We often hear the promise that digital games can be used to change the attitude and behaviour of players, that games can be useful for business due to their capacity to engage players and transform their learning experiences. However, merely using a digital game for serious purposes does not guarantee success and does not always entail engagement and effective learning. Understanding how games can be used to convey messages and persuade players is relevant to design efficient playful learning experiences.

This talk focuses on the different roles that digital games can play in the process of persuasion and the different persuasive dimensions that can be present within digital games. The presentation will include an interactive discussion of examples, which will go through the examination of common mistakes and efficient strategies, to illustrate how to use the knowledge discussed to approach the design of efficient learning games.

The best innovations come from organizations that foster creativity. Innovation workshops are a powerful way to tap into that creativity. Follow the White Rabbit enables participants learn the basics of the Excellence Baseline in “rabbit sprints” while developing guidelines for an innovation workshop and practising the skills necessary for the creation and facilitation of innovation workshops.

Managers face increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) markets. The cross-impact of a considerable number of factors make it almost impossible for a managers and organizations to decide on the best strategy to pursue. Business War Games allows for executives to assess and anticipate these impacts by gamifying the Competitive Environment and its players’ strategies. These can range from corporate, through innovation and product launch, to marketing and brand activation strategies.

The session, illustrated with real business examples, will ultimately focus on showing the diverse applications for Business War Gaming in learning how to crafting and stress-testing the winning strategy.

There is a long discussion on intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation and whether learners need to be fully engaged, to live and breathe learning that is ever-present. This is pursued through things like microlearning and mobile learning. These strategies have their time and space. The overall experience of students in higher ed needs to be planned and thought through as a whole. What happens, however, with every particular subject, even down to each session? There is a connectedness to the overall experience but keeping engagement in the day-to-day is also a challenge to be reckoned.

With our background on interactive and engaging learning experiences, we have found that they are intended precisely to keep engagement alive in the day-to-day, directed at that nudge to get the next learning item into the schedule and to look forward to it. We have seen how the full attention of learners improves their capacity, let alone willingness, to incorporate new information.

We will focus on the perspective of games-based learning for what feels like short-term engagement, especially when you place it in the context of an experience that can last up to 18 months like a master’s degree.

Any leader of any movement is by definition an agent of change. This is all about cajoling, supporting, selling, and resolving objections to making change happen inside their organizations. Bringing game-based learning to any organization, academic or corporate, is overcoming significant forces of inertia and a wide variety of questions – many legitimate, some born of fear – about the role, purpose and concrete outcomes of this new form of disruptive educational methodology.

The trick is figure out how to reach those who are energized by new possibilities while bringing along those who are indifferent or reluctant, converting those who stand in the way of a change to the existing order. To this end, we bring you a tool that you can employ as you begin the process of bringing a game-based solution to your institution: The Four Faces of Change.

Key Take Away: Understanding the Four Faces of Change and carefully managing each of these constituents will result in creating a successful movement and bring a game-based learning solution successfully to into use. By doing so you will be seen not only a change agent, but a champion of new and engaging forms of learning that yield positive and concrete results.

Using serious board games for supporting strategy execution, change management or cultural change is a difficult and context specific endeavour. This often results in complicated games requiring facilitators that are expensive to hire or train. Instead, it is possible to design and distribute simple unfacilitated board games that target and support very context specific dialogues and change processes. In this presentation we’ll take a look at two cases of all teams in an organization unpacking and playing a board game designed for change. This approach shows promising results in terms of each team feeling that the game addresses relevant local issues, of pushing the whole organization in an overall desired strategic direction and of doing so in a fun and engaging way. We’ll close with a look at how such games are designed and what the growing frequency of distributed teams, that mostly collaborate on video conference, means in this regard.

In this session we discuss the elements to consider when designing a business learning game to be effective with players from different cultural backgrounds.  Using different cultural frameworks (the layers of culture, Hofstede’s Cultural Values Continuums, the dimensions of culture learning and intercultural competence), we identify the elements of business learning game design in which culture is a factor, including the instructional aim, learning (context and learning mechanics) and game play (framing, aesthetics, game mechanics and synthesis). We discuss cultural differences in perception on the importance of knowledge versus application, and the impacts of these perceptions on game design.  We discuss different strategies for the cultural framing of games, including creating culture neutral, culture specific or multicultural scenarios.  Finally, we discuss the relationship between language choice, including idiomatic language, and culture.  At the end of this session participants will be able to strategically analyze an existing game or design a new game, through a cultural lens.

Games are increasingly part of how we learn, play and live. Despite this, we have been slow to adapt to the evidence emerging that shows they are more effective than traditional teaching approaches.

This talk aims to confront some of the main assumptions that continue to impede the development and uptake of games in educational settings. It will outline the unique dimensions games bring to education and, through a consideration of the ‘six degrees of freedom’ that immersive games adopt, it will explore the evidence that show games to be more effective than traditional approaches.

The approach is cross-disciplinary and focuses upon systems and education design as a new paradigm for future learning that will include adaptive learning patterns and more use of exploration and roleplay.

During the talk, Sara will discuss the work she has undertaken with colleagues, including exploratory learning, frameworks for design and evaluation of games, and the role of flow in learning. As part of her reflections, she will consider the contributions from neuroscience, data science, human computer interaction and game science.

A panel discussion featuring a combination of questions collected from delegates during the conference, scripted questions, and possibly also on the spot questions from the audience.