‘Play it before you live it’
– the case for alternate reality games and narrative-making play Most games don’t pretend to be real. As a player you sit around a table holding cards or moving pieces, or stare at a screen […]
Article Tag: Sustainability
#Play4Sustainability: Engaging employees in sustainability through play
Sustainability is an aspect of business that is perceived by employees as complex, confusing and time consuming. A topic that is still too often ‘siloed’, leaving employees disengaged and lacking interest to understand the full […]
Legacy Games and Tipping Points
One of the much-vaunted advantages of using games to facilitate learning is the idea of the ‘safe environment’. The premise is, that players and teams can experiment with taking actions, and, because there are no […]
Octalysis Analysis of a Sustainability Learning Programme
When I first discovered Yu-kai Chou’s Octalysis framework, shortly after he published ‘Actionable Gamification’, I knew straight away that I would find it an invaluable tool, not just to help me design learning with learner […]
Enhancing Biophilia for Sustainability Learning
‘Biophilia’ is an excellent album, and app, by Bjork, and does include a number of brilliant interactive games, which help children (and adults) discover the wonder and beauty of both music and nature. I can […]
Natural & organisational ecosystems
A design challenge I have frequently tackled over the past few years has been to create games which relate to the functioning of ecosystems. This is not perhaps surprising as I have been delivering learning […]
Imagining a Better World: Game Design with and for Teens
As long-time youth program developers, several years ago we became curious about game design, inspired in part by Doris Rusch’s work on deep games.[1] In Making Deep Games and her TEDx Talk[2], Rusch describes how […]
Climate Change-Catalyzed Simulations in the Anthropocene – Going Back to the Future with Jurassic Park?
Water stress, searing heat, refugees, displacement, geopolitical uncertainty. In talking to innovative colleagues in the serious games space in The Hague this past week, the wargaming of the future is complex, and multidimensional—and climate change […]
Transferable skills learning through games
In any face-to-face learning situation, the facilitator has to consider that they may face dissent from the learners. I used to like to believe that as someone who works with adults, that I wouldn’t have […]
How do we gamify sustainability at scale?
Personal behaviour change is arguably one of the most powerful tools that we have in the fight against environmental challenges, such as Climate Change, ecosystem degradation and overuse of natural resources. Although the contribution of […]
The Resource Management Mechanic in Sustainability Learning
The process of designing learning games should always start with the learning. Games, although they are at the heart of all we do, are just a tool for implementing the outcomes we have already designed. […]