The article about applying computer game design to the design of organizations that I wrote together with Marinka Copier and Thijs Gaanderse has now been published in the International Journal of Organisational Design and Engineering. It was based on our first case study in the fall of 2008 and originally submitted to the International Workshop on Organizational Design and Engineering in December of last year. You can access the article through the table of contents or go straight to the PDF.

I’m working on an interesting new case study at the moment at an organisation called We Beat The Mountain. More about that later.

At the end of my last post, I mentioned there are fundamental ingredients that constitute a game beyond just adding points. In his excellent exposé on game design (that I mentioned before), Sebastian Deterling identifies seven game design principles that form a good round-up of these ingredients:

• Games set S.M.A.R.T. goals
• Games present clear, bite-sized actions and choices
• The relations between the actions/choices and the goals are clear
• Your current status is absolutely clear
• Games give instant and unambiguous feedback
• The challenges games present get increasingly difficult
• Games create social comparison

In essence, these principles are another way to phrase what Salen & Zimmerman have called meaningful play. Perhaps the principle of recoverable loss could be added to the list, because it is an essential ingredient of the informed trial-and-error behavior that characterizes a lot of game play.

When applying game design to organizations, these principles form a good checklist. However, many of the principles are hard to apply directly outside a computer game context. But when crafting a rule set that triggers action and lets desired behavior emerge, principles such as the ones mentioned here are a good way to achieve the desired dynamic.

Sebastian Deterding is a user experience designer and researcher from Hamburg who recently gave a very comprehensive and insightful overview of the ways game elements have been entering the work sphere. He warns us about the just-add-points paradigm: the notion that if you just add points (and perhaps a leaderboard and rewards) to a mundane task, it becomes a game. The warning is a timely one, because this misconception is becoming more and more widespread.

Adding points will in most cases create a sense of competition but that is just a superficial characteristic of games and one that will not stay interesting in the long term. An example of a fairly simple implementation of the just-add-points paradigm is Foursquare, mostly based on what psychologists call introjected regulation: I compete with my friends and get recognized for my achievements. A very sympathetic initiative such as The Fun Theory also focuses mostly on the principle of providing rewards for actions that people normally wouldn’t do: I am entered into a lottery if I stick to the speed limit, I can make music by taking the stairs or wiping my feet. Don’t get me wrong, I love the site and these are some very creative rewards. But I keep hearing it mentioned in the context of games, which causes confusion.

Fundamentally, games are about something completely different than points and rewards. Among other things, they are about players that develop strategies based on clear goals and meaningful choices. When looking at the matter from an organizational perspective (as I do), there is a use for the just-add-points paradigm in limited contexts such as workshops. It can be useful to create emotion and energy in these settings. When I try to apply gaming principles more broadly to the design of organizations, I need to work with the fundamental ingredients of what constitutes a game. More about this later.

In a previous post, I briefly touched upon a difference in perception between ‘hardcore’ games such as World of Warcraft and social games such as Farmville: the latter can be reconciled with being productive, the former can’t (the idea was coined by Timothy Burke in this blog post). It is interesting to talk a bit more about this work vs. play or real-life vs. game-life dynamic. This is probably the most important challenge I face in my research, working to apply game design to the design of organizations.

My early struggles with the subject focused on the differences between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. But ultimately, that is not where the biggest divide is: there is a lot of extrinsic motivation in games as well as in work.

More fundamental seems to be the playful attitude and the magic circle that games induce. My research has shown that this can also be created in work settings, albeit in a very specific and sometimes fragile manner. Getting back to the difference in perception between Farmville and World of Warcraft, it may come down to just this. There is no doubt that most players take leave of their “real lives” when they enter the magic circle of Azeroth, sometimes perhaps to a worrying extent. I don’t think the same is true for Farmville. It seems to be an instrument for killing time in between your day-to-day activities, while staying very much inside your real-life social circles. There is probably not much of a magic circle to speak of with Farmville, or at least it is one that is extremely permeable.

In a sense, I guess that the Farmville model more closely resembles the way we can apply games to work settings. But there is much to be improved there, such as getting beyond the just-add-points paradigm, creating a little game, big game dynamic (extending the things that happen during the playful moments to the broader context) and crafting an elegant set of rules that allow for emergent behavior.

More on this later.

Blizzard (publisher of World of Warcraft) has caused a huge uproar within their community by announcing that users will need to start using the Real ID system for posts on their forums. This means they will have to use their real-life first and last name. The idea behind this move (in Blizzard’s words) is to get rid of flame wars, trolling and other unpleasantness in the forums (see the original announcement here, followed by one of the longest comment threads in history). Some (mostly outside the WoW community) have welcomed the change and at first glance it seems to be in line with a move away from pseudonyms that I posted about earlier. But there is a fundamental difference, that Randy Farmer is quick to point out: World of Warcraft is a game! A game which very much extends to these forums. As Randy puts it: people will get pissed at each other for stolen kills, breaking alliances, and the price of components – and they want to – no, they need to – have a safe place to express this, to play.

This controversy is also shedding some light upon a fundamental difference between WoW and Facebook games like Farmville, as pointed out by Timothy Burke on Terra Nova: the latter are seen as compatible with productive work and with mainstream sociality, so we don’t mind having our real-life identities connected to them.

It will be interesting to see if Blizzard will go through with this, but at least we can thank them for having sparked a fascinating debate.

Today I presented a paper I wrote together with Marinka Copier and Thijs Gaanderse at the International Workshop on Organizational Design and Engineering in Lisbon. My participation in this workshop brought me a lot of new insights. Not just from the reactions to my presentation, but also from listening to the other speakers and participating in the discussions that went on here these past two days.

One early comment that resonated with me was the distinction that was made between “hard” and “soft” elements of an organization: on the one hand hard artifacts that can be designed (information systems, offices, business processes, etc.) and on the other hand the parts of organizational systems that cannot be designed, such as individual behavior and social interaction. This of course lies at the heart of my own research and of my interest in game design.

I was encouraged by the reactions to my conception of a rule-set as the minimal structure that an organization is looking for. Case studies like the one described in our paper were recognized as a valuable research setting that add an important empirical element to related conceptual and theoretical work (such as that by Joao Vieira da Cunha, also present at the workshop). One insightful comment was that the term “minimal structure” does not relate so much to the number of rules, but to their elegance and their affordance for emergent behavior.

The keynote today was given by Antonio da Camara, CEO of a company called YDreams. Besides some of the very interesting projects his company is doing, he talked about how he designed his organization. What I thought was his most interesting remark was: “If I were to start another company now, it would be less emergent but more based on my experiences in the past.” This points to the need for supplying design knowledge to managers and entrepreneurs. It also addresses one of the questions that was raised during this workshop: who will use the results of our work? My answer to that question is – based on the discussions here – that the results of our work on organizational design are not directly applicable by managers or entrepreneurs. As a matter of fact, it was pointed out that there have been big failures when working from the assumption that everyone can use these methods themselves. Applying organizational design knowledge requires specific training, so a manager will need an (internal or external) designer to come in and help him with this task. Much in the same way that managers will not design buildings or information systems themselves.

A presentation that got me thinking was the one by Robert Winter. He has been doing very interesting work on what he calls method engineering. I did not know this label before today, but it is actually part of what I’m doing in my research: I am constructing (or: engineering) a method for organization design. His point was that there is often too great a distance between the method and the actual problem that it is being applied to. He used the example of Davenport‘s BPR method. This is a very general method, being applied to a great variety of problems. Sometimes it can be better to make a method adaptable to specific design goals or context contingencies. This is definitely something to think about in my research as well: perhaps the steps we go through in our method should not be the same for all design problems.

I look back on a very worthwhile couple of days. Interesting discussions with fellow researchers, much food for thought, and a feeling of validation for the direction that my research is taking.

I was invited to give a presentation about my research today at the CoreNet Global Summit in Las Vegas. CoreNet Global is the world’s leading professional association for corporate real estate and workplace executives. They have been active in organizing a dialogue between researchers and practitioners. This session was part of that effort.

I started out with a very brief overview of the history of computer games, leading up to MMOGs and World of Warcraft. I then went over some principles of game design and how it can be used to inform organizational design. I explained the importance of the rule set as the means to induce certain behavior. This led up to an explanation of the methodology that I’ve developed together with Marinka Copier, that has the organizational rule set as an end product.

The link to the workplace is something that I’ve been exploring recently. I put forward the idea that the workplace could be used as a means to express this organizational rule set and communicate it to employees. And with this idea, I put the audience to work. Of course we didn’t have time to go through the entire design process, so we did a highly condensed version. I gave each group a desired behavior as a starting point (such as: collaboration). I then asked them to choose one or more rules that would induce this behavior and to describe how the workplace could communicate these rules.

I was pleasantly surprised by the energy that this exercise generated. Here are some of the ideas that came out of it:

• If the desired behavior is collaboration, the rules could be: you answer the phone when it rings, you are available 50% of your time to connect, 50% of those connections have to be face-to-face.
• A second group came up with these rules for collaboration: all ideas are welcome and valued; experiences, abilities and ideas are always visible; all members must participate.
• To express these rules for collaboration in the workplace, a group developed workplace interventions such as: colocating individuals or units to mirror certain behavior and strategically locating visible, high energy business units.
• For customer focus, one group wrote down the rule that “we actively solicit our customers’ opinions about how effectively our products and services have performed”; a way to express that rule in the workplace could be a wall of customer comments
• Several groups worked with the rule that employees who live more than 20 miles from the office would be there a maximum of two days a week (to induce sustainable behavior); as an expression of this rule in the workplace they came up with maximum technological support for the virtual workplace and maximum support for “non-task objectives” when in the office: celebrations, feeling good about the company, building trust, managing conflicts.

I want to thank everyone who participated in the session today for their enthusiasm and input and I’m looking forward to continuing the conversation with some of you.

The paper I wrote together with Marinka Copier (Utrecht School of the Arts) and my colleague Thijs Gaanderse about our first case study with applied game design was accepted for the International Workshop on Organizational Design and Engineering in Lisbon this December.

And next week I will be at the CoreNet Global Summit to discuss what implications my research on game design could have for new ways of working and the design of the workplace. Incorporating the workplace is a recent perspective I’ve been taking that looks quite promising. More about my CoreNet presentation and the subsequent discussions next week, when I will report from Las Vegas.