we have published a lot of serious games in for companies like Foot Locker Europe and NN Global. Unfortunately we cannot disclose all of our projects online, but the ones we are allowed to talk (and write) about can be found on our project page.

5. What is your favorite video game and why?

I’ll go with the scientific literature here again, and say that Tetris has been the most extensively studied game for accomplishing everything from preventing flashbacks after witnessing a trauma – so it could be used as a cognitive vaccine against PTSD; to reducing cravings for cigarettes and junk food by 25 percent – so it can be used as a tool in behavior change and fighting addiction; to creating the same blood flow patterns in the brain as meditation – so it can be used to improve attention and improve the body’s ability to recover from stress.

Everyone should have Tetris on their phone. We should have PSAs explaining how to use it for all of these benefits. And I’m ready to give Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov the Nobel Prize in Games.

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When I mention the topics of applied games, serious gaming and gamification, they are often greeted with scepticism. And for good reason; video games have had a very tumultuous history. 

By Luis Ramos 

Ever since their inception, critics have associated video games with a number of negative  consequences, like aggression, addiction and social isolation. In spite of this, the industry has thrived and grown into a $70.4 billion industry in 2013. This number is expected to top $86.1 billion by 2016 ¹. It is still the fastest growing entertainment sector, and with the advent of mobile gaming, the number of users exceeds that of any other form of entertainment. This makes video games as much a part of our modern lives as any other medium.

Yet, the mention of video games in a serious capacity is still met with many concerns. They are games after all, aren’t they? How could playing games possibly help us reach any organizational goals? Luckily, we can use the science of psychology to finds some answers.

For this article, I’ve chosen to home in on the topic of employee training. Also met with much resistance within the workplace, employee training is a vital tool for developing employee skills, fostering cooperation and increasing overall organizational adaptability. However employees, as well as managers, tend to react negatively to training, often labeling at as boring, unnecessary and a distraction from their ‘real’ work. This lack of engagement can seriously undermine the motivation of the employees, which in turn impacts the effectiveness of any training program being implemented.

If one were to pair the above mentioned with any possible scepticism on the use of video games as a training tool, they would surely conclude that it would be doomed to fail. However, one of the most important characteristics of any game is their ability to fully engage the player. By demanding the use of multiple senses, and providing a challenge that is just difficult enough to exceed the players skill level, games create a ‘flow’-experience: a temporary state in which a person feels detached from their surroundings and becomes completely engrossed by the task at hand. It is a state associated with performance at every level in many different disciplines.

Another reason video games can be so engaging is their ability to motivate the player. Here are some things video games do really well in order to motivate players to keep playing:

Visual representations of progress

A game will show you how far along you are and how much more you need to go. You are never left to guess if you are making any progress.

Multiple long-, mid- and short-term goals

Games are great at breaking up challenges into smaller goals. This is already apparent in the classical level structure that most games use.

Reward effort

A game often rewards the players for every action he or she undertakes. Whether it’s smashing some bricks with a jump or successfully dropping puzzle piece, the action is rewarded in one way or the other.

Rapid, frequent, consistent and clear feedback

Games tend to provide quick feedback for everything you do, enabling you to rapidly gage the effectiveness of your actions. Feedback ranges from small pinging sounds when you jump or grab an item, to on screen flashes that you are receiving damage and are in danger.

This is just a sampling of what games can do to influence and motivate peoples behavior. This ability to influence and motivate peoples behavior is what makes video games such a powerful training tool. Each of the above aspects can be expanded upon by further researching scientific literature on the relevant subjects, but we’ll leave that for another time.

So, now we have an idea of how it could work. But a more important question remains: Does it actually work?

Industrial and Organizational psychologists Traci Sitzmann and Katherine Ely set out to answer this very same question². In their 2010 article, they compiled 55 reports that researched the effectiveness of training games, dubbed ‘simulation games’ in their article, and compared the results of these reports through statistical analysis.

What they found is that self-efficacy (the strength of one’s belief in one’s own ability to complete tasks and reach goals) was 20% higher for trainees receiving instruction via a simulation game than trainees in a comparison group. They also found that, on average, trainees receiving instruction via a simulation game had 11% higher declarative knowledge levels, 14% higher procedural knowledge levels, and 9% higher retention levels than trainees in the comparison group. This means that trainees receiving instruction via a simulation game were found to know more of what was taught, more of how to perform a task or action and remembered it better after an extended period of time. In addition to the above, another important find was that training games worked best when they were part of a training program. This allowed for post-play feedback session that improved results in all learning categories. For a more extensive report on the investigation, be sure to consult the article.

For an example of a successful application of serious gaming, we need look no further than the “Hot Talent” Game; a game we at BrandNewGame developed for one of the leading telecom retailers in the Netherlands. Check out the game here: http://www.brandnewgame.com/bizz/projects/belcompanys-hot-talent/ 

The company approached us with the objective of wanting to improve the understanding and application of the principles of cross- and upselling by their sales personnel. They had already developed a training program for the same purpose, but found they wanted to increase the amount that employees interacted with and applied the knowledge provided through training. The game placed the player in a store environment, where their task was to greet and engage customers in conversation, wherein they tried to discover a customers consumer profile. For instance: are you dealing with a casual consumer who doesn’t have a lot of product knowledge, or is the customer a gadget freak, who wants state of the art and is up to speed on the latest developments. When the customer profile was identified, the player had the task to match the right tone of voice to the profile, increasing the trust the customer had in the player. Doing this correctly resulted in the ability to make a better sale.

The results were impressive. A total of 680 employees played the game for an average of 40 times within the first 8 weeks after the game was deployed. Some employees even played the game 200 times! The game significantly increased the voluntary interactions the employees had with the training material, which in turn resulted in an increase of sales.

Research in the field of psychology keeps providing us with positive evidence for use of serious games for training. By combining the knowledge privy to us from the field of science with that of the field of game design, the possible results are realistic and significant. Furthermore, gaming provides us with a tool to convey knowledge and vision in a playful, dynamic and challenging way. On top of everything else, it can help relieve the stigma of training in the workplace, by changing the way we all look at training. Those who dare to challenge conventions will be able to reap the benefits of gaming as a training tool. Playing games just got a whole lot more interesting!

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TNO – The leading Dutch research company recently published a report of their extensive research how serious games contribute to the effectiveness of ‘learning’ in an educational environment. The stunning conclusions can be read in the summary below.

“They conclude that play has a firm foundation in evolution and individual development. It not only drives the physical, social and cognitive development of animals and man, but also functions as a behavior generator that simulates the development of new types of behavior and skills.”

There are three main motivators in play: development of competence, the feeling and experience of ‘autonomy’ and self-realization. External conditions that help to increase motivation are feedback and rewards, meaningful goals (in the game) and rules that restrict us to achieve these goals. These elements are all present in my basic ‘Game Design Mechanics’ model that I published over a year ago and it’s nice to see that TNO has scientifically proven I was right 😉

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The power of games can be explained by the proverb “Tell me and I will forget, show me and I may not remember, involve me and I will understand.” Learning by doing has proven to be the most effective way of changing behavior. Changing behavior is also—in essence—what we ultimately want to achieve with all our communications. Applying game elements to your corporate communications ensures that your audience will remember and engage with your messages like never before.

Over the past three years, I have applied games and game mechanics to a diverse array of business objectives and goals. They varied from convincing 350 different companies involved in the air cargo industry to streamline their processes, to teaching 3,000 bank employees about how they should implement their organization’s new brand values in their daily work to a compliance game in which 2,500 employees were able to experience the potential consequences of their actions and behavior.

Games are the richest form of entertainment compared to other media because they engage most of our senses. If you read a book or newspaper, you consume passively, if you listen to a workshop—you see and hear (just like watching TV) and maybe get involved by asking questions. Games are so effective because they require active involvement from players. Games involve a player’s eyes and ears, and require physical and mental interactions. Multi-sensory learning has been shown to be the most effective form of learning and changing behavior.

The theory of play
Games involve setting objectives that challenge the players, rewarding them when they are doing well and punishing them when they fail. A good game is easy to learn and difficult to master. Good games are also highly replayable and enable players to remain in a state of “flow.” A state of flow is achieved when a game challenges the player continuously, level after level. It means that the game is challenging, but never so difficult that it leads to frustration. Games should also not be so easy that the player becomes bored. To keep players from becoming frustrated or bored, games must offer the right amount of skills, options and variables. It’s very difficult to achieve the right balance in a game, but it can be accomplished through play-testing over and over again with different target groups.

Getting started
So how do you determine what results gamification can have for your organization’s communications? First, you must determine the goal for your game. What is it you wish to achieve? What do you want your target audience to accomplish? Is your goal to increase store traffic? To increase sales? To engage customers longer online? To increase brand awareness or brand loyalty? To train staff or for internal branding and employee engagement?

Next you must determine your audiences’ key drivers and motivations. Notice how the motivations above can very plausible match dominant department behaviors and determine which driver & motivation dominantly determines your challenges in life!

Key element—drivers and motivations 
The most important element of any game is that it must link to real-life benefits. These benefits don’t necessarily always have to be prizes or money; they can also be social recognition, access to a useful tool or service, or a yearly advantage. For example, a hotel chain may offer game players a “never wait in line while checking in” benefit. To determine the right benefit, you must understand what motivates your players (target audience). It may help to use the model below to help pinpoint your audiences’ drives and motivations.

In the model, an individual’s key drivers are indicated in the center of the boxes. According to psychological research, one or more of these is a dominant driver for each individual. For instance, some people are driven by constantly learning, while others may find it critical to have a lot of friends, which means their key driver is to bond. Others feel the need to acquire things, while many others may have as a dominant driver the need to defend their current situation or way of life.

Surrounding the key drivers boxes are characteristics that typically motivate each driver. From these you can determine where employees in particular departments may fall within the model. For instance, people involved in HR are typically motivated by social mechanics, so a key driver for them would be to bond. Sales people are typically motivated by challenges so a dominant driver for them would be to defend.

As soon as you determine which driver is most dominant in your target audience, you can refine your targeting by selecting the most dominant motivation and then start developing your score model.

Score model
In every game, players need to take actions to get rewarded. When developing a game for employees, it’s most effective to begin by searching for scenarios and dilemmas in your employees’ daily work life. I gathered scenarios for a game I developed for a major bank by interviewing bank employees and managers about everyday occurrences that happen in the organization. To make a game interesting, players must always choose between options, and each choice has to lead to a different outcome. Based on a scenario I gathered from the bank employees, one challenge within the game was about trust. Employees had to determine whether or not they trusted another employee to get money from the cash machine. Pressure mounts in the game as the line of clients grows. The correct choice for this scenario depends on the values of the organization. If efficiency is one of the organization’s values, then the employee should let someone else get the cash.

For each challenge in a game you must provide players with options for action. Then you must translate these actions into a score model or a tree of choices that lead to certain results.
Games are an effective tool for communication because they actually change people’s behavior. So stop conducting workshops and producing booklets that nobody will read, and start playing games at work!

Check out some of the projects I did in the past years here.

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We released our compliance game in October 2012 here in The Netherlands for 2.500 employees of Ziggo (a cable, internet and telephone company). It was a great succes as you can read here: http://www.brandnewgame.nl/bizz/projects/

The company below has a different proposition and chose to use a more ‘realistic’ cartoon style than we did, but it looks like a nice alternative and a great adventure compared to classical training, to ssay the least: it’s interactive!

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The University of Phoenix did a great job getting this message across with this video…It explains how we can learn by using computer games. “The blur between learning and playing should be even more blurrier…”

And let’s be really clear: everything in this video also applies to adults! We are ALL humans, young, old, men, women, black, yellow, red, white, blue or whatever color you like to have… Playing Games is in our DNA, whether it be political games, taunting games,  sexual games, learning games… it’s all gameplay on this playground we call earth…

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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… 😉

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>By Morton Geertsen 

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>

Cool! We have been nominated for an e-learning award for the games IJsfontein developed for Air Cargo Netherlands, Dutch Customs and Schiphol airport. The games where developed to get ‘smart-working and e-freight’ across within the Airfreight sector around Schiphol Airport.

We already won an award in the United States in 2011, but now apparently we have been nominated for an e-learning award in our homeland – which is great as well of course!

Check the game trailer of the first game below and the presentation underneath! We can finally share some results in terms of gameplay, high score development, amount of plays (3 on average per visitor) and some other stuff. Go check it out and let me know what you think @BartHufen on Twitter!

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