Revealing the many ways that our world is gameful, by exploring definitions

Hailey and Jase set off on the ambitious quest of answering the question “what is a game?”, but with a focus on what this means for ways of working. Our amble takes us through a wide range of terminology. We explore the differences (or lack thereof) between games, workshop activities, and rituals. We also discuss the distinction between “gameful design” and “gamification”, and lean into some thorny ethical issues around using games for behaviour change. Overall, we discover that gameful elements are at play in many aspects of our lives, and that games are a useful lens through which to understand our world.

Links to resources

Dungeons and Dragons
https://dnd.wizards.com/

Travis Hill, at Press Pot Games
https://www.presspot.games/about

“Our Innermost Thoughts” on Kickstarter
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/travisdhill/our-innermost-thoughts-a-mostly-solo-zine-of-small-rpgs

“Our Innermost Thoughts” on Itch.io
https://presspotgames.itch.io/our-innermost-thoughts

Google Documents, a collaborative writing tool
https://www.google.com.au/docs/about/

Werewolf, social deduction game
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/925/werewolf

Social deduction game
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_deduction_game

Collabforge
https://collabforge.com/

Euchre, a card game of which Buck Euchre is a variant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euchre

Magic the Gathering
https://magic.wizards.com/

Magic the Gathering turn structure
https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Turn_structure

“Finite and Infinite Games” by James P. Carse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games

Gail Taylor, one of the creators of the MG Taylor facilitation method
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gail-taylor/

Gamification
​​https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification

“Gameful design: A Potential Game Changer”, and education-focused perspective from Educause
https://er.educause.edu/articles/2018/5/gameful-design-a-potential-game-changer

“Life. Be in it.” campaign, as commemorated by the National Museum of Australia
https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/life-be-in-it-launch

Gamestorming, facilitation resource website and book, led by Dave Gray
https://gamestorming.com/

MG Taylor method
https://www.matttaylor.com/public/mgt_tool_kit.htm

Homo Ludens, a book on the cultural history of play, by Johan Huizinga
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Ludens

Man, Play, and Games, a book on sociology of play by Roger Caillois
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man,_Play_and_Games

“Paying for Predictions”, applied game by the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre
https://www.climatecentre.org/games/2501/paying-for-predictions/

Capsim business simulation tool for MBAs
https://www.capsim.com/academic-use-cases

Andre Marczewski, articles and books articulating definitions in gamification, via Gamified UK
https://www.gamified.uk/gamification-framework/differences-between-gamification-and-games/

PAX Online, the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) gaming convention, delivered as a virtual event
https://online.paxsite.com/

Logan Timmins, Amble Troupe Member and indie game designer
https://breathingstories.itch.io/

Transcript

Hailey: [00:00:00] This is Amble, the podcast where we take a disciplined wander through the borderland between ways of working and games. I am one of your hosts, Hailey Cooperrider.

Jason: And I’m Jason Tampake.

Hailey: Good morning Jase. It’s a cold but bright Saturday here in Melbourne. What’s the week been like for you?

Jason: Week’s been pretty good. Getting lots of game on this week. There’s been a lot of D&D. I particularly enjoyed the guest that I, guest appearance I made in your campaign. It was hilarious. That was my first time driving a level 20 character and it was enormously exciting for me, even though our friend Abby is [00:01:00] exceptionally efficient in the game world and dispatched me relatively brutally, it’s really nice to jump in anyway. It was a lot of fun.

Hailey: Yeah, that actually was really good and clearly a game. Whereas we’re raising the question this week of “what is a game?” And, and it’s, it’s a topic that’s been, you know, very lengthily discussed in many fora. So we’ll, we’ll try to focus it down to what is a game and why that – understanding that matters in the context of ways of working, designing collaborations, you know, what facilitators do that sort of thing.

But we thought we’d start off with a discussion about a game that you’ve been playing Jase that maybe sits in this fuzzy boundary between game and something else.

Jason: Yeah, I mean, our um, interest in this, if I recall correctly sort of came from one of our colleagues, one of our friends, Kiri, you know [00:02:00] producing sort of a game. And then another one of our friends, Logan, another fellow Ambler, Logan saying, Hey, you know, there’s this genre of games called lyric games.

And, you know, going, wow, you know, what’s the difference between this thing called a game and a ritual and a process or a, you know, like yeah. And that, that, that raises some really, really interesting things. And at the time I, I, a little while ago, I backed the Travis Hill Kickstarter called “Our Innermost Thoughts”.

So, and that zine that Travis put together is explicitly five experiences about communicating with your self nature and others, and the, the lead kind of game in that space in his book is called “Lost Nature”, which is a beautiful little experience slash game slash meditation slash ritual slash personal development tool that sets up a context [00:03:00] or a framework for you to think about your place in the world through returning a lost object back into nature. You know, and

Hailey: What do you do when you play this game? What do you actually do?

Jason: So I mean, I can reference the thing itself, like Trav leads out saying, look, over time our world’s grown chaotic. There’s too much unknown and too little means to separate the worlds we live in. We’re both intrinsically woven into nature while also being a foreigner to it. For too long, human kind has uprooted and destroyed, robbed, and pillaged; chewed up the land and spat it back out.

It must embark on a journey of memory and reconciliation. It’s up to us to help try and restore the world as it once was. So this is about setting up a journey where you return an object and when you take a wander into nature and you find an object that seems lost, or out of [00:04:00] place and Travis sets up all these sorts of questions as prompts for you to, A, first connect with the object and then, B, on your wanders,

think about what it means to return it to place. Now, of course, this is a vehicle or a metaphor for considering your own kind of place in nature. Like how do you respond to being in a place? And it’s just such a, yeah, it’s, it’s a really beautiful experience, a really beautiful game that you can take yourself on when you’re going for, like, I mean, for instance, in the context that we’re in, in Melbourne at the moment through lockdown, you know, we get to go out for one hour a day, you know, not to walk more than five kilometers, but that’s, it’s, even in that context, you can still have a meaningful engagement with the world and connect with a sense of self and place.

So in, in that sense, it’s a really beautiful kind of vehicle – game as vehicle for meditation.

Hailey: Go a level lower down. What do [00:05:00] you do? Do you roll dice? you you play, is it a, you play other people? it work?

Jason: Yeah, no. So this is a solo experience, so it’s a solo experience and Travis sets up sort of context provides a whole bunch of context and instruction if you will, and how to go about creating or recreating this experience for yourself. And this is the beauty of design in general, like, and I think this is sort of the crossover that we get interested in when you’re working with people.

How do you create context or experience for them to have a very designed experience, an intentional experience, an experience with purpose, an experience that’s engendered, that’s meant to encourage a particular engagement with the world or a particular engagement with content, or a particular engagement with people.

So he sort of breaks it into, he says, you know, the first thing you want to do is go out into the world, find your place. It could be as simple as taking a walk or, you know, just getting away from it all, then find a place where you’re alone. Like your having a solo sort of experience. And then [00:06:00] the invitation is to pick up an object and carry them to somewhere else.

And this seems is pretty straightforward. Right? But the ask is that you do it intentionally and with purpose – intentionally engaging with the world around you. And it’s this, it’s, it’s a beautiful little mechanism, you know, when you find a particular rock that seems out of place or a flower that’s somewhere where it shouldn’t be, or I mean, in person, I found this, you know, like with a wrapper, like, you know, like, you know a candy wrapper or something like that, you know, like, it, it asks you to engage with a an object, like at the micro level and really connect with something in your environment.

So that choosing an object, he’s got some kind of structure around that he’s saying, look, find an object that looks lost can be a rock or a fallen leaf, a stick, or a flower pedal. Lost objects are lost because they’re not connected to anything. So they – they’re out of context. And then the ask is to engage with that sort of object, like actually get in touch with it, like [00:07:00] draw it or kind of name it, or, you know, look at its idiosyncrasies.

So again, rather than passing over something really quickly, like slowing down and observing the thing that you’re, you’re picking up and, understanding, like seeking to peel back, why you think it’s lost, why it looks out of place. And I guess the first game mechanic comes in, then he asks you to flip a coin and the coin means that you, you he um, he sets up heads or tails to a set of answers, a set of questions, prompts for reflection.

And it gives a bit of randomness. Your experience is going to be different depending on whether or not the coin goes heads or tails. So for heads, for instance, the questions that you’re asked to engage in uh, how long has the object been lost and how far might it be away from its home?

Whereas for tails, it says, how long will it, will you, will it take you to return the object home? And how do you think the object came to be in this place? So then you, you pick up your object. Off, you go, you’re going on your work. And then he [00:08:00] sets up a bunch of prompts around how you go about the journey.

So, And this is the sort of reflection piece. It’s sort of framing your experience of, of the journey. You know, Travis asks you to take some time to understand the object, like focus on, on this sort of lost object. And his prompter is because understanding oneself is understanding one’s place in the world.

So by focusing on this sort of object, as a metaphor for place in the world and, you know, being lost in returning to connection to broader context, you get this sort of mechanism to think about your place in the world, right? And again, you stop and you can flip a coin and answer some prompters or some questions that are in that.

And again, it makes the experience repeatable because the questions that you’re being asked are going to be different depending on your coin flip. And then the final piece is homecoming. So, you know, when you arrive at the object’s homeplace or wherever you feel that object needs [00:09:00] to belong, you can return it to where it was meant to be.

And then the ask is to celebrate, like celebrate taking in the world like this thing coming home. And that’s a opportunity for you to breathe deeply and reflect upon a whole bunch of questions around your place in the world. And again the invitation from Travis is to sort of, you know, feel your sense of place and then connect with where you are.

Listen to the sounds around you, look at where you return the object, answer some questions about, you know, what it feels like for you to be in this place in the world. And that’s the end of the experience. So by taking a routine, walk around the block and turning it into a meditation on paying attention to the little things, and then using that as a vehicle for exploring your place in the world.

Yeah. Game is invitation to intentional practice or something. I, yeah, it’s just quite beautiful. It’s a really beautiful thing.

Hailey: I think that’s where I wanted to go next was ask you: what made you choose this? You know, [00:10:00] what, in what context are you choosing to spend your time doing this game?

Jason: Hm

It’s interesting. I mean, I backed it on Kickstarter because, you know, I’ve, I mean, Trav has a an Itch.io site. So for anyone who wants to look up Travis’s work, you can check it out on Itch.io. So it’s Travis D Hill, but you know, I was attracted to this sort of format because one of the things that’s interesting to me, so one of the things that attracts me as a gamer is games are sort of these systems that you can involve yourself in.

It doesn’t matter if, you know, if you’ve had a a rough week or a rough day, getting together with a group of known friends and playing through a campaign where, a D&D campaign, allows you to engage in a, in a kind of context that’s safe and also imaginary and creative. And, you know, it gives you an opportunity to engage with the world in a different way and take you out of that sort of context of [00:11:00] whatever you’ve been feeling.

I think that there’s something about these sorts of experiential or lyric games or meditations or rituals or whatever you want to call them – games as vehicles for intentionality – that’s a reminder, I think. You know, if we were deeply kind of connected humans, the process of walking around in your environment, might be, you know, something like might be more connected than it is in the every day, but you know, we’re fighting, we’ve got distractions, you know, you’re worried about what time do I have to get to work?

You know, what’s the messages that I’ve – what are the the loops that I’ve left unclosed on messenger. What’s I don’t know. What’s the assignment that I have due What’s the queue of stuff in my print queue, all those sorts of things that, you know, occupy your mind and you’re walk becomes one of, you know, I’ve got to get my hour of exercise in because, you know, that’s what it is.

And off you take around the block. There’s something about finding [00:12:00] ways to remind yourself, to connect to it. Now, if you’re deeply disciplined and you can do a mindfulness preparation and, you know, and actively step into those sorts of spaces, that’s great. But often having a prompt like, that someone’s designed for you, that someone has taken the time to think about, and, you know, put it into a poetic kind of game…

… it’s an easy mode of engaging or reminding yourself that, hey, I’m going to play something that’s fun, but I’m also at, that’s going to be a vehicle for allowing me to engage more meaningfully with my walk around the block, you know, with my walk around the neighborhood.

Hailey: Okay. So it’s a kind of a support structure.

Jason: Yeah, it’s, it’s a scaffold. It’s a you know, it’s, it’s a, a vehicle or a platform through, through which I can engage more meaningfully in something that’s as mundane as a walk around the block, because it reminds me that even a mundane experience like my daily walk is still about me [00:13:00] connecting with a broader environment, still about me paying attention to the small things that matter still about me, asking myself questions about my place in the world or about, you know, paying attention to the things that are around me.

I mean, yeah, I think there’s something really, powerful in that. And I guess the other reason, sorry, I’m talking an awful lot, Hails…

Hailey: No, please. I’m asking you lots of questions.

Jason: But I think the other thing that emerges in there in that sort of reflection is that it deeply resonates with the sort of work that we do when we’re working with people in collaboration. You know, part of the you know, job of collaboration, designers or facilitators is to create context for people to pay attention to the things that are important to them in that, in, in particular moments. You know to create a context in which people can do work that yeah, if we had all the time, energy resource and [00:14:00] space, we could do.

You know, we’re able to do, people are able to do amazing things, but in the hustle and bustle of the everyday work environment, if I’ve got X amount of time, you know, we trust in collaborative designers or in facilitators to give us the vehicle through which we can do work more effectively. And designing those experiences seems very akin to something like a a poetic game, you know, taking the time to bring people’s focus to the things that count, creating a structure through which you can do something which you might normally do, but be given a roadmap to make it slightly easier.

Oh

Hailey: I’m glad you went to the group thing. I wanted to ask about that next. And there’s, there’s something interesting for me around the game as this book – you’re holding up this book, you know, showing it to me – is a facilitator in an object that you choose to facilitate yourself [00:15:00] with.

And groups who might play D&D, they’ll pick up the core rule book, and they choose to facilitate their creative journey through this, this game, I mean, D&D does have the gamemaster as facilitator, but there are many, you know, gamemaster-less RPGs groups can use, or board games, which don’t necessarily have that special role, where people choose to facilitate themselves through a journey.

And that sort of striking me as in this sort of question about what is a game and how does it relate to, to group work? As a fruitful point of overlap. I’m curious as well. You mentioned you did use the word fun at one point, and I was going to ask you, was this game fun?

Jason: Yes. I mean, I think it’s like being asked to look at the world in a different way. And any mode of enabling you to do that? I think is fun. [00:16:00] Like the fact that I was constrained, like, you know what I mean, a series of prompts is a series of constraints. Like, you know, pick up one object that looks out of place. Spend some time observing it.

And those sorts of constraints to your experience, i.e. playing within a set of rules and seeing what you can do with them and the other prompts that are there throughout the journey does yeah, make the experience sort of fun.

Although, you have to willingly kind of be in that space, you have to choose to engage with the game, right?

Hailey: This is what I’m interested in picking at is – after that initial choice to do this, it sounds like maybe some of the fun is in, in the release of responsibility and permission. Because you’re letting the game lead you, you don’t have to worry about that. You just have to do, you just have to follow the thread.

Maybe it’s even a way of getting closer to flow because you don’t have to have those extra layers of cognition of like what am I doing and what should I be doing on my walk? And am I [00:17:00] spending this walk well, am I truly relaxed – how am I going to get truly relaxed? – and instead you’ve made a choice to follow this, this program, this game, this, this activity.

And there’s a freedom in that.

Jason: I love it. That’s such a beautiful insight Hails. Yes. That’s all I’m going to say is yes. I mean, that’s just a brilliant observation. It is that, you know, when you, when you can engage, when you can trust in and give yourself over to, or choose to engage with a structure or a support or a scaffold, or, you know, a thing that’s going to enable my particular journey, then yeah.

You can just get on with the, with the process of doing it, you know, and, you know, you’re going to come to an outcome. I know that I’m going to end up with these questions that enable me to think about my place in the world. And yeah, the, the process of how I go about doing that has been taken care of by someone.

Yes. And in many ways, that’s exactly like the value of a facilitated process, right. Or the value of working with [00:18:00] collaborative designers. Yes.

Hailey: And again, yeah so there’s this interesting, same but different there. So the facilitator’s job is to look at the group, at the situation, at the context. And through dialogue with the participants, but ultimately to choose what does this group need now and how can I deliver that by providing them a particular structure? And with games, groups have the opportunity to do that for themselves. And so the, the main difference is that they need to kind of look at what they need and make a choice about what they need, but then in a sense, once they’ve initiated the game, they can spend less energy holding themselves. You know, so we’re on a small team, Amble Studio, were doing a lot of work at the moment around who we are and strategy and how do we work?

And there’s always this moment of, okay, how are we spending this hour? Or, we’ve arrived here. What’s the next step. We’ve had a conversation about [00:19:00] principles and what they are. Now, what do we do? And usually someone proposes: well, why don’t we just have a brainstorm?

Let’s all think quietly, write down a bunch of principles and then we’ll all put them in the chat and press enter at the same time and we’ll get this big wall of chat. And then we see that and we have a conversation about that and that’s kind of one game, and then we have the next one. Okay. What do we do with that?

Well, maybe let’s put them in a Google document and see if we can cluster like with like, and distill them down to a list. And people go, okay, yeah, that’s a game. I know how to play that game. And then we can actually just stop talking and start working and kind of see what unfolds through the course of that game, sort of for the next 10 or 15 minutes. Maybe if we had a facilitator there that would have already planned out something for us or walked us through something like that.

Um, whereas a game… and because we are these gamey facilitator types, it’s easy for us to think about what could a next activity be.

Jason: Yes.

Hailey: And maybe what we’re [00:20:00] looking at is when you might grab a game off the shelf is because you’re looking for something better than what you could do for yourself.

Jason: So there’s, there’s something in that I think. Yeah. Let’s, I mean, again, another beautiful insight Hails. I think the interesting thing for me that it sort of raised in my consciousness, there was this sort of idea that, you know, people naturally… this sort of job of choosing which game we’re going to play so that we can relax and just go through the process is stuff that we do, is stuff that people do all the time and gamers do all the time. Oh, there’s 15 of us, and we’re real kind of talky folk, you know

Hailey: Let’s play werewolf.

Jason: Exactly. We should play a social deduction game, right? Or, oh, guess what? I have time to myself and I’m going to be traveling on a train from here to here for you know, 45 minutes. I’m going to pick up Onirim and, pop it in the bag, cause it’s going to be a really reflective game for me to play, just to puzzle [00:21:00] through kind of stringing suits together, for instance. Gamers make those selections all the time around the vibe or the sort of thing that, the sort of experience that they want to have. The interesting thing is we, how often do people bring that thinking into the delivery of their everyday life or their work or getting, or doing work together?

You know, maybe it’s because as gamers we’ve got this suite… there’s hundreds of games on the shelf, thousands of games that you can pick up and play with well-documented rule systems and reviews and, you know, YouTube around how you go about doing it. And, you know, people having fun, you know, you, you can, you can look at all this sort of stuff, whereas for working together or collaborative work, there aren’t that many maps, you know, it’s sort of, oh, we need to make a decision about our priorities.

Right. What game are we going to play? Let’s have a meeting.

Hailey: right, [00:22:00]

Jason: You know what I mean? You know, is that, whereas the, the games that you were talking about, like that, that we decide between, much more subtle, it’s like, oh, let’s play a internal generative game that then spills into a group synthesis game.

Hailey: That’s where, at Collabforge, when we were doing work with clients doing a lot of this kind of thing we talked about “unmeetings”. So when we would come and be in their office for a two or three hour stretch, that’s what we would say we we’re doing: we’re having an “unmeeting”, you know, bring laptops.

It’s not the sort of format where you come to the meeting and talk, and then everyone goes alone to their desk to work. And now, thankfully, especially it’s become more common for people to have portable workstations uh, as the, as the default, even in, in government organizations. And so we could do this and, and you, you need the shared game space of like a Google doc, you know, real-time collaboration.

And once you kind of got over the hurdles of introducing those things, and you could start to have [00:23:00] these sorts of unmeetings where we go, right. We’re doing this next, we’re doing this next. You know, we have a whiteboard here. And then talking about the work we needed to do and sort of pivoting through the meeting as we went. So by the end of three hours, we’d actually made some progress.

Jason: Mm-hm. Yeah, the thing that stands out for me, there is this sort of deliberate selection of task for the work that needs to get done or the right vehicle for the right work that needs to get done. Whereas a meeting as an all encompassing thing is, okay, people sit around and have a conversation.

You write down some actions, and then everyone disperses, whereas doing in the way that we understand it, really productive, collaborative work, there are multiple vehicles that you might need to go through. And there are multiple modalities of that. Like sometimes you need to have individual reflection that then provides an opportunity for the best ideas to be brought in, and then assessed.

Sometimes you need to be doing prioritization really, really effectively so that a group can agree what the next step is. Sometimes, you need to be accelerating [00:24:00] kind of pieces of work, you know, putting timelines and you know, constraints around how the work gets done. It’s the, all these things are different modalities of ways work gets done.

And I think there is something in that parallel between choosing the game or the vehicle or the platform for the type of experience or the type of work that needs to get done. And the differentiation that we see in, in the rich world of games and the types of experiences you can have, the types of games there are that exist.

The sorts of genres that are out there. We’re not really good at articulating that in the workspace. And yet we do know that there are different ways of doing work and different types of work that need to get done.

Hailey: Yeah. Cool. If I may, I want to take us on a little bit of a long bow, because we talked a little bit about what gamers do and what they do when they’re sort of moving from game to game or holding themselves in a game playing space. And we talked a little bit about how that relates well to work and can really upgrade what happens in work.

But I think [00:25:00] there’s an interesting thing around what do people who don’t like games or don’t generally play games do when it’s not work? You know, when you think of going to a party or uh, a nice dinner or a family holiday and in a context where you know, getting out Buck Euchre after dinner isn’t normal, where it’s just standing around in groups of two to four having chats.

And there’s something interesting there for me, because I’ve always struggled with that. And I feel like a lot of people who I play games with, we have this in common where the world of sort of social engagement and conversations, doesn’t always make a lot of sense. I think I tended to steer conversations towards complex topics or solving problems in the world.

Or, solving problems of the person, of my conversation partner. And I think what I’ve started to learn is that, it’s not that they’re not playing games, is that it’s just a different type of game. It’s this sort game of keeping the [00:26:00] conversation going, moving from interesting topic to interesting topic.

It’s a kind of jazz, it’s very lyrical. You know, we talked about lyric games and folks who like that kind of engagement and really enjoy that and kind of banter and cracking jokes and, you know, kind of following from A to B, often find games really boring, and especially competitive games because you’re actually trying to not share information and you’re trying to bluff, so they’re even less conversational.

And so if somehow we’ve ended up playing a game, there’ll be the one cracking jokes and maybe lightly sabotaging the game, or, you know, if it’s something that’s trying to happen at the end of a party and they don’t like that it went there… I just remember this experience a lot. And there’s something where, when we’re at work, we’re in the situation where we have lots of different brain types together, lots of different ways of being and thinking and working.

So games, the structure that games provide, the facilitative structure it can provide, the common ground that allows those people to come [00:27:00] together. But in sort of social life, it’s often a real mismatch and there’s, there’s something in here that maybe is a dilemma or a challenge, or just useful to see.

And also maybe throws open the question of what is a game.

Jason: Yeah. The thing that it evokes in me that that sort of thinking is that, I mean, we’ve all had that experience of, I mean, a lot of people who gravitate to games, you know, as a social outlet oftentimes do so you know, I think it’s, it’s, it’s a, what’s it called a stereotype for a reason, but you know, you get this sort of idea of the awkward game, you know, like the nerdy kind of gamer, but the reason being is because games provide us a structured environment to engage.

You know the rules. We know what the right social cues are. For example, again, as a Magic the Gathering tragic, I know that after “untap” comes “upkeep” [00:28:00] and after “upkeep” comes “draw”, and after “draw” comes “main phase” and after “main phase” comes “combat”, and then there’s another “main phase” and then there’s “cleanup”, right?

That sort of structure has very specific moves associated with it. Now in a social environment, it’s the same…

Hailey: Yep.

Jason: Right? You know, we’re all brought up to observe – whether or not we explicitly pay attention to it – there are social norms and social cues. Some more subtle than others. And you know, this idea as you, you’re saying it’s like the, the best British game ever invented: the art of polite conversation, you know, how do you keep conversation continually going and British people are expert at that polite conversation with strangers and continuing conversation.

And for those of us who might not be familiar with the rules or sort of grok what the rules of that kind of social discourse are, know, having a game to fall back on as a structure that, you [00:29:00] know, allows it to sort of break down, I think, you know, to break down the steps and the kind of norms that are involved in each step is really, really useful.

Hailey: having this conversation with my mom who was an incredible social conversationalist, and just going, like, just please, how does this work? Like, what are we doing here? Like I really don’t… and she said, you just ask yourself, what’s the next thing I can contribute that might be interesting to people or spark interest.

And I realized, I think that really helped me realize that it didn’t matter if it was a total non sequitur. In that kind of conversation, like if it was only vaguely related or just, “you know, what that makes me think of?”, and then you take the conversation in an entirely different dimension – and it doesn’t matter because there’s no goals, there’s no purpose.

We’re just here to have an experience. I mean, we talked about this a little bit with, even with D&D, it’s like, at the end of the day, there’s no desired [00:30:00] outcome. So if the party wants to abandon trying to conquer that keep with that evil sorcerer and just go do something else, I mean, that affects the dungeon master a little bit, but it doesn’t matter.

They didn’t because they did that. Yeah. So it’s, it’s, it’s actually quite similar.

Jason: It is. The other thing that evoked in me, like when you, when you raised that, was this sort of idea of that – I think we shouldn’t lose the thread of is – sort of this idea of social discourse and social interactions, human sociality culture, having rules. There are games that we play, and this was something that we wanted to talk about. When we think of folks who have thought about gameplay and play as fundamentally human, the observation is often made that, you know, we play games all the time.

There are rules to how I introduce people at a cocktail party. There are rules to that sort of thing. You know, there are rules to what you wear to work. There are rules around, you know how you open up a meeting space, for instance.

Hailey: Well, maybe [00:31:00] let me put a little frame around this then. Cause we you know, our topic is what is the game? And we had an idea that we might start with sort of the, some of the philosophical discourse about that. And you know, we, we followed some beautiful threads and I think probably the most useful thing about trying to answer this question of “what is the game?” is not trying to come to a definition, it’s a a difficult one pin down, but to identify some of the distinctions that different philosophers and thinkers have come up with that are useful. So, you know, right now in this conversation about sort of social conversation as game, you know, versus a competitive board game, say, I’m thinking about finite versus infinite games, you know?

So yeah, maybe you’d like to introduce the concept of Carse and sort of tie that back to some of what we’re talking about?

Jason: Yes. So really, really influential book. Certainly on myself. Introduced to it through Gail Taylor [00:32:00] actually, um, brought it to my attention because she knew that I was a huge gamer, but James Carse wrote a book called “Finite and Infinite Games”. So his background, I guess, a philosopher slash theologian slash thinker about people.

And he has this very, very simple premise. There are two types of games. There are finite games which are played for the purpose of winning. They finish when you reach an end state and there are infinite games which are played for the purpose of continuing the game. And from that, that really those really two simple starting premises, he builds out this sort of meditation on…

What it means to engage in various types of games. And he very, very explicitly says that, you know, like you can view every type of interaction that we engage in as a form of, of finite or infinite game. There are these things that we do, social [00:33:00] constructs that we enter, there are, you know, these places that we go to that have rules around them. And we engage with them as active participants in that sort of game.

Hailey: And so what is an infinite game?

Jason: Yeah. Good question.[Laughs.] So, yeah, look, I think it’s, it’s exceptionally subtle. Like, I don’t know that I’m equipped to, if we, if we take Carse’s definition of an infinite game is played for the purpose of continuing play. So if we take a really concrete example, one of the ones that we’ve talked about in the past has been when you, when you think about the operation of a business…

At heart, the infinite game is probably to continue the existence of the business.

We want to see business X continue and continue to flourish, but in order for business X to continue and continue to [00:34:00] flourish, there are a whole bunch of sub- sort of games that have to be played within that context. There’s the game of quarterly budget. There’s the game of…

Hailey: Making payroll this week.

Jason: Making payroll this week. That’s right. There’s the game of getting folks to do the work that’s necessary to, you know …

yeah. Deliver on deadline, produce products to sell to market to then, you know, have things have income

Hailey: And these are finite

Jason: Yeah, because they have definite – they have known rules. We have known roles within them. There’s a particular outcome that we’re seeking or a goal state that

Hailey: A sense win or lose.

Jason: Yeah. A sense of win or lose that’s right. Yeah. And these sorts of things uh, they have a definite end.

Hailey: Yeah, whereas a social conversation, as my mom told me, it’s, you know, try to just offer the next thing that might be interesting to people that kind of keeps the vibe going. And sure those conversations eventually wrap up, but they’re sort of situated in a larger infinite game of [00:35:00] maintain the relationship, be in convivial connection to each other through time, create a set of positive memories so that we can get together again and do this again and enjoy being together.

Yeah, I just think that was maybe a helpful way to start getting into this, the sort of definitional stage of things. So, you know, in a sense the collaboration design, trying to come to an answer, when we frame it in terms of solving a problem, can seem like a finite game. You know, did we get the solution, did the solution work, was our situation improved? Can we measure that? But it’s also part of an infinite game of just trying to have a good life here on earth. Yeah. As we move time.

Jason: Yeah. I mean, even the nested game of enabling people to have better relationships with one another and cultivate a group of folks who [00:36:00] work better together and who understand one another and who, you know, all these sorts of things. Yes.

Hailey: So I guess that that’s one distinction that can be useful to designers, even if you don’t go and really digest the sort of full philosophical brilliance of Carse. It’s just to kind of be aware of what are you designing for? An infinite game, a finite game, or – usually it’s going to be both situated in respect to each other, you know, and understanding which aspects of what you’re doing are finite and which aspects are towards the infinite can help a designer with their emphasis, with their choice of activity, with their sequencing, with how they frame things, with how they pay attention to people’s feelings versus, you know, their commitment to a specific outcome.

That really matter. But I’m of a mind maybe just kick through a few of these distinctions here.

Jason: Yeah. Yeah. Let’s go to the next one.

Hailey: I’m looking at “gameful” versus “gamification”. Yeah, and I think what [00:37:00] mostly, what we’ve been talking about here is what we call gameful, gameful design, where it’s this entirely broad world of possibilities, where you can take inspiration from games and apply things that you see there, elements you see, or just ideas, and bring them into your purposeful work, possibly your everyday life, and decide to do things differently as a result.

Jason: Yeah. And there’s something in that like, the thread that is continuing there is this idea that if we recognize that even conversation that we engage in, social conversation, has rules and is a form of gameplay, then if we can be explicitly aware of the things that we’re trying to achieve as a group of people, and there are games that can enable that more effectively, why wouldn’t we spend our time playing the game that’s going to be more effective, A., and, B., actually potentially more [00:38:00] fun and worthwhile for the folks who are in the room.

That’s sort of the value in saying, you know, we have this time together, we can be unaware of the social game that we’re playing, but very, very aware of the outcomes that we want to get to.

Or we can be aware that we have limited time, energy and space to get this done and we get to choose the sort of vehicle that this group wants to use or the sort of game that this group wants to get involved in, in order to get the outcomes.

Hailey: So gameful design, a process, being aware of, of designing the experience you’re having together as you progress and using some, some things that you call games for that.

This word game “gamification” is an interesting one because I think it can be used and is sometimes used quite broadly to mean almost the same thing as gameful design, as we’ve been talking about. It’s just, yeah, we’re [00:39:00] taking inspiration from games and applying them to things that you wouldn’t normally associate with gameplay. But I think it’s come to mean something very specific, in the kind of world of people who are looking at using games.

You know, this terminology kind of often shifts and takes on specific meanings as it gets tied to certain trends of what someone in the field has called “PBL”: points, badges, and leaderboards. So it’s become so prevalent of a trend that it has an acronym. It’s the idea that you’ll take something that you want people to do, like, make so many cold calls in an hour or many emails in a week and you’ll give them points for doing that. You’ll give them badges for doing that. And then you’ll create leaderboards where people compare themselves about how many points and badges they have as compared to everyone else.

Jason: Yeah.

Hailey: And I think there’s a strong critique of this going right now, which is that it’s [00:40:00] entirely extrinsic. It’s taking something that people don’t necessarily want to do. And giving them a fake reward, or reward that doesn’t even necessarily contribute to their livelihood or their wellbeing, and kind of creates a yeah.

A bit of a brain hijack to make them more likely to do the thing that the sort of business superstructure wants them to do. And I, Yeah, it doesn’t have to be that, but I see a lot of people complaining that it’s become that.

Jason: Yeah, there is a distinction between gamification and game full, and I think it’s important. It’s an important one to be aware of. And with the emerging popularity of games, there’s a whole bunch of folks out there who are really diligently, trying to make sure that folks grok the difference between the two sorts of things. Because folks who are really deeply involved in game design, I think feel that the strict gamification you know, [00:41:00] equating that with what game design is, is dangerous and you don’t want to be perceived as the same sort of thing.

And I’m with you. I mean, gamification… I’m not so against gamification, I mean, tapping into points, badges and leaderboards for, for folks who are driven by that kind of competitive… I mean if we were to use the Caillois kind of definitions, which is a bloke that we can come back to in another episode, but like, you know, like to tap into people’s sense of “agon” or competition, I mean, that’s, that’s a part of humans, right?

That’s, that’s a thing, but yes, to hijack human behavior for a brute productivity outcome, that just seems really brutish and that’s something that’s often associated with gamification. Interestingly, that’s the extrinsic kind of piece you pointed to like that external motivation.

There’s also intrinsic gamification where you’re using behavioral cues to kind of motivate people to, to do [00:42:00] things that they may not naturally do. Right. And that starts to get a little bit, even more icky when you’re playing in that space, like designing experiences to,

Hailey: What’s an example

Jason: So if you think of behavioral nudges in policy design, for instance, that’s a form of… now that’s for, for good, you’re trying to encourage people to do things like, you know, live a healthy lifestyle and eat, but it is a form of behavioral engine design, behavioral design.

And you want to be sure that the folks who are doing that design have your best interests in mind, right?

Hailey: So, someone with a lot of resources and power levers has hired some smart people to think about how to change your behavior, my behavior on a mass scale, and then they’ve implemented a large scale initiative through different channels, that’s going to touch a lot of people and change the behavior.

Jason: Exactly. So if you think of something like the Australian “life be in it” program, for instance. Now that’s done – that’s exceptional work. [00:43:00] It literally changed the lifestyle and health outcomes of generations of Australian men, you know, who went from being norm on the couch with a bee, watching the tele to going out there and playing sport, being involved in life, like doing things with the family, right?

Like it, it genuinely is seen as this amazing shift. And before, behavioral nudging was even a thing. Do you know what I mean? Before it appears in, you know, in the UK, et cetera, you know, this is happening in the late seventies, early eighties of Australia, right. So remarkable kind of work. Now that’s, that’s a form of, you know gamifying or sort of tapping into behavioral, kind of traits.

Hailey: The big takeaway for me is it’s not the points badges and leaderboards, or the nudges themselves, that are necessarily the problem. It’s… you really need to be looking at who’s using it, and for what purpose. How involved were people, the trade-offs between people’s agency and freedom and wellbeing that you’re making.

[00:44:00] And like any policy or decision or strategic decision, it’s always going to be tricky and hard, and there will be losers and winners, and trade-offs.

Jason: Yeah, but if I can give you a practical example, there’s a massive difference between someone investing in trying to nudge the health outcomes of generations of Australian men, for instance, and a well-known designer brand, selling me a view of a lifestyle that I feel I need to aspire towards to get me, you know, out there wearing their products. Right.

Hailey: Right. Well, and you seeing that as a meaningful distinction and having a clear preference is reflective of your values.

Jason: That’s right.

Hailey: And others might see the problem in a much different light,

Jason: That’s true.

Hailey: You know, hey, I might want to choose that lifestyle designer brand. And I, what I don’t want is this government telling me how to be, you know,

Jason: Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting, isn’t it like that, that sort of space, and it’s not uncharacteristic of any technological intervention. And [00:45:00] anyone who is designing anything. You’re making explicit normative decisions about what your design is trying to achieve, and you can choose to do that collaboratively and transparently with the folks that you’re building a thing with.

Or you can choose to be some sort of you know, like solo operator in an ivory tower and hope that the thing gets received particularly well, and that your intentions are, are right. I think in a complex world, this sort of move towards transparency and collaboration is the, personally, I believe it’s the way to go forward because with many eyes all bugs are easy and not to mention that, you know, you’re designing and building with the people who are going to be using the thing.

Like I think this idea of, so just to bring it back into our space, into the collaborative design space, part of the reason that we work with groups of people to design the experience for them is because we’re trying to enable them to choose the games that are right for their [00:46:00] people and their group to play, to get to an outcome.

It’s not about you or I deciding what the game is that they should be playing, or pushing for a particular outcome. It’s about giving people… it’s about introducing the game shelf to folks and saying, Hey, if you’ve got this work to do, we can help you sequence up and a whole bunch of games, so you can just relax and play them. But we need you to be choosing the sorts of outcomes and the sort of way that you want to engage.

Hailey: Let’s bring it down to that micro level. Cause I think we had one more distinction we wanted to explore, which we have framed as activity versus game versus ritual. And so as a collaboration designer, a facilitator, it was very common to encounter people in the field talking about games that they play with people in workshops.

And I go, oh great, you know, as a gamer I go, oh wow, okay. So you’re using games in workshops. [00:47:00] Great! And then I look at what they’re talking about and it’s basically a workshop activity. know, we generate these ideas on sticky notes, then we take turns doing this and then we converge that.

And I think it used to really annoy me more, cause I was looking for, I was looking for these exciting, interesting applications of game into the collaboration space. So I’d be disappointed. There’s a book, a really awesome book, called Gamestorming, which is a a collection of different activities that they actually went to the places where people innovate in Silicon valley and corporate America, I think for the most part… Dave Gray looked at what are the games they use, what are the activities that they use and then gave some theory about how to structure games together well, that looked quite similar to what you do in an M.G. Taylor context as well.

Jason: The Schrage was also influential on you too.

Hailey: Oh yes. Sure. But that’s, I feel like that’s a whole different thread,

Jason: Okay.

Hailey: Right? I think, I think there’s something I want to say before I go [00:48:00] there around: it’s fine to call games “activities” and activities “games”, and it’s true. I think if you look back at everything we’ve said in the last 50 minutes, game is this really broad term and it’s about bringing a structure that gives guidance, that allows you to kind of, let go. And where, where I’m increasingly leaning in terms of like where it’s a meaningful distinction between a workshop activity and using a game in a workshop is where you really want to push more on the fun factor, more on the letting go of the immediate practicality, more on the experiential exploratory nature, more on exploring different possibilities or suspending the given rules of the situation and letting the participants get into a sense of playfulness.

Or to upend the dynamics that are, might have become too concrete that are limiting us.

That’s where I’d want to [00:49:00] push a little bit more into games, gamefulness, play.

Jason: And you get with folks like Huizinga, and Carse, and Caillois, the observation that these folks who think about play and games is that it’s one of the better aspects of being human. And when we’re engaging in this sort of activity, it’s something that brings out the best of us.

And, I’m not the person to argue for why. I’m sure there are folks who write about play in evolutionary science, you know, like are how you know, critters learn and, you know, all that sort of stuff. And I don’t know a great deal about that, but like there’s a sense in which bringing play as a way of expanding possibility of engaging folk in the work that they’re doing…

So as opposed to it being purely transactional, like I’m doing this thing for an outcome and I’m trying to produce this outcome for income and that’s the whole sum of [00:50:00] what I’m engaged in. But turning that into tapping into something that engages our interest, engages our whole selves, engages this sense of play and possibility…

I think that is the tagline to Carse’s book actually is “a vision of life as play and possibility”. Does that sound right?

Hailey: Close, um, I’m looking on my shelf, but I think that’s correct.

Jason: Yeah. Th- there’s something about bringing play into a space that games do. Games give us the invitation to bring our playful selves in, to play. And if you can combine that sort of sense of play with all of the forms of games, if you will, that are out there – the business games, the collaboration games, the social conversation games, all that sort of stuff – then maybe we’re tapping into something that’s a lot more beneficial for, for people. And games give us a [00:51:00] really clear definition or boundary and permission to do that – whereas, Whereas you know, others structures may not. And that sort of gets us to, well, what’s the difference between a game and a ritual and a meeting.

Hailey: Yeah. One of the things that I’ve noticed is, just concretely, when things start to make the shift from just an activity into a playful game, is that they start introducing the kinds of things you associate with games. So there’s a random die roll in there at some point.

The players imagine themselves in a role in a fictional setting, and may be very closely tied to the setting we’re exploring and meant to bring insights to it, but they they’re taking on a character. There’s a sense in which they can win or lose within this fictional setting. There’s a game called “Paying for Predictions”, which is teaching people about the value of predictive data for planning for disasters. You’re [00:52:00] playing this kind of guessing game of whether or not your country, your fictional country, will be flooded, and then you’re offered some data. And if you’re willing to pay some of your beans for that, then you’ll have a better chance of predicting the die role. And then you lose beans if you don’t prepare for the event.

And so it’s this kind of economy, choice-making, decision-making that illustrates to you how data is important. But it’s a very, it’s puts, it’s a very, the fictional world they put you in is very analogous to the real world you’re in, but there’s something about suspending, you know, and allowing you to sort of fast forward through time and see how your decisions might lead you to win or lose.

Jason: Okay, to run with that thought, I mean, folks who are doing the um, MBA through Melbourne business school might be using the CAPSIM simulation tool for exactly the same thing. You spin up a business, you make a bunch of decisions on how you’re going to invest, what markets are you going to get into?

And then the simulation [00:53:00] gives you results, based on your decisions that you make as a leadership group of a corporation. Now that again, that’s using a game -like environment to allow you to make meaningful decisions, and see the results. And it is a bit competitive because there’s a leaderboard. You can see how your company’s going against other companies in the, in the group, et cetera.

Hailey: gets us into that, distinction of a game versus a simulation as a specific subset of gameful design.

Jason: Yeah, look, in that space it might be useful to, shall we introduce the the Andre Marczewski thing?

Hailey: Well, maybe to reference it, but I think we actually need to wrap up soon. maybe point at it and then… um

Jason: Yeah, cause he’s sort of um, through Gamified UK, his breakdown of the difference between the sorts of game elements that are brought in to the type of thing, thing that you’re designing is just an interesting way for folks to begin to get their head around, well, what sort of a thing am I doing?

And [00:54:00] this speaks back to the difference between gamifying something, simulating something, or producing an actual what we would call a recreational game. So he has this sort of thing that goes through everything from playful design, so bringing, using playful design into gamification, into simulation, into serious games, into an actual game game

Hailey: …entertaining game.

Jason: Entertaining game, yeah.

Hailey: And all of those distinctions are questionable. And the interesting stuff is in the fuzzy boundaries. And if you’re trying started using these possibilities in your practice, then it’s great to have that kind of framework carve out reality with.

Jason: Exactly. And it gives you a starting point to begin having conversations about, well, to what degree are we just going to use… aesthetics of games or incentivization. Oh, okay. So we’re just going to use some incentivization and a bit of, you know, get some lights going on on [00:55:00] our dashboard.

Oh, well maybe we’re doing gamification, right. Are we asking people to make meaningful decisions about something that’s going to affect a analogous condition in the real world? Well, maybe we’re moving into serious game kind of territory or simulation. And I think his sort of definition in that space is just a nice, simple way of getting your head around things.

Again, not being an advocate don’t, you know, not getting paid for any of that sort of stuff, but it’s interesting that a lot of these sort of theorists that we’ve been talking about, part of the challenge of this “what is a game?” is just recognizing… doing some categorization so you can have the start of a meaningful dialogue around, well, what aspects are we going to use? What do we not? What are the things that we’re going to amplify and make explicit? What are the things that we agree are not part of a game?

Hailey: Awesome. And one thing we didn’t talk about as much is ritual, but we are expecting some time soon to get our colleagues on here who are working in that space of designing gameful [00:56:00] rituals to talk with us about that more. But yeah, in the meantime from the last week, any interesting game things to share? I mean, maybe we could talk a little bit about PAX.

Jason: Yeah. PAX online. Yeah, totally, totally. In the COVID world. That’d be amazing to talk about. I do um, want to encourage folks to get out there and play some of these sorts of like in preparation for, you know, game versus ritual or, you know, game versus experience, you know, just get out there and see what these young indie, well, I don’t know if they’re young or old but like what folks in market are doing at the moment and, you know, the Travis Hill stuff is great.

Like, Logan Timmins, great. You know, have a look at some of the folks out there. The older, older stuff is great. Like go and play with some of these games and, you know, make a decision about, how you see the difference between, you know, this being a guided experience or a ritual or a platform for storytelling versus a game proper. It’s interesting.

The thing that is inspiring to me in the, in that [00:57:00] space is that there are people making things, designing things that are encouraging us to engage in the world, using games as a platform to, to get stuff done. Sorry Hails. ..

Hailey: No but think that’s a fine place to wrap up. And I think I’ll just say that you can always check in with us on Twitter – @TheAmbleStudio – where we’re continuing to talk about these things. And here what we’re going to be talking about next. But that’s been a great session, Jason. We’ll, we’ll pick up these threads next time.

Jason: Thanks Hails, really enjoyed this one.

Hailey: Yeah, likewise. It was a good one. So until then, ciao.