Making Games

A great manager of mine (Benjamin Rand) once told me that I was ‘gamifying performance’ when I was trying to encourage some friendly sticker-based competition in my team. The concept was new to me then but it was putting words to something I think I’ve always done one way or another - building fun into how I work.

Games are fun. 😄

Work being fun is really important to me. Perhaps I took it too far but we ended up fixing electric hole punches as root cause analysis training, giving silly prizes to the team-member who could remember where in the world a certain serial number product was and using planning poker to add some levity to tedious prioritisation meetings. All of this is silly, but importantly engaging and actually encourages the learning, knowledge of our customers and getting decisions made in meetings that we actually want. 

One of my colleagues went a step further with the idea of using the game 💣 ‘Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes’ 💣 to train the team on how to provide remote technical support under pressure. We had a great time! Thank you Joe Strak. 🙌

Of course with all of this it’s a game, there are no negative points for wrong answers and this isn’t in any way tied into someone’s ‘performance’. It’s just for fun. 🎉

Inspired by an offhand comment by my wife before the General Election last year I’ve now decided to give this a try the other way round. I’m now trying ‘performifying games’ by designing card games, playing them and selling them. 🃏

Moving away from all the business-speak and self-righteousness I wanted to jot down my thoughts about what makes a good game (with a particular angle on card games) in a few upcoming posts. I hope this might help me realise where I’m going wrong and what I can do better, or at least get my ducks in a row ideas-wise. 🦆🦆🦆