The basic rationale behind the workshop was that there are things to be learned from game design principles that can be applied in other settings, such as education or management. At the end of the day, everybody agreed that this is an idea that has immense potential. We arrived at some common understanding of the challenges and exchanged ideas for potential projects in 2008. More about that as soon as these ideas are more concrete.

One of the most important insights I took away from the workshop has to do with the attitude of the game designer. Game design is about building a solution on a small scale (with a focus on the things you can control), letting people play with it, observing and evaluating what happens and then adjusting the solution. Because what you are designing is not an end product but a dynamic process (basically, you are designing behavior) you need an iterative approach and constant monitoring.

The second thing that stuck with me is the different view on the world that playing, studying and designing games can give you. This view has to do with not taking rigid, old structures as a given (such as bureaucracies or hierarchies in organizations) but deliberately organizing things in a different way. Studying games can give you these insights. Once you realize there are other ways of organizing, new doors will open in many areas. Right now, gaming is the only arena where the network society is truly taking shape. What if we could expand this to other fields such as education and organizational life?

This design attitude combined with a view on the world inspired by games could be a very powerful instrument for managers. Especially when you consider that these tools may be essential if they want to use the full potential of the new generation entering the labor market.

However, my attempts to pry open the black box of the game design process during this workshop were unsuccessful. There are a few design principles that you could make explicit (such as giving meaning to meaningless actions, mystification of the rules and direct feedback) but these principles are always connected to the design practice of the individual designer. It is hard to make them explicit as clear-cut rules that a manager could use.

So more work is needed before we can start helping managers adopt a gaming mindset. I have the impression we can work on that from the platform we created with this workshop.

I gave a presentation last week at a conference in Amsterdam. The conference was about Business Process Management in the financial sector. My presentation was about “What we can learn from virtual worlds, games and the gamer generation”. And although the subject of my talk did not exactly fit the theme of the conference, the questions and feedback I got from the audience were very positive and encouraging. You can find the presentation here. It is in Dutch and doesn’t contain much text, so it may be of limited use without my talk to accompany it.

In my talk, I argue that many organizations are still bothered by old, bureaucratic structures that limit their ability to function in our network society. I then give a brief introduction about virtual (gaming) worlds, using examples from my recent fieldwork in World of Warcraft. My main point is that enterprises should mimic certain aspects of virtual worlds to make new ways of working possible. It’s important not to be distracted by the monsters and dwarfs you see on the screen. That is just a content layer. The social layer above it is where these tens of millions of players are collaborating on complex tasks and new ways of working are emerging.

I gave two specific examples. The first is the mechanism of what I call informed trial-and-error, which enables faster decision making. It is made possible in World of Warcraft by a combination of detailed information about your own performance and abilities, immediate feedback about your actions and the possibility to recover from mistakes. The second is the principle of meritocracy that arises in World of Warcraft: assembling teams based on the skills of participants and to a much lesser extent based on (irrelevant) aspects like age, gender or location.

Let me be the first to point out that all this is not new. My own fieldwork in World of Warcraft only confirmed earlier insights by authors like Constance Steinkuehler. The recent Seriosity study by Reeves & Malone also contains ideas along these lines. The new element is trying to isolate some of the mechanisms we see occurring in virtual worlds and to apply them in another context (i.e., an organizational setting).

What was interesting about the audience response was that they, for the most part, shared my view that these virtual worlds offer a lot for managers to learn from. Especially combined with challenges they face such as accommodating a new (gamer) generation of workers and working across distances with outsourcing partners. The big unanswered question of course is: which interventions are necessary in an organization to actually apply these lessons? That will be the subject of our research the coming year, when we will be testing some of our ideas.

Letting a meritocracy be reflected in your office environment? Embedding informed trial-and-error into your business processes? Exciting times ahead!