Serious Gaming for education with complex layered metaphors

I’ve written a couple of blogs about metaphors. In Direct, Indirect and complex Metaphors I promised I’d post again on complex layered metaphors so here’s the post.

Complex Layered Metaphors

I consider a complex layered metaphor to be a collection of metaphors contained within another metaphor. Potentially this structure can be recursed so that you end up with with a stack of metaphors containing metaphors. There’s a number of reasons for doing this:

• it’s fun
• it provides a vehicle for delivering a lot of direct and indirect messages

Since it’s a little complex by it’s nature I’ll describe it in terms of a concrete example of some work I recently did with one of my clients. We wanted to get a number of messages out about awareness and the nature of the process improvement team in the organisation and services as well as specific messages in terms of the attractiveness of continuous integration, change set based scm (software configuration management), the use of a wide variety of collaborative tools.

To do all this in an innovative and creative way I designed a complex layered metaphor in terms of a Serious Game. The game itself was a treasure trail through a series of physical and intranet/web tool based locations.

Here’s the in-game metaphorical framework design:

Analogy	Message(s)
[Top Level, contains everything else] The game is a complicated sequence through a diverse range of information sources and collaborative tools	[Process Improvement Team] can make a path through the complexity of internal tools and technologies[Process Improvement Team] enables problem solvers to achieve their goals in innovative ways
The game brings together and links up a number of different areas of knowledge and tools (an information web made of new links)The game is rooted in the intranet which provides an information web of existing links.The game involves a clue that is a spider at the centre of a physical “web” which is actually the roof of a large virtual presentation area, literally a web of information.	[Process Improvement Team] brings together disparate systems and knowledge into unified ways of working.There is a wide web of interconnected elements that are needed to complete our tasks.
Generally clues are meaningless out of context (e.g. just numbers, the name of an animal etc.)Information is meaningless without context, a broad understanding of the information architecture is necessary to understand the facts.	Silo mentality in functional disciplines is working with information out of context. Cross-functional understanding and working, collaboration, is necessary to achieve goals.
Keep coming back to searching in [Internal Search Engine] for general knowledgeKeep coming back to searching in [Project Tool] for project information	Much information is open and discoverable, knowing where and how to look is necessary. This is taught implicitly.
The name of the game [Quest] implies a search with a goal	Doing the game is worthwhile and will result in finding something

The set of clues that made the game each led to each other and were themselves metaphors, normally containing metaphor restrictions to apply specific process improvement, service management and tooling messages indirectly. There were of course direct messages peppered throughout as well as well.

This provides three layers of metaphorical messages so far, the clues, the framework and the treasure trail game. On top of all of these was an activity sequence which started with a viral messaging campaign that leaked the information about the game in mysterious fashion. The discovery of the clue sequence, engagement in it’s elements (including 3 sequences held inside a virtual 3D environment like Second Life), and entry into the prize draw for a number of prizes ranging from the silly to the seriously cool.

As a result of the external activity sequence the players interacted with individuals in the Process Improvement Team through a variety of communication channels and even started eliciting help from them on a number of topics. Finally they had to physically come to the prize draw which further raised the profile of the Process Improvement Team and it’s individual members whilst delivering a message that the team was approachable and had answers.

This is just an example of how you can design layered complex metaphorical messaging campaigns. You don’t have to build a game structure for this kind of stuff.

Serious Gaming

“Serious Gaming” is used to describe games designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment. Serious games are often used for educational, investigative and promotional purposes.

I’m a big fan of serious games and gamification as games can be excellent motivators. Gamification is the application of game concepts to solve problems and engage audiences/players. For an example of gamification in the wild check out Chore Wars which helps turn boring household chores into a game.

I play a game with myself to increase the hit count of my blog, for no other purpose that to increase the “points” I get Indirectly that makes me ensure my blog is discoverable and I exercise good SEO practices to get good google rankings, oh yeah and post stuff that people want to read (I hope).

Learning through play is considered perfectly normal for children and yet is sometimes frowned up with adults.  As mentioned before, a serious game can be an excellent vehicle for metaphorical messaging as it can provide a framework of engagement and activity towards a goal. Make the activity a metaphor (like the quest example above seeking a goal by working through a web of complex tools and collaborative environments being a metaphor for the process improvement team enabling people to solve problems) and you’ve got a ready made layered complex metaphor.

If you want to run something like this here’s the set of game features I used to “gamify” the eductional treasure trail:

• The treasure trail itself, they’re fun
• Clues range from simple to complex to challenge players
• Clues range from simple directions to multi-part referential clues that need piecing together (mini-puzzles)
• Depending on the path taken through the game some clues can be referenced more than once in different contexts (i.e. the launch blog entry has a set of textual clues to the first location via encoded IP address, contains a red herring reference embedded in decorated characters in the text and also contains the final code embedded in the task). Discovery of hidden information, especially hidden patterns or elegance is psychologically rewarding for humans.
• There are a number of “red herrings” in the game, adding another mini-game in terms of find them
• 3D virtual environments imply game activity and lead to fun construction and interaction activity. There was also a rudimentary tic-tac-toe game in-world.
• Clues are written in stylised humorous game-like language
• Competition for prizes (open prize draw for all finishers who submit the correct code word, minor silly prizes for fastest and slowest completion, minor prize for funniest feedback comment)
• The winning of virtual badges by completing the game that people could add to their profile
• Early viral messaging campaign to make the game seem “subversive” initially

Feedback was overwhelmingly positive, in fact some of the most positive feedback I’ve ever seen, and we estimated we completed several hundred hours of high engagement practitioner training for only 4 days effort (game design and running) + the cost of the prizes.

All work should be like this, creativity should be the norm, not the exception.

---

This blog is part of a series on Holistic Communication: The linguistics of business change. Introduction, ethics and table of contents is all in the first post.

An agile approach to innovation in a small company

I recently spent a little while thinking about an open, transparent and honest way to deal with innovation/staff objectives/supporting work in a small company. Note that this isn’t what my current employer does, just an idea for how these things can be done.

Firstly people need time to do this stuff, if it’s valuable for your organisation to spend time doing supporting work, intellectual property development or general innovation then they need the time to do it. People need the Google 20%. I’m very fortunate that in my job I get that time, or close to it normally.

New Ideas:

Create a wiki page or similar somewhere (that everyone can see and everyone can edit) – a bit like the Google ideas wall. Start it with a freeform/categorised ideas list in the form, this is a bit like a backlog, once an ideas done/delivered/published it drops off this list

Ideas – Owner – State:

Idea for doing something – Mike – Identified

Idea for taking over the world – Unassigned – Identified

If someone like one of these ideas they can run with it, recruit a team of colleagues if necessary and get on with it. Once I’ve asked someone to help with my idea I can be fairly sure they’ll ask for reciprocal help on something. This improves teaming in distributed companies and provides a channel for autonomous action, critical for motivation.

In Progress Ideas:

When ideas are in progress they’ll have their own tracking and information in the appropriate technology. For example a blog idea probably goes from being picked up to being published without any tracking. Maybe there’s a review process if it’s a big position piece so it might go through Identified to In Review on the list above but that’s it. Another idea might be for the development of some software, in which case it’ll take some time and probably have a project web and bunch of tools and info to communicate.

Complete bits of work:

Once something has been done the owner can add it to the achievements table, a column for each person where they can list what they’ve done with links to the various bits of output.

Person A	Person B	Person C
Blah Practice published	Blog series on X
	Paper published on Y

All bits of achievement aren’t the same size, but this allows people to see the creativity and production of their colleagues and find all of the useful things people have been doing. It also applies some peer pressure to Person C who on the face of it doesn’t appear to be adding much, although there could be a good reason for that.

Why did I say all this was agile?

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Individuals ideas are valued and encouraged, as are their achievements. People are encouraged to help each other and work together on ideas. There’s very little process and tooling involved, just a list on a wiki. If I had a co-located team I’d just use some whiteboard paint on a wall or some post-its.

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Well we’re not talking about software here, but achieving ideas. The emphasis is on the achievements table, not the detail of how people go there. In progress ideas can be tracked and reported using whatever info is relevant for the type of thing being done, which can be determined by the people doing it.

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

This is an open and transparent process. Anyone can comment on the ideas on the list have a look at in progress ideas or question published/achieved goals.

Responding to change over following a plan

All this stuff is just written down, it would be easy to rewrite it if things changed. People, ideas, the environment etc. will all change so we need to be responsive to too and not plan the next 50 ideas to the hour.

Other thoughts

Since the list at the top is a bit like a backlog, it could be managed with input from management to direct the backlog, prioritise and agree. But I’d be wary of applying that kind of governance to creative/innovative ideas. I’m not proposing this as a general work management process, just an ideas/ancillary objectives process. Remember, bad management kills great ideas and worse this kind of management intervention stifles bad ideas, which are necessary and valuable.

Also, there are few things worse in life than an “Ideas Process”