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A board game designer's web site
Copyright Eric Pietrocupo
E-Mail: ericp[AT]lariennalibrary.com
Gray, Dave
266 p.: ill; 24cm
Index: p. 259-263
ISBN 978-0-596-80417-6
Since this is a board game design website, the title of this book could get confusing. What this book call a game is actually a tool to gather ideas. It's not a board game. But like a game, these tools have rules and objectives and are fun to play with. Still these kind of tools could be used by game designers to gather ideas for creating real games.
Most of the book contains a series of games that people could use to gather ideas. I will not describe these games in my summary. So I will only summarize the 3 first chapters that explains the basic concepts of Gamestorming. According to the book, you can find many games on their website:
Chapter 1: What is a Game?
Chapter 2: 10 Essentials for Gamestorming
Chapter 3: Core Gamestorming Skills
Chapter 4: Core Games
Chapter 5: Games for Opening
Chapter 6: Games for Exploring
Chapter 7: Games for Closing
Chapter 8: Putting gamestorming to work
A game is composed of the following elements:
The whole process of a game could be explained in 5 steps which are either part of the game design or the game play.
Game Design
Game Play
In business, to achieve a goal, you need to start from point A and reach point B though a series of steps that can be measurable and predictable. This is what is commonly found in industrial work.
But in Knowledge work, you do not know exactly where you are going because the results you want to achieve has never been seen before. It could be compared to Columbus who found America when he was looking for India. It's completely different but maybe more valuable.
So in knowledge work, the goal is fuzzy but you still need to set yourself a course. Most of the path consist in experimentation and exploration. Fuzzy goals have the following properties:
A game is composed of
In between these states, you will use 3 different stages to reach your goal:
The whole idea of this book is to use games for each of of these stages. Games can be links in different ways. You can sometime create a chain of games where the results of a game feed the input of another game. Or you could split the results a game into multiple smaller games. It looks similar to serial and parallel electrical circuit.
This is some sort of list of rules and concepts commonly found in gamestorming games.
1. Opening and Closing
This is the most important step in gamestorming. Opening is about opening people's mind and explore possibilities. Closing is about Making conclusions, choices and decisions. You should never try to open and close at the same time and you should close everything you open.
2. Fire Starting
Most common fire starter is a question what will ignite the imagination. You could also use fill-in-the-blank method where you write a sentence with a missing word.
3. Artifacts
You can use cards, tokens and post-it to record any kind of information you would like. This is useful for players to see and remember the information.
4. Node Generation
A node is a part of a larger system. An idea written on a post-it is a node. The concept of the node is that it can be moved, sorted, etc. This is why post-it are useful.
5. Meaningful Space
You can use section and areas where you can place your artifacts (ex: post-it). That could be used to group, sort or categorize ideas together.
6. Sketching and Model Making
A sketch is a visual too that is used to explain rapidly something by drawing simple shapes. Sketching can be done with other tools than a pencil, including plasticine play and pipe cleaner. But the basic idea is to create something with minimal efforts.
7. Randomness, Reversal and Reframing
Using randomness can create patterns you would have never though before. For example, you could place you ideas on cards, shuffle then and group them randomly. It's the same concept than an "Exquisite corpse".
8. Improvisation
Improvising consist in creating stuff spontaneously without planning anything. It is possible to improvise by role playing a character to gather new ideas.
9. Selection
You need to select which ideas you are going to keep since you cannot do everything. So you could use a voting or rating system to determine what is important to keep.
10. Try something New
Take risks and try new things. Force yourself do to at least 1 new thing at each gamestorming session.
The start of a gamestorm consist in asking questions. Here are various question examples for each category.
Opening Questions: The goal of this question is to open a portal into the game world.
Navigating Questions (Exploration): These questions are used to make sure you keep people on track toward the goal.
Examining Questions (Exploration): These questions allows to observe and analyze details and characteristics.
Experimental Questions (Exploration): These questions are there to stimulate imagination and create new possibilities.
Closing Questions: These questions are used to compile what you have achieved, define priorities and make a selection.
Node: They are any thing which are a part of a larger system. You could use index cards or sticky note to write an idea on each of them. It will allow you to easily sort the information afterward. There are various ways to use nodes:
The author explains that that are many ways to represent things visually:
Improvisation is something that people does more often than they think. The basic idea is to do something without a plan. Improvisation consist is setting up a basic structure and improvising inside that structure.
There is 2 important improvisation skills A) come up with a quick answer to an unanticipated emergency and B) Create something spontaneously around a structure.
This is it. This is all the basic concepts behind gamestorming. If you want to use the tools yourself, go the website or read the book. The rest of the book is simply a huge list of gamestorming tools with an example at the end of how gamestorming can be used.
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