Tag Archives: #game

Gameful Project Management: Embracing the Rules

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Reading time: 3.5 minutes

Is there a project in your life, either work or personal, that sets ridiculous, in your opinion, requirements, or, in other words, rules*?

Most of us have (or used to have) at least one such project.

Let’s look at something else from a similar standpoint.

Isn’t a rule to hit a small ball with a club over a long distance to fall hopefully after not too many hits into a small hole, utterly ridiculous too? Wouldn’t it be more straightforward to take a ball into your hand, march straight to the hole and drop it in there?

Yes, it would!

And still, if you are a golfer, you would never choose the straightforward solution and instead will take your club faithfully and play by those, possibly strange to others, rules.

What is the difference between the rules in golf or any other game, in its classical meaning, and the rules in real-life projects? And are there more than one?

Yes. There are several. Here is what I discovered, looking at the games and projects anthropologically, in other words, non-judgmentally.
First of all, the rules in projects, have specific goals in mind that are different from just having fun (see the previous chapter on goals, “Approaching the Goals Anthropologically”). They serve a specific purpose since they are not always designed for entertainment (although they might, at least indirectly, be meant that way, as it is the case in the entertainment industry).

But the most significant difference is not in the goals, which is another game component altogether. It is in our resistance to embrace and follow the rules as if we have designed them (even if may have come up with the project and the rules ourselves), and they were our idea all along. In contrast to that, in games, we readily do so, which is often visible because we take on that game’s identity. For example, we become passionate golfers.

So, even if we sign the contracts and by that claim our will to engage in the project or job, we still resist the project’s or job’s rules inside us, judging them as bad, ridiculous, or impossible to function.

If a golfer on a course would put his or her arms crossed in front of them and start judging the inventors of the clubs and balls, he or she would completely stop playing the game and stop having fun.

What choices such a player has then?

These choices are at least of the following three types:

  • To continue complaining from their standpoint, which most probably will lead them to be left behind by their co-players.
  • Make a note (either mentally, on a piece of paper, or in an email to themselves) to check out which other models of balls and clubs are there on the market and order one or more for testing. Or check out another game altogether.
  • Make a note to create a new model of a club, a ball, or a new gold-inspired game after the match has ended, and then either send the suggestion to one of the golf-equipping/game designing companies or “play” with the materials to create these themselves.

We have the same types of choices with our real-life projects.

We can either continue suffering from the limits set by the project’s rules, or put our curious, studying, and designing hats on.

We could get more information on what else is possible for our project game.

And we could adjust the rules (and possibly also goals and feedback system) of the project in such a way that it becomes engaging, fun, and thus, provides the best possible outcome.

References and Glossary:

* “The rules place limitations on how players can achieve the goal. By removing or limiting the obvious ways of getting to the goal, the rules push players to explore previous uncharted possibility spaces. They unleash creativity and foster strategic thinking.” — Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World

If you want to learn more:

Sign up to Optimist Writer’s Blog to follow the Gameful Project Management series.

Check out my coaching and consulting services to work directly with me.

Take a look into my book Self-Gamification Happiness Formula.

Go to this link for the list of all the resources I offer on Self-Gamification.

Every Game is a Project; Every Project is a Game

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Reading time: 5 minutes

When beginning to create anything, you start a project.

The same applies to games.

If you want to create a game, you are taking on a project that contains many parts to it, both creative and management matters.

Here is how Thomas Schwarzl introduces his book Game Project Completed: How Successful Indie Game Developers Finish Their Projects, which among many other addresses the management aspects of a game project:

“This book deals with the underserved topic of how to finish a game project. Technical and artistic work are just the ingredients of the overall process. What makes them stick together and how to manage specific tasks make up the secret sauce to success.”

To create a game and make it a finished product, you will need to follow one way or another the following processes defined by the Project Management Institute (PMI)*.

“According to the PMI, there are five ‘process groups.’ Technically, they’re not supposed to be ‘steps’ or ‘phases’ in managing the project, but it might be easier to think of them that way. They are the following:

  1. ​Initiate
  2. ​Plan
  3. ​Execute
  4. ​Monitor and Control
  5. ​Close” — Kory Kogon, Suzette Blakemore, James Wood, Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager

If you look at these five processes closer and recall that here in this series we consider the ability and the will to see and approach anything we do as games, you will recognize (or at least imagine) that these processes can be seen as quests in your “game project game” or as separate games on their own.

To be able to recognize that projects are games too, we need to take a look at the game components and find out whether projects also consist of similar ones.

The most revealing for me definition of game components was the following:

“What defines a game are the goal, the rules, the feedback system, and voluntary participation. Everything else is an effort to reinforce and enhance these four core components.” — Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World

Before I read this definition, I hadn’t been able to see the parallels between my projects and games. I might have used a metaphor like “it’s a tough game” or similar, but I rarely considered my every-day projects to be games.

Let’s repeat the quote by Jan McGonigal and put the components into bullet points. The primary elements of a game are:

  1. The goal,
  2. The rules,
  3. The feedback system,
  4. Voluntary participation.

I am a business owner, so after reading this, I could immediately see parallels between the projects I was working on for my customers, and games. A contract or an agreement, which my customer and I both sign, contains all four of these components. Each project has a goal, there are specific rules, like how I shall do it and by when. There are reporting and evaluation systems in each contract, which is indeed a feedback system even if the progress is not recorded by getting points or badges. And finally, when my client and I sign the contract and make an agreement, we both demonstrate the free will to participate in that project’s “game.”

The same applies to job contracts which lead to your job “games,” with their goals, rules, feedback system (the regular meetings you most likely have with your boss, before or after which you and your employer provide some kind of evaluation of each other), and both sides demonstrating the voluntary participation by signing the employment contract.

Other activities, like sports to stay in shape, also have all four components. The goal could be to live a healthy life. The rules are then the allocation of time you commit to it; the feedback system might be your step counter or an app where you record your workout results every day. Some people take on thirty, one hundred or another amount of days challenges and have social media as their feedback system. Each post recounting a successful workout session is cheered about by their friends and followers.

Voluntary participation might be challenging to see in such cases when we think we don’t want to do sports or to develop other healthy habits. However, if we end up working out or doing yoga without someone forcing us, then that is still voluntary participation.

So any project or activity is already a game. We just rarely see them that way.

Why do we need to see and treat what we do as games? If we don’t want to see, call, and embrace what we are up to as games, then we won’t be able to “play” them and enjoy them in a similar way as we do in games. Only when you become open to see your project as a game, you can identify how you can modify its design to make your “project game” exciting and fun.

I will address the topic of the will to see, learn, design, play, and have fun in projects as in games in a later post.

References and Glossary:

* “Founded in 1969, the Project Management Institute (PMI) sets standards for the project management profession. It has 454,000 members in 180 countries.” — Kory Kogon, Suzette Blakemore, James Wood, Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager

If you want to learn more:

Sign up to Optimist Writer’s Blog to follow the Gameful Project Management series.

Check out my coaching and consulting services to work directly with me.

Take a look into my book Self-Gamification Happiness Formula.

Go to this link for the list of all the resources I offer on Self-Gamification.