Thursday, February 10, 2022 we held a LIVE workshop hosted by TVW Learning Community Member Wolfgang Rathert.
This webinar will explore how you can use game-based design principles to engage your audiences. The times we live in have been labeled an “Attention Economy” and the “Age of Distraction.”
However, Game Designers seem to possess the hidden superpower of creating unprecedented levels of focus, engagement, even “flow.”
Background
Gamification, or the application of game design principles in non-game contexts, has been a hyped topic for some years now. Professionals in domains like marketing, learning, management, healthcare, events, and many more. In principle, it can be applied in any situation that requires a voluntary commitment of an audience to an activity or topic.
At the same time, the widespread familiarity with the genre of ‘games’ turns out to be a tricky obstacle, inviting engagement-designers-to-be to stumble into a variety of traps.
These range from the idea of turning the target activity into a literal game to simply adding the notorious “points, badges, and leaderboards” in order to motivate people to get a job done.
“Every age has its storytelling form, and video gaming is a huge part of our culture. You can ignore or embrace video games and imbue them with the best artistic quality. People are enthralled with video games in the same way as other people love the cinema or theatre.”
— Andy Serkis, actor, producer, and director (best known as Gollum in LOTR movies)
Our Workshop
In this workshop Wolfgang will take you on a deep(er) dive into the “how to” of successfully designing for engagement. He will introduce you to some of the underlying theories and frameworks and give you a blueprint that you will apply to a real life challenge – preferably your own. In case you do not have a target group you want to engage, you will work on one of the other participants’ cases.
Topics that will be explored in the workshop:
- What drives people?
- Understanding the “subject matter” – a big picture of human psychology
- How do we cross the chasm between motivation and action?
- What provides motivations (and obstacles) for engagement?
- How do we better link action to meaning?
- What can we learn from IT project management? From UX designers?
To get you started, Wolfgang will send you a series of weekly short videos that shall introduce you to the topic. You are invited to watch, comment, and ask questions if any pop up. During the workshop, we will apply the concepts to real-life situations, so please feel free to bring your own project or challenge where you want to engage an audience. It does not matter if these are customers, employees, participants, members, or any other population.
Our Host
Wolfgang Rathert is Chief Engagement Officer at Smart-Up.Work in Zurich, Switzerland. He is an entrepreneur, business game designer, and university lecturer on marketing and leadership. His work focuses on the application of game-based design principles in the domain of (agile) leadership, as well as the design and facilitation of events and communities.
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