Playing games, gamification, and the gulf between them

games and gamification: an illustration. At the bottom, two people play a game. Above them, the "not equal to" sign. At the top, a large number of puzzled people are receiving awards, scores, trophies, certificates, and prize cups.My post on gamification last week garnered plenty of comments on LinkedIn. Many responses exposed the vague ways people use the word gamification to imply, well, something good about a service that some companies provide. Like advertising’s liberal use of improved! without explaining what’s improved, the genius of the word gamification is that it can be applied as a plausible-sounding selling point to all kinds of products, without ever saying what gamification is, or specifying its benefits. So let’s explore the gulf between playing games and gamification in the world of events.

Playing games with Bernie DeKoven

Bernie DeKoven published his classic book The Well-Played Game, (originally published in 1978) long before its time. Eventually, a generation of game designers discovered its importance and the book was reissued in 2013, five years before his death.

I was lucky enough to play games led by Bernie. I still remember my joy while playing a glorious session of the “pointless game” Prui. (Recommendation: play Prui at least once before you die. A group of people and an empty room is all you need.)

A game designer’s experience

Here’s an eloquent description of game designer and performative games artist Professor Eric Zimmerman‘s experience of playing games with Bernie in the ’60s:

“Not too long ago, I was privileged to take part in a New Games event led by Bernie. On a brisk afternoon in the Netherlands, a few dozen players stood outside in a circle. With the boundless panache of a practiced ringmaster and the eternal patience of a kindergarten teacher, Bernie taught us several games.

Bernie led by example, always reminding us that we could change the rules to suit the moment, or that we could exit the game whenever we wanted. Attuned to the spirit of the group, he flowed effortlessly from one game to another, tweaking a ruleset to make a game feel better, always somehow knowing exactly when it was time to move on.

He wove his spell. Or, rather, we wove it together. As we threw animal gestures across thin air, raced like hell with locked knees to capture enemies, and became a single blind organism with a forest of groping hands, Bernie helped us massage our play into a more beautiful shape. In a short space of time, jaded gamers, know-it-all developers, and standoffish academics became squealing, sweating, smiling purveyors of play.

‘This is amazing! I can feel the equilibrium shift and restore itself. I can’t tell which one of us is making it happen. But I feel so sensitive–I can sense the game. I can sense the way we’re playing it together. And I love it. I love being this way. I love doing this thing, playing this game with you.'”

Eric Zimmerman, from the original Foreword to The Well-Played Game

The joy of playing

I hope it’s obvious at this point what a well-played game can be like. (Though, of course, experiencing transcends reading about a game.)

One more quote. Bernie wrote the following in 1978 about playing well:

“If I’m playing well, I am, in fact, complete. I am without purpose because all my purposes are being fulfilled. I’m doing it. I am making it. I’m succeeding. This is the reason for playing this game. This is the purpose of this game for me. The goals, the rules, everything I did to create the safety and permission I needed, were so that I could do this-so I could experience this excellence, this shared excellence of the well-played game.”

I’m hearing joy here.

Games and gamification

Merriam-Webster defines gamification as “the process of adding games or gamelike elements to something (such as a task) so as to encourage participation”.

Now, compare what you’ve just read with your experience of “gamification” of meetings.

If you’re like me, there’s no comparison between the experience of playing a game well and the experience (often negative) of participating in “gamified” conference sessions. The former is transcendent, the latter is often something to avoid.

As I wrote last week, gamification concentrates on competition and rewards to encourage participation. Proponents don’t directly address whether gamification leads to joy and fun. Instead, they imply it by including a version of the word “game”.

As game designer and author Ian Bogost put it:

“The rhetorical power of the word “gamification” is enormous, and it does precisely what the bullshitters want: it takes games—a mysterious, magical, powerful medium that has captured the attention of millions of people—and it makes them accessible in the context of contemporary business.”
—Ian Bogost, Gamification is Bullshit (2011)

Competition

Yes, competitive experiences can be fun. (Though, as I write this on the morning of Super Bowl Sunday 2020, I’m wondering how much fun the Chiefs and Buccaneer players will experience.) It turns out that including competition in a well-played game is surprisingly tricky. Bernie, who designed events and computer games in the 1970s and ’80s, wrote extensively about this, including the roles of coaches and spectators.

Rewards

Yes, rewards can be fun too, provided the rewards are, well, rewarding.

The problem is that manufactured competitive experiences usually feel fake. I’m supposed to get excited about beating some other randomly chosen team so I can win a prize I generally don’t want that much. Even if the prize is substantial — “an all-expenses paid trip to Hawaii!” — what I have to go through to “win” is unlikely to feel joyous.

And, of course, “you have to play to win.” But, as Bernie says in The Well-Played Game:

“…as I’ve seen and said so many times, if I have to play, I’m not really playing.”

Once someone requires you to “play the game”, gamification becomes little more than trying to make an obligatory task more enjoyable. Articles like this one, which touts the benefits of gamification on an already highly competitive group, are silent on the effects of a coercive learning environment on participants in general, many of whom may resent being constantly compared with their peers.

Gamification confusion

Many of the comments on last week’s post referenced using games to improve the effectiveness of learning, or adding some fun activities to an event. This is a straw man argument, because, yes, using games to achieve specific objectives, like learning something experientially or having fun is often helpful. Applied Improvisation (1, 2), about which I’ve written a fair amount, is a fine example, as are serious games. But these approaches are not gamification as it’s routinely marketed! In reality, these are game-like activities that have value in their own right, rather than band-aiding them onto existing meeting activities.

In contrast, the concept of “gamifying” something we already do at a meeting is a marketing strategy rather than something that’s useful.

Incorporating playing games well into events

Here are a couple of examples of successfully incorporating game playing, ala Bernie DeKoven, into events.

Simulations and serious games

Several years ago, I participated in a high-end business simulation during a meeting industry conference. [If anyone can provide more information on this session, please let me know!]

It included briefings and a set of high-quality videos that introduced a motorsports business situation leading to several possible choices. We split into small groups and discussed what our group thought was the best choice. We shared and discussed the group conclusions en masse and chose one of them, which led to another video segment showing the consequences and giving us another set of choices. After, I think, three choice points, the simulation ended and we debriefed and discussed the lessons learned.

The small groups didn’t create significant connection, so I wouldn’t class this as gamification, but it was a learning experience with game-like features.

I remember that creating this single example was clearly very expensive and only provided limited (though probably quite effective) learning. The session provided the same kind of experience as some interactive courseware built for education.

Applied Improvisation

Ask people what “improvisation” brings to mind, and many mention improvisation in the performing arts, aka improv. As the name suggests, applied improvisation (AI) applies improv techniques, skills, and games developed and formalized over the last hundred years to learning activities in areas like team building, social work, health care, responding to emergencies, etc. — in other words, student-centered interactive learning.

Today, AI practitioners have a rich inventory of hundreds of games, with a myriad of variations. (Some invented, as you might expect, in the moment as needed.) A skilled AI practitioner can design meeting sessions that satisfy complex needs for improved human interaction. These sessions are also a lot of fun!

The gulf between playing games and gamification

Both of the above examples require significant resources. Simulations involve careful learning design plus the creation of supporting materials. Successful AI must be led by a highly trained, skillful, and experienced practitioner.

In addition, these approaches are not examples of gamification. Why? Because simulations and AI sessions are designed from the ground up to meet specific outcomes, rather than slapping achievements, badges, leader boards, and payments onto a traditional learning environment.

To conclude, incorporating playing games thoughtfully and productively into meetings is possible, and desirable. But it’s not something you can do meaningfully on a formulaic basis by adding competition and rewards, which is what proponents of gamification are selling. Caveat emptor!

Gamification makes about as much sense as chocolate-dipped broccoli

gamification: a photograph of chocolate-dipped broccoliGamification “makes about as much sense as chocolate-dipped broccoli”. Education professor Amy Bruckman coined this analogy in a 1999 paper on game software design:

“Most attempts at making software both educational and fun end up being neither. Fun is often treated like a sugar coating to be added to an educational core. Which makes about as much sense as chocolate-dipped broccoli. The problem is that too many game designers are using long-outmoded models of what it means to be “educational”.

Can educational be fun? Amy Bruckman

Game designer and author Ian Bogost makes the same point, somewhat more forcefully:

“…gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is video games and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway.

Bullshitters are many things, but they are not stupid. The rhetorical power of the word “gamification” is enormous, and it does precisely what the bullshitters want: it takes games—a mysterious, magical, powerful medium that has captured the attention of millions of people—and it makes them accessible in the context of contemporary business.”
—Ian Bogost, Gamification is Bullshit (2011)

So what is gamification?

Merriam-Webster defines gamification as “the process of adding games or gamelike elements to something (such as a task) so as to encourage participation“. Nick Pelling, a British computer programmer and inventor, apparently coined the word around 2002.

The concept derives from loyalty reward systems, first developed over two hundred years ago, which have morphed through multiple incarnations (anyone remember S&H Green Stamps?) into today’s frequent flier miles and retailer brand loyalty cards.

So gamification adds the potential reward of interaction with others to the material rewards offered by loyalty reward systems.

Is there a case for using gamification in events?

Having fun, playing, and playing games are incredibly important human activities. My late friend Bernie DeKoven was an eloquent, passionate, and thoughtful writer and practitioner of these basic human pursuits. I miss him. (Here’s the story of how Bernie shattered my life-long perspective of chess.)

Proponents of using gamification in events claim that introducing fun and games into meetings must be a Good Thing. What could be wrong with making your meeting more fun?

Bernie DeKoven on gamification

So, here’s what Bernie said in a 2013 interview in Wired (emphasis added):

“I’m not convinced that efforts to make work fun are destined for success. I think the same thing about efforts to make learning fun, or writing fun, or just about anything else that we want to make fun fun.

Because, now that you ask, most human endeavors are already fun. Because the thing that keeps the best of us as good as we are is the fun we find in doing what we do, whether the thing we are doing is building a house or a game or a community, making plans or music or medicines, fixing the plumbing or a computer network or a school system, writing poems or proposals. Engineers, mathematicians, surgeons, dancers, architects, so many of the truly accomplished many readily confess to how much fun they are having doing whatever it is that they do. Gamification? They don’t need no stinkin’ gamification. They don’t need to keep score, to get trophies. What they need is the opportunity to do the work they do best.”
Bernie DeKoven: Designing Deep Fun Into Games & Other Life Necessities

I agree with Bernie. Many companies offer gamification products and services to slot into an event. (Googling “event gamification” returns about five million hits.) Supposedly, the achievements, badges, leader boards, and payments (real or virtual) of gamification improve the meeting experience, or its effectiveness in some way. But the case studies companies provide (such as these or these) offer no hard evidence that event gamification provides any tangible benefit compared to using meeting designs that meet participants’ wants and needs.

Event gamification — chocolate-dipped broccoli

Justifying paying (it ain’t free) for gamification at a meeting by claiming it links fun and relevant learning is bogus. I’m all for participants having fun, but meeting professionals already know how to create fun experiences at events — we’ve been doing this for a long, long, time.

So don’t buy the claims of gamification vendors, and assign chocolate-dipped broccoli to its proper function…an April Fool’s post.

Are five million Google links wrong? Do you think that event gamification is not chocolate-dipped broccoli? Your thoughts are welcome in the comments below!

Image attribution: from an April Fool’s post on Make It And Love It

Stop treating adults like children at your conferences

stop treating adults like children: graphic of a seated audience listening to a lecturer at the front of the roomPlease stop treating adults like children at your conferences. (For an exception, see the end of this post.)

With children, there’s an argument for broadcast-style learning. Schools were originally developed as establishments for improving the efficiency of oral communication of information. They did this by bringing many students together, so they could learn simultaneously from one teacher. The key cultural reason why broadcast methods remain firmly embedded in our children’s education is the sheer quantity of knowledge that society — for whatever reasons — is determined to cram into young heads during formal education.

For example, school curricula invariably include the Pythagorean theorem. (Why? One can make a case to skip it.) You can argue that most kids are best served by a broadcast-style introduction to this GED requirement (though you might try a flipped classroom approach).

stop treating adults like children

Treat adults differently from children

But with adults, unless you’re an expert training a bunch of novices, there’s no excuse for deciding unilaterally, “This is what you will learn today.”

Instead, frame the scope of the session, find out what people want to learn or discuss first, and then create the session they want and need. Five minutes of Post It! for Sessions, described in Chapter 26 of my book Event Crowdsourcing, is exactly what you’ll need for an in-person session. Or use this variant if you’re meeting online.

So, please stop treating adults like children at conferences. But with…

…one exception

Children play — and play is important at meetings. More precisely, creating the potential for meeting moments of what I’ve described as mystery, play, and the suspension of belief.

That doesn’t mean filling our events with children’s games, singing, and water and sand play tables. Though I remember a few conferences I attended where such activities would have made a distinct improvement.

Rather, consider including sessions involving improvisation, Serious Play, and creative group work that satisfy attendees’ actual wants and needs. And if someone brings bagpipes to your event, let’s dance the hornpipe! 

How I got here

How I got here…a pile of old Froebel blocks used to immerse young children in playHow I got here?

Schoolboy days

I have little memory of my earliest formal education though I suspect it has informed my entire life.

My mother decided that I should attend London’s Chelsea Froebel School. For a couple of years, she valiantly brought me to school via two buses and a train, went to work, and then picked me up to return home via the same interminable route.

The school’s philosophy was developed in the early nineteenth century by Friedrich Fröbel, the remarkable German pedagogue who created the concept of kindergarten and espoused the importance of children’s games, singing, dancing, and self-directed play. I remember singing, writing poetry, and spending hours at water and sand play tables.

At the age of seven, my school environment changed drastically. I was lucky enough to win a scholarship to Dulwich College, a British “Public” (in actuality private) all-boys school founded in 1619. I say “lucky” because, as a child of working-class parents who were forced to leave school at thirteen due to the outbreak of the Second World War, my options for educational advancement were severely limited. By a twist of fate, the school had recently implemented what eventually became known as the “Dulwich College Experiment”. Local councils paid the fees for the majority of boys selected to attend.Attending a private independent school with experienced teachers and small class sizes greatly increased my likelihood of access to higher education. On graduation, I won a second scholarship to Oxford University.

Education

I’ll always be grateful for the opportunities Dulwich College gave me. But I had no awareness at the time of the poor learning environment it offered.

I sat at ancient wooden desks, complete with inkwells and carved with the initials of generations of earlier schoolboys. I listened to teachers sharing knowledge that the best minds had taken hundreds or thousands of years to figure out. A condensed précis poured unceasingly into my ears. Somehow, I was expected to absorb, understand, regurgitate, and use this information to do well at frequent tests and nerve-wracking national exams that determined my educational and vocational future.

Apart from the tests, I found this torrent of knowledge exhilarating. Apparently, as judged by tests and exams, I was capable of absorbing it better than the majority of my peers. It was only much later that I realized that for most people, immersion in a high-volume flood of information is a terrible way to learn and provides minimal opportunities to connect with others.

It had a cost for me. The school environment emphasized my intellectual side and provided almost no time for personal or social development. I made no close enduring connections at school, becoming a nerd, and concentrating on my studies. Luckily, I never completely lost touch with the Froebel-nurtured, playful, and curious child buried inside me.

How I got here

How I got here

After school, I began a thirty-year journey. It wasn’t until my fifties, after careers as a high-energy physics researcher, owner of a solar manufacturing business, college professor teaching computer science, and independent information technology consultant that I reconnected with the six-year-old who loved to sing and dance.

Throughout this period, convening conferences on my current professional interests fascinated me. I organized academic, solar, non-profit, and information technology conferences. In retrospect, it was an advantage to be an amateur. I hated the formal academic conferences I had to attend. So, I tried new approaches.

People started asking for my help with conferences on topics I knew little about. I realized how much I loved to bring people together around common interests and needs. I became fascinated with the remarkable improvements that good processes can have on the individual and collective experience and satisfaction when people meet. Eventually, I decided to make inventing and proselytizing this work my mission.

Today, I’m happy that thousands of people and organizations have realized the value of what I’ve been learning and sharing. Over the last twenty-plus years I’ve worked all over the world, facilitating connection between people face-to-face. The coronavirus pandemic temporarily reduced this work. Yet I feel confident the value of well-designed and facilitated face-to-face meetings has only become more apparent during the period we could hold them.

Lessons for #eventprofs from an improv and mindfulness workshop — Part 2

lessons from improv: A collage of three photographs from the improv workshop. The top landscape photograph shows the sea view from the workshop building. On the lower left is a photograph of Adrian Segar laughing with another workshop participant. At the lower right is a group photograph of the nine workshop participants.

I have learned so many lessons from improv. Here are more of my experiences and takeaways for event professionals from the wonderful five-day improv and mindfulness workshop Mindful Play, Playful Mind, held June 8-13 2016, at Mere Point on the beautiful Maine coast — followed by their relevance to event design (red). (Here’s Part 1.)

The YOU game

In the YOU game, participants stand in a circle and create — by saying YOU and pointing to someone — patterns of categories, such as people’s names or breeds of dogs, around the circle. (Detailed description & instructions can be found here.) When you have several different patterns going around simultaneously, things get hectic. When we add people moving to the next person’s place in the pattern while playing, things get…demanding! The game vividly drives home this golden rule: When communicating, ensure your message is received! When everyone successfully implements this rule, the YOU game flows despite its complexity. And when we slip up, the patterns mysteriously disappear…

Successful event professionals learn the importance of this golden rule early! Another way to think about and practice this rule is the ask, tell, ask formulation.

Status

I have written about status in both my books, as it’s an important aspect of event design—and improv. At the workshop, we played several improv games that explored status and allowed us to practice taking status roles and working to change our own or others’ status. One example was a two-person scene we played over and over again with the same dialog:

Player1: Hello.
Player2: Hello.
Player1: Been waiting long?
Player2: Ages.

Each player had the option to choose their original status and then work to raise or lower their own or the other player’s status. Qualities of body stance, control of space, speech, and interaction affect status, and it’s something that I would like to be more aware of in my life. As a facilitator, I typically work to equalize status with people with whom I’m working, but, programmed by my upbringing, I also have a tendency on meeting new people to default to lower status until I know them better. Improv status work helps me become more aware of such proclivities.

Ted also introduced us to Patsy Rotenburg’s Second Circle model of communication and connection, which maps in many ways onto improv status work. Worth checking out!

If you’ve read my books or this blog you know that I am a proponent of replacing traditional preordained status at events with a peer model where individual status can and does change from moment to moment. Such participant-driven and participation-rich events provide a fluid-status environment that supports leaders and experts appearing and contributing when appropriate and needed. 

Building things together

One of the most wonderful things about improv is the opportunities it gives us to experience what can happen when we build something together with others, something that is a true joint creation that would have been different if any one of its creators had not been present. Improv games provide an environment of mutual support, where players add to what’s currently been created. The addition can be of more detail or deeper focus on some aspect, but the whole glorious edifice only increases in size and complexity over time.

Many improv games provide this experience. One that we enjoyed a lot was three-words-at-a-time poems. We wrote group poems, our only instruction being to read what we received and add to it in a way that seemed true to what had already been written. Sitting in a circle, each of us wrote the first three words of a poem. We then passed our paper to the next person who wrote three more words and passed the paper on again. Our papers circulated twice around the circle, with the starter of each poem contributing the last three words.

Here’s one we created together:

The Dinner
The cold lasagna sat on the white stool.
Uneaten, unloved.
Unlovable.
No cheese?
What, no noodles?
No meat?
No because too much.
VEGETABLES!
The guests departed, deflated, never to return to my sugarless, soulless party.
My hungry friends
Even hungrier for the lost moment
Of Italian goodness lingered beside
White plates and glasses.
Never host again.

I think the most satisfactory experiences I have designing, producing, and facilitating events occur when every person involved contributes creatively to making the event what it becomes. It feels darn good to be part of something wonderful that a group of people built through their work.

Conclusions

I learned so many important lessons from improv at this workshop. Our five days together passed swiftly. Throughout our time together we had moments of play, joy, seriousness, sadness, intimacy, fun, learning, and much laughter. I love workshops like this because they offer and support a unique experience for each participant—prescribed learning objectives are refreshingly absent, though I am sure that each person (including Ted and Lisa) took away something personally meaningful, valuable, and probably important. I’ve only covered some of what I experienced and enjoyed. I recommend Ted and Lisa’s skillful, supportive, and empathetic workshops to anyone who wants to explore the wonders of improv and mindfulness in a community of not-long-to-be-strangers.

I plan to be back next year; please join me!

P.S.

Ted & Lisa’s excellent Monster Baby Podcast just published David Treadwell’s interview with Ted & Lisa, which was recorded during the workshop. They explain “why they offer these retreats, what the weekend usually covers, and how improv skills can lead to a better life”. They also consider what keeps people from such ways of being in their normal lives and when they can get into the “no” mode. David asks how the retreat can help teachers, business professionals, and those in personal relationships before getting into the rewards and challenges of leading such retreats. Ted and Lisa offer a few specific examples of the kinds of exercises they offer. The podcast closes with a few short testimonials from this year’s participants. And if you keep listening past the apparent end, there’s a hidden bonus track improvised performance from Ted and Lisa!”

Lessons for #eventprofs from an improv and mindfulness workshop — Part 1

Here are some improv and mindfulness lessons from a five-day improv and mindfulness workshop I attended in Maine in 2016.improv and mindfulness lessons

You had to be there. In this case, “there” was a wonderful five-day improv and mindfulness workshop Mindful Play, Playful Mind, held June 8-13 2016, at Mere Point on the beautiful Maine coast. In this two-part article, I’ll share a little of my experience and takeaways, followed by their relevance to event design (red).

How I got there

Many people think of improv as a form of entertainment. I am fascinated by my experiences of improv as a tool for better living. As Patricia Ryan Madson, a teacher of both workshop leaders, says: “Life is an improvisation.” In addition, I’ve been working for over 40 years (with erratic focus and success) on practicing mindfulness in my daily life. So, when I heard in 2015 that Ted DesMaisons and Lisa Rowland, with whom I’d spent three days at a 2012 beginner’s improv workshop in San Francisco, were offering a workshop on improv and mindfulness, I badly wanted to go. Although that opportunity had to be passed up—PCMA made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: facilitating the 2015 PCMA Education Conference—I made it to the 2016 workshop.

I’m glad I did.

Where I came from

I became interested in improv after short experiences in various workshops during the last 15 years. After a three-day introductory workshop at BATS, I attended two four-day Applied Improvisation Network World Conferences (San Francisco 2012 and Montreal 2015). In Lessons From Improv and other posts I’ve shared how improv shines a powerful light on core practices that improve events. Saying Yes to offers can allow amazing things to happen at conferences, Being Average improves our creativity by focusing on the possibilities inside the box, and Waking Up to the Gifts makes the importance of public and specific appreciations at events obvious.

Looking back, I’ve only one post about mindfulness. Not because it’s less important, but because I find mindfulness hard to write about.

The content and process of Mindful Play, Playful Mind was so rich that I’ll cover only a fraction of what one might learn from participating: the fraction that especially resonated for me at this time in my life. Here goes…

Practice

One of the key gifts I received from the workshop was the gift of practice of improv and mindfulness.

The principles of improv, though easy to grasp, require practice to master. I’m far from mastery. The first time I worked with a fellow participant in a simple game, Ted and Lisa gently pointed out that I blocked her first two offers. (Essentially, I said  “no, not that” to what she had suggested about my character and motivations). I noticed that I sometimes say “no” to perfectly appropriate ideas. Improv doesn’t mean accepting anything anyone says to you; rather it is a way to expand a world of possibilities that one might otherwise reject. Practicing saying “yes” over our five days together helped me be more open to saying it in my life.

Each morning, Ted led us through an hour of movement and meditation. During the last ten years, I have had a rather, well let’s just say, sporadic mindfulness practice. On the fourth morning of the workshop, I was so aware of the benefits of daily practice, I determined to start each day henceforth with yoga and meditation. This decision was a surprise to me. It may well turn out to be the most significant change in my life from this workshop. We’ll see.

After we have grasped the basics of event design, mindful practice is how we improve. We become better at noticing what happens and learning from it, more focused on the present, and less distracted by our ego. Improv practice increases our creativity in dealing with the unexpected (turning broken eggs into omelets), makes accepting offers (of assistance and opportunities) easier, and helps us to work better with and support collaborators.

Being appreciated

It was a surprise to me to find during the workshop that I still short-change appreciations from others. I was taught at an early age to feel embarrassed by compliments, applause, or thanks. Though I’m better able to accept these things nowadays, I still feel a certain reticence at accepting these positive affirmations.

Providing private and public appreciations to those who make our events possible is incredibly important. Accepting such appreciations as offers of love, connection, and support is equally important.

improv and mindfulness lessons: Workshop participants Ellen, Nancy, Nahin, Ellena, Wendy, Everlyn, and Adrian with Ted DesMaisons (beard) and Lisa Rowland (scarf)
Workshop participants with Ted DesMaisons (beard) and Lisa Rowland (scarf)

Creating connection with others

Although I had previously spent time with workshop leaders Ted & Lisa, I had never met my fellow participants before. All nine of us spent five days living, playing, and working together. We stayed in an old family home overlooking a stunning Maine estuary and ate meals together. One afternoon we hiked together over Morse Mountain to Seawall Beach. Our workshop was held either outside or in the Mere Point Yacht Club next door 😀.

2016-06-09 14.37.34

By the end of our time together, I got to know Ellen, Nancy, Nahin, Ellena, Wendy, and Everlyn better in some ways than our Vermont neighbors (and friends), with whom we’ve shared a driveway for over thirty years. The improv and mindfulness exercises we experienced together allowed us to help each other learn and grow.

Well-designed events can change peoples’ lives through the connections we make during them and the learning and changes that result. What an amazing responsibility and opportunity we have!

There are more improv and mindfulness lessons in Part 2!

Create Your Dream Conference Collectively On This Friday’s #Eventprofs Happy Hour

Creating the perfect conferencesubscribe_nowJoin me and my special guest Bernie DeKoven on Friday, November 20, 2015 from 4 – 6 pm EST for a unique online experience where we’ll collectively create our dream conference. Instead of our usual Google Hangout, we’ll be hosting this show for the first time on the live-casting video platform Blab.

Bernie DeKoven is a legendary American game designer, author, lecturer and fun theorist. He is most notable for his classic book, first published in 1978, The Well Played Game “one of the most brilliant and overlooked books on games to date”, for his contributions to the New Games Foundation, his pioneering work in computer game design, and for his long-running web site, deepFUN.com. Bernie has spent the last 45 years working to teach new ways to play and create community.

Bernie is also a sweetheart.

The blab will go live at 4 pm EST. Join us before 4:30 pm, when Bernie will lead us through the first ever online version of “Did I Mention“, which we will then use to collectively build our ideal conference.

Don’t miss this unique opportunity to play with Bernie, building a collective vision of what a conference can be. To participate, you’ll need to be logged into Twitter in the browser you’re using. Simply click on the “Subscribe Now” below to subscribe to (in advance) or join the blab.
subscribe_nowHaven’t blabbed before? No worries—this post by Jocelyn Gonzalez covers everything you might need to know.

Join us!


[Added November 20, after the Blab was over.]
Here’s a recording of the resulting Blab!