Category Archives: Gameful Project Management

This series will be about Gameful Project Management, which is based on the Self-Gamication approach, bringing anthropology, kaizen, and gamification together.

Approaching the Project Goals Anthropologically

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Reading time: 6.5 minutes

Goals* in games often pose a fun challenge. For example, save the princess, who is kept captive and guarded by hideous underworld dragons.

We rarely consider challenges in real-life projects as fun, especially in one that’s stalling or which doesn’t run as expected or preferred.

Apart from that, the goal is always clear and visible in a game. In a real-life project, we often get lost in complaints and forget why we started doing something in the first place.

There is another curious difference between how we consider — and treat — goals in games and projects.

In multi-player (and other) games, all players voluntarily agree to embrace the goals and the rules and have their score recorded in a feedback system given by the game provider. (We will consider rules, feedback systems, and voluntary participation in the following three posts.)

In contrast to that, in real-life projects, we tend to be quite resistant toward goals, rules, and often also reports we need to prepare (which are nothing else than the various types of feedback systems in your project). Even if we sometimes might enjoy filling in and formatting the report, we will complain at least out of tradition about having to do so, and we will feel compelled to feel along with that tradition.

Is it wrong that we don’t resist games as much as we resist projects and that we are more willing to be excellent and engaged in games than in real-life projects? No, it’s not. I’m not trying to blame us humans for taking lives seriously. We absorbed this attitude in the cultures we grew up in, from the generation coming before us and who historically had much challenging lives with significantly less opportunity and awareness than we do today. We absorbed these attitudes toward various areas of our lives as much as we absorbed and learned the language and the traditions of the cultures we grew up with.

So why is then all that comparison above? What I did above was an attempt to apply “cultural relativism, an approach that rejects making moral judgments about different kinds of humanity and simply examines each relative to its own unique origins and history.” — Cameron M. Smith, Anthropology For Dummies

In this blog post, the two cultures I consider non-judgmentally are “us in games,” and “us in real-life projects,” before we started turning our projects and project management into games.

As you see above, depending on the circumstances we are in (”games” versus “real-life projects”), we can become a different culture.

In fact, understanding that each of us is a culture of our own can help us perceive why each of us sees the goals, which are supposedly clearly defined in a contract with your customer or employee/employer, through very differently colored and patterned lenses. (Read also “GPM and the Synergy of Three”)

Where do all these different colors come from?

They might come from the secondary goals behind the real-life projects.

The primary goals both in games and projects are defined when you answer the question, “What do we what or need to achieve to win this game or to bring this project to a successful (= preferred) closure?”

The answers are often very clear: save the princess, design, and fabricate this product until the specific date and with particular quality criteria and satisfying or even overcoming customer expectations.

The secondary goal is defined by the question, “Why do we want to do that?”

[A side-note: The word “secondary” doesn’t mean here that the goal defined by it is less important than the primary goal. It is just not as immediately visible as the latter.]

The secondary goal in games, especially in those we play to make us happy, is to have fun and experience happiness while playing. We often greet games, and specifically new games, with a smile and curiosity and a question, “I wonder what playing it would be like.”

That is entirely different from how we greet the real-life projects. There we often expect “only” work. And the word “work” frequently has a bad taste.

Thus the secondary goals in a real-life project are rarely to have fun. It is often to increase productivity, be better than competitors, improve this or that. Here we come again to the pressure and the will to manipulate our current status into something different. (See also “Achieving Improvement Without Forcing It”)

So what is again the difference between goals in games and real-life projects?

The goals in fun games pose an exciting challenge, and they are both kind and honest. Here’s how. If you go on the quest of that princess and throw yourself into the adventure to fight or escape those dragons, you will be excited, maybe even laughing happily along the way, having success experience with each dragon you avoid or defeat. You feel elated each step of the way.

In real-life projects, there is often just one success. It is expected at the end of the project, if it is done on time, and in conformance with previously set criteria. The achievements in-between or with less than expected results are rarely celebrated.

So, how can we make the goals of your project games truly gameful in terms of self-gamification?

We need to approach them both honestly and kindly.

I don’t mean here to try to find out whether your goals are realistic. You can reach some unimaginable and unplanned goals starting at quite strange places, like the story I quoted about Richard Feynman in the References and Notes of the post “Fun is Not a Bonus; It’s a Must for Success.”

Realistic doesn’t mean that you are kind and honest. By trying to be realistic, you might try to suppress your heart’s desires both for yourself and your peers in the project. That is neither kind nor honest.
The advice to keep the goals concrete is measurable is helpful, especially because it urges not to jump ahead of us. But we still might resent those concrete and measurable goals and think that we don’t want to achieve them, that we only have to.

So what to do?

The following: Go to that triplet mentioned in the post “Fun is Not a Bonus; It’s a Must for Success”: the curiosity-fun-passion triplet.

Ask yourself:

  • Are you curious about this project? No? What could make you curious (in case you need to address it because you committed to doing so)?
  • What could be fun for you in the challenge that the project already poses? What other fun features, challenges could you add to make it hard to leave?
  • What are you passionate about? Is there any connection between that and your project? Volunteer to do those parts of the projects that connect your passion to the project. So if you love using Microsoft Excel, volunteer to maintain project spreadsheets or something similar. That will increase your experience of fun.

You probably can see how you can develop this further. Yes, fun is your compass, and at the same time, measuring tool of your success.

What I often recommend is to always have your fun-detecting antenna on. Then you will be on the right track toward your true goals, those you want to achieve with all your heart, especially the true secondary ones, the ones that determine why you are working on that project.

References and Glossary:

* “The goal is the specific outcome that players will work to achieve. … The goal provides players with a sense of purpose.” — 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.

Fun is Not a Bonus; It’s a Must for Success

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Reading time: 5 minutes

We all grew up in cultures that taught us to be serious about life and what we wanted to achieve in it. Otherwise, we wouldn’t survive either literally or figuratively, or both.

If we wanted to achieve anything in life, we had to work hard. And to underline this seriousness and determination, we learned to complain and surround whatever we wanted or had to do with drama.

Somehow, the opinion of having fun being in the way of achieving anything in life seemed to have established as being true in many human minds.

But interestingly enough, the opposite is the fact. And thanks to globalization and due to the internet growing connectedness on our planet, we have become more and more aware of the fact that having fun is not impeding success, but instead leading to it.

That is easier to see in the entertainment industry. When talking about fun, I love quoting Heidi Klum, a German-American supermodel and television personality, and one of the four judges on America’s Got Talent (AGT) between 2013 and early 2019.

After the results show of the AGT 2017 finals, a reporter asked Heidi what advice she would give to the winner, Darcy Lynn, a twelve-year-old ventriloquist. Without hesitating, Heidi answered, “Always to have fun. If you don’t have fun, it shows in your performance. That is always the key number one.”

But also in other areas, including the most technical and business ones, the experience of fun sets you on the path toward success.

“Fun is an extraordinarily valuable tool to address serious business pursuits like marketing, productivity enhancement, innovation, customer engagement, human resources, and sustainability.” — Kevin Werbach, For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business

Here is another quote about fun, which is one of my favorite quotes by my favorite authors on living in the moment, Ariel and Shya Kane: “We have come to realize if we are not having fun, we are moving in the wrong direction.”*

But how to find this “correct” direction. What is fun anyway?

Fun is a complex term made up of just three letters.

What is fun for us might not be fun for someone else. What we find fun is not only subjective to various persons but even to the same person in different circumstances. We might enjoy playing a game one day and not so much on another.

But there is a great thing about fun. However difficult it is to define it with words (I counted, for example, more than ten various definitions of fun in just a few chapters of the acclaimed book Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster**), we all know what it feels like for us.

Fun can show in different ways. One time while we have fun and enjoy something we laugh, and other times fully engulfed into a video game we play or fantasy novel we read, we frown and appear quite tensed from the outside. But we will still have fun!

There is another excellent feature of fun. You can discover it anywhere and in anything. Even in those activities, you claim as not being fun initially.

We can either discover fun when we give that project or activity a chance and approach it with curiosity and without prejudice (open to recognizing the fun factors in there), or we can bring fun elements into this project deliberately. Or better both.

How can we do this?

Curiosity and passion can help us here. I call them to be the other two siblings of fun in this inspirational triplet, one preceding and another succeeding the birth of fun at each moment. This triplet helped us, humans, to choose and pave earlier unfathomable paths. See References and Notes to read one of my favorite stories on how curiosity leads to passion and fantastic success.***

Fun also lead me to unexpected initially but utterly rewarding places. I wouldn’t have become an author if I hadn’t let myself “taste” the writing out of curiosity and let myself follow what felt healing, rewarding, rejuvenating, but most of all, fun for me. I tried various art forms in my life, including singing, playing guitar, painting, making jewelry, and decorations. But it was writing that turned out to be the best to express myself.

Through all that experience, I discovered that fun equaled wholehearted and rewarding engagement. And that is what defines successful projects and those involved in them. The latter are wholeheartedly engaged and experience this engagement as utterly satisfying.

References and Notes:

* https://www.transformationmadeeasy.com/

** Here are just five of the shortest ones:

  • “Fun is light, energetic, playful and…well…fun.” — Will Wright in the foreword
  • “Fun is all about our brains feeling good — the release of endorphins into our system.”
  • “Fun is the act of mastering a problem mentally.”
  • “Fun is contextual.”
  • “Fun is another word for learning.” — Raph Koster, Theory of Fun for Game Design

*** “I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling. I had nothing to do, so I start figuring out the motion of the rotating plate. I discovered that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate—two to one. It came out of a complicated equation! I went on to work out equations for wobbles. Then I thought about how the electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there’s the Dirac equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it… the whole business that I got the Nobel prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.” — Richard P. Feynman, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character

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.

Designers and Players: The Main Feature of the Gameful Project Management

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Reading time: 4 minutes

Acronyms: GPM = Gameful Project Management; SMG = Self-Motivational Game.

Of all four main components of games*, Self-Gamification emphasizes voluntary participation, which seems to me to be sometimes forgotten in gamified solutions and when serious games are developed. (We will consider the game components and their counterparts in real-life projects in a later post.)

When I was exploring and formulating the Self-Gamification approach in the book Self-Gamification Happiness Formula: How to Turn Your Life into Fun Games, I discovered that the main feature of turning anything in our lives into fun games is the following:

We are both the designers AND the players of our Self-Motivational Games (SMG).

Before reading this blog series or the book Self-Gamification Happiness Formula, you might have heard this statement as two separate ones:

  • “Be the designer of your life,” and
  • “Here is how you play the game called life.”

But I discovered that you couldn’t separate the two. We are both the designers AND the players of our daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and so on games, be it at work, at home, or anywhere else.

That is especially true for project management.

Many brilliant resources on project management emphasize that successful project managers start with managing themselves**.
But how can we do it, I mean turn project management into games?
We can, for example, learn from other players and designers of self-motivational project management games.

Many gamers and skill learners nowadays learn from videos on YouTube and other media, watching how their fellow players play the games (or instruments) they love and succeed playing.

But designers learn that way too. They play other people’s games in the genre they are interested in and eagerly study and absorb each detail for inspiration.

Writers do that too. They learn from their peers and idols by reading books in the genres they write.

The project management game designers have even a better situation. They can learn not only from other project managers in their or different niches, but they can also learn from the game and play (toy) designers. They can absorb almost everything around them like a sponge, wringing out what doesn’t apply and keeping the fun for them bits to implement in their projects and work.

Above learning from others, the following question to yourself and your team (since project management includes team management***) can help to jump-start undoing even the tightest knots in your projects:

  • For yourself: “If my project was a game, and I was its designer (which I am!), how would I approach it so that I, as its player, can’t wait to start playing (engaging in it) and enjoy doing so when I do?”
  • For you and your team members: “If our project was a game, and we were its designers (which we are!), how would we approach it, so that we as its players can’t wait to start playing (engaging in it) and enjoy doing so when we do?”

When you ask yourself and your team this question, remember that no idea that appears is wrong. The main criterium to find out it is appropriate for you and your team is how fun it is.

In the next blog post, I will address the significance of fun for project management.

References:

* “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

** “It is a project manager’s job to organise everyone else, and you will be much more efficient at doing that if you can keep on top of your own activities. If you are clear about what you have to do next it will make it easier for you to organise other people and the work of your team.” — Elizabeth Harrin, Managing Yourself: Shortcuts to success

*** “Project management is no longer just about managing a process. It’s also about leading people—twenty-first-century people. This is a significant paradigm shift.” — 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.

Defining Gameful Project Management

Gameful Project Management
Reading time: 5 minutes

Acronyms: GPM = Gameful Project Management; SMG = Self-Motivational Game.

So gameful thinking and approach to anything are different from gamification and the process of creating serious games. It’s another,  in my opinion missing so far (because not clearly defined yet) component, of seeing and approaching real-life contexts as if they were games.

Let’s say (spell out) the two concepts we discussed in the previous two posts (“Gameful Project Management Versus Project Management Gamification” and “Gameful Project Management versus Serious Games”) and the one, upon which Gameful Project Management is based upon:

  • Gamification,
  • Serious Games, and
  • Self-Gamification

Note: This list is incomplete. There are game-based design and simulations that also profit from game elements and game design. Then games themselves, in their classical meaning along with play, make the list of those things that have to do with games (more or less) complete. If you would like to find out more on the distinctions between all these concepts, then I highly recommend that you read an excellent article by Andrzej Marczewski, where he defines these concepts and considers their differences and commonalities.*

For simplicity’s sake and for the purpose of this book, let’s limit or list just three: gamification, serious games, and self-gamification.

When applied to project management, the above list will become:

  • Project management gamification,
  • Serious games for project management,
  • Gameful project management.

I must say, gamification sounds to me as a process and games are the final products. So these lists might be confusing and pointing at different types of targets.

Even if I named the approach of turning my life as self-gamification, the more appropriate name for it would be “The Gameful Approach to Life.”
And the list above for project management reflects that well. In that list:

  • Project management gamification is a process of bringing game elements into project management processes.
  • Serious games for project management are full games created often to educate in the project management subject.
  • And Gameful Project Management is just that; it is a way to approach project management gamefully. Nothing else.

I started writing this blog series on gameful project management before I had the Self-Gamification Happiness Formula: How to Turn Your Life into Fun Games made as an audio-book. When I reviewed the audio recordings I read my book again or had it read while reading in the paperback copy of the book. I haven’t read the whole book between publishing the e-book and paperback versions and reviewing the audio-book, which was about four months. So, the book sounded at times new to me.

As I was re-reading it this time, which is while writing this blog series on the possibility to approach project management gamefully, I have realized how much the book is about project management too.

In fact, there are twenty-two occurrences of the phrase “project management” in five chapters and even in Conclusions the Self-Gamification Happiness Formula book.

Self-Gamification enables you to turn any- and everything into fun games, in other words, you can turn your whole life into fun games, if you wish so.

Gameful Project Management is Self-Gamification focused on the project management aspects.

I will address in another post of how project management is a steadfast part of all of our lives.

But for now, let’s consider the definitions of self-gamification and self-motivational games and then finalizing with summarizing the definition for the Gameful Project Management.

Here is how I defined Self-Gamification in the Self-Gamification Happiness Formula:

  • Self-gamification is the art of turning our own lives into games.
  • It is the application of game design elements to our own lives.
  • It is a self-help approach showing us how to be playful and gameful.
  • In self-gamification, we are both the designers AND the players of our self-motivational games.
  • Self-gamification is about creating uplifting emotions for ourselves and keeping ourselves “happily entertained” with whatever comes our way in our lives.

And here is the definition of the Self-Motivational Games (SMG):

  • A self-motivational game is a real-life project or activity that you adjust in such a way that it feels like a fun game with which you are eager and happy to engage, both in terms of its design and the playing of it.

Thus, any project, as well as the project management processes, can become an engaging and fun self-motivational game. When you approach project management gamefully, both as a designer and a player, you turn it into Gameful Project Management.

This can sound like a colorful salad of definitions, and it is. Games are such an embracing unity of various disciplines and inspirations for other parts of our lives that sometimes when you gamify something you might end up with a serious game and when you could consider a serious game also a gamified solution (such as a grammar games or other I mentioned in the previous blog post, ”Gameful Project Management versus Serious Games”). There is never a clear border between these definitions and there doesn’t have to be in my opinion, because we all will see the definitions slightly differently. (There is another fun article by Andrzej Marczewski on why the definitions of gamification, serious games and other are important, and why at the same time they are not that important.**)

All that being said, I invite you to find your own meaning of the Gameful Project Management but approaching it as the designer and player of it and invite your peers to co-design and play it together with you, since:

“Game design isn’t just a technological craft. It’s a twenty-first-century way of thinking and leading. And gameplay isn’t just a pastime. It’s a twenty-first-century way of working together to accomplish real change.” — Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World

References:

* https://www.gamified.uk/gamification-framework/differences-between-gamification-and-games/

** https://www.gamified.uk/2018/11/14/the-importance-of-definitions-and-why-they-dont-matter/

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.