Innovation Games Retrospect: How I created my first game... & Upcoming Events

In September I participated in the Workshop by Luke Hohmann about "Innovation Games: Designing for Multidimensional Collaboration". In this workshop Luke presented how everybody can create a "serious" game by themselves in order to fit the own needs and purpose.

In the first part of the workshop Luke explained the basics of game theory about rules, the "game board", the resources in a game and the players' problem and motivation. In addition to his presentation he also talked about some real life examples and challenges creating games, which were very interesting.

In the second part of the workshop we tried to create a game on our own. Lukas and I worked on a game for "retrospective retrospectives". The idea is to get some quick feedback from a project team how the retrospective can be improved. The important thing is, that the method shouldn't be too complex to explain and everybody should be participating.

We used the idea of a metaphor and created a poster with a car body. The team will get a concrete number of missing parts, e.g. wheels, spoiler and engine, that they should add to the car in order to get it running. These missing parts should be the ideas how the retrospective can be improved.




Retrospective Retrospective Car Game

The idea and metaphor worked well, but it was a little bit too easy for the participants. So we learned that a game should also be a little bit tricky in order to be fun. Nevertheless, we learned a lot about creating a game and adapting existing games to better fit our needs.

Also really funny games were created in this workshop - like a game for Impact Mapping using the metaphor of a knight searching the way to the castle. The knight has to pass a dark forest with trolls, but there are some signs and a fairy that can help him to find the way.



"Serious" game with a knight, a castle, trolls and a fairy.

I would like to see this game in real-life.

If you are interested in the topic of Gamestorming and Innovation Games as well - I have some interesting events coming up in Vienna:

• 12th of November - Gamestorming Meetup Vienna
• 3rd of December - Innovation Games: Designing for Multidimensional Collaboration (Certification Course with Luke Hohmann) (Full-day Workshop like described above)
• 5th of December - Playcamp (http://www.playcamp.net/, Conference/Unconference with Luke Hohmann & Mitch Lacey)