#GameDynamics – Narrative

by Bernardo | Jan 21, 2017 | Game Dynamics, Gamification

Narrative #gamedynamics

Why are the players playing?

In terms of #gamification and #gamedynamics, the narrative is not just a story or a writing technique/style or whatever the term for writers mean (hehe).

Narrative is really a powerful tool. It can guide your system into success within seconds or destroy it forever. You must be very careful when writing as it will prove its sensitivity to player behavior far more than any other dynamic. It is used to connect the players to the reason why they are playing. It will help them visualize objectives easily and always return to the path without having to analyze or process a lot of information.

When you tell people they have to save the world, it becomes way to ambiguous, however, if you say they must save it from a specific threat, they will always know WHY they are doing/learning whatever it is you are trying them to learn/do and they’ll know what will be a victory or a failure.

I have divided narrative into two game mechanic categories: Story and Objectives. This basically means that you either work towards a series of objectives or you are told a story you want to be part of.

When using a Story, you tell your players something like “Here you will become the best web designer on the planet, however, the road is unclear and heavy, but we will guide you into it”

When you use Objectives, you tell your players something like “In order to become the best web designer, you must finish the following tasks: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6… ,938”

There is NOTHING wrong in combining mechanics and there isn’t one better. Both of them work wonders on your system as long as the goal is clear.

The narrative is the answer to WHY the players are playing. How do you want them to find such answer lies in the choice of the category.

Let me know if you find a different way to organize the categories and your thoughts!

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Bernardo Letayf

M.B.O. (Mind Behind the Operation)

6th position in the Gamification Gurus Power 100!

Gamification Keynote Speaker & the mind behind the operation @bluerabbit, a gamification platform for education.

Developed three frameworks to teach/learn how to create gamification systems and build gamified content

Declared a world wide war on grades.

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Game Master Framework

by Bernardo | Jan 21, 2017 | Gamification

Game Master Framework

Our in-house game master framework is a model built on the basis of many #gamification gurus.

The goal is to setup a framework that will help people understand easily where to strat, what are the key points of a gamified system and how to test it on a conceptual level before putting all the effort in developing the content which is a lot harder and time consuming

The MDA framework for game design states to build three things: MECHANICS, DYNAMICS and AESETHICS (a.k.a. components acording to Kevin Werbach’s pyramid of game anatomy)

In my experience the framework order should always be: 1)Dynamics, 2) Mechanics and 3) Aesethics. Doing it differently will affect your workflow heavily. When you need to make changes dynamics should be the last things to touch as changing them will mosify everything in cascade.

Our first approach on the framework is the Dynamics.

We defined six:

Narrative
Environment
Win state
Progression
Relationships
Limits

These aren’t at all absolute or definitive. You may find authors who use them as mechanics or won’t consider them as fundamental, however, I’ve found that filling this six steps first is the best way to organize a gamified system.

Coming up next: Narrative. Why are the players here.

Any thoughts?

<a rel="license" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-nd/4.0/88x31.png" /></a><br /><span xmlns:dct="https://purl.org/dc/terms/" property="dct:title">BlueRabbit Gamification Academy Game Master Framework</span> by <a xmlns:cc="https://creativecommons.org/ns#" href="https://bluerabbit.io/2017/01/game-master-framework/" property="cc:attributionName" rel="cc:attributionURL">Bernardo Letayf</a> is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<br />Based on a work at <a xmlns:dct="https://purl.org/dc/terms/" href="https://bluerabbit.io/b/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/GM-FW.png" rel="dct:source">https://bluerabbit.io/b/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/GM-FW.png</a>.

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Bernardo Letayf

M.B.O. (Mind Behind the Operation)

6th position in the Gamification Gurus Power 100!

Gamification Keynote Speaker & the mind behind the operation @bluerabbit, a gamification platform for education.

Developed three frameworks to teach/learn how to create gamification systems and build gamified content

Declared a world wide war on grades.

<a class="twitter-timeline" data-height="400" href="https://twitter.com/bletayf">Tweets by Bernardo Letayf</a> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

It’s not about winning

by Bernardo | Dec 1, 2016 | Gamification

It’s not about winning

In a gamification strategy the goal is not winning. It’s about becoming, learning, growing.

There will be win states, but if you make the strategy about winning, then it becomes a competition and sports have that area developed and covered and it shouldn’t be the main objective of a gamified environment. If anything, the goal should be to NEVER win, like playing a game of tetris, where you keep getting bigger and better challenges.

According to Andrea Kuszewski (@AndreaKuszewski) “If you don’t spend the majority of your time, at the beginning of each project, finding what motivates your audience, YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG”. However in gamification what motivates the audience and the goal are not entirely the same thing.

There are 4 experience phases that (according to Yu Kai Chou) follow a good gamification strategy. People learn about whatever they are doing (Discovery), then they get on board with it (On Boarding), after, they start levelling up in skill and learning (Scaffolding) and finally they become masters and enter the hard part to design (The End Game).

In most cases, people don’t realise when they become masters of whatever they are involved. It just happens as a consequence of their hard work and growth. Unless it’s specific training, the goal is never set to become a master copy maker or a master student in math. However if we can change that approach, the goals and the motivation will come a lot closer and help each other out in the development of skills for the players.

As usual, the narrative (at least for me), is the one element that help clear this out perfectly simple. You don’t know how the book is going to end, but you keep on reading and learn a lot in the way and crave for the ending.

When building a gamified environment and you put the clear goal in the end, you can work with the obstacles to become the motivators to achieve that goal. This will help the brain of the players tackle the goal in smaller steps and therefore feeling it’s easier. This doesn’t mean they have to always see the main goal in front, but the smaller one and take things step by step.

Now, I said that the goal and the motivation are not entirely the same thing, however, in the end, when they are just one more challenge away from ending the game, the goal MUST become a powerful motivator and the reward should feel powerful from within.

Remember that the rewards should recognise, don’t bribe. Rewards should celebrate the achievement not be the achievement (Andrzej Marczewski @daverage)

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Bernardo Letayf

M.B.O. (Mind Behind the Operation)

6th position in the Gamification Gurus Power 100!

Gamification Keynote Speaker & the mind behind the operation @bluerabbit, a gamification platform for education.

Developed three frameworks to teach/learn how to create gamification systems and build gamified content

Declared a world wide war on grades.

<a class="twitter-timeline" data-height="400" href="https://twitter.com/bletayf">Tweets by Bernardo Letayf</a> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

To change the school system

by Bernardo | Nov 18, 2016 | Education

Ok, so how are we going to do this? It’s a known fact (here and here). Education as we were taught needs to die soon. And, who will be in charge of the slaughter?

The students.

It’s very simple. We can find a lot of evidence on how schools have less interest now than ever before and at the same time schooled systems are as obsoletes as a BETA tape. Our students right now have more access to information than ever before in the whole history of mankind COMBINED.

What’s the need for schools then?

If you are a 15 year old kid who suffered a trauma and can start reading and learning how to fix that problem (a good example here) you do not need a school telling you which way your education should go. Schools should be a place to help students find inspiration and motivation and passion and love and many many things. They need to stop killing creativity as they are.

But, where to start?

In my experience the system has a fatal flaw that must be exploited. Teachers are actually willing to help the change. This change has to come from the bottom. Schools DO NOT CARE what system they use or how engaged their students are. Schools are businesses. They will be happy as long as the students pay and the teachers “teach” and every year they get to graduate any number of students. But schools don’t really care about how happy or how much the students learn. They brag about having some students getting in the best universities but that’s just less than 10% of even the best highschools.

The core problem is that more often those students are realising that school SUCKS big time and they DO NOT NEED IT for them to be successful. So why would students want to be in school? Imagine things going on like this for 10 more years and your 15 year old kid goes to school, paying for tuition he doesn’t need because his online business on baseball facts has grown 20% in the last three months and he wants to take an advanced course in online marketing in an online school that will give it for free or maybe 10 bucks.

So, the place to start is the teachers. Teachers have to change the strategy. WE have to change the strategy. School can’t stay like this forever. If there is anyone out there who owns a school and thinks it’s great business to change it into the future of learning that’s awesome, but the millions of students who won’t have access to that need to get help from teachers who can adapt their own curriculum to a modern model and have the curiosity of the kids grow and thrive.

theoceancleanup If we ignite that light within our students, the limits are absolutely gone forever! They will not only think about great solutions for the planet, they will EXECUTE them.

Teachers need to stop thinking that their job is just a consequence of unemployment or the one thing they can do easily for a paycheck. Teacher transform lives forever. Either for good or bad, but they do.

All teachers need is to stop limiting students and show them they can do whatever they wish. All schools need to do is let them.

Really. The sky is the limit.

Our education as a purpose

by Bernardo | Nov 18, 2016 | Education

I am the proud father of a 12-year old son who has begun his first year in secondary education ( Junior High ). Since he was a little kid studying in kindergarten, I’ve seen that teachers, parents and students have deviate from the real purpose of education.

Back in the days where I was a 12-year old student, my parents and my teachers had a very specific purpose for me, to study, learn, and get good grades so I could fully understand the responsibilities the school had in me.

If I didn’t do a homework, then the teacher would send a note to my parents mentioning that this kind of behavior had to change and that I needed to bring every single one of my homework done to the class.

If I misbehave, then the Principal would call my parents to see what was going on. My parents, the teachers and the Principal would talk about me in a peaceful way and would agree on a change of direction for me.

Today, sadly I see the opposite. The moment the teacher sends a note to any parent, the parents mostly would deny their children behavior and would say that it has to be the teacher’s fault. Then they would go directly to the Principal’s office and demand that the teacher has to change its behavior rather than the student itself.

I believe this nonsense is going on, mainly because most of the parents, teachers and students have lost the true meaning of the education as a purpose.

Purpose is a strong word that changes many lives instantly, It brings joy and defines the path of any person for good.

Purpose = That which you love ( Mission ) + That which the world needs ( Vocation ) + That which you can be paid for ( Profession ) + That which you are good at ( Passion ).

If we as parents accept that these new generations of students had the same responsibilities as we did back then when we were students, then we have found our true purpose and it would reflect on being achievable of our children’s education.