Gamify Your Team

Jane McGonigal, a researcher and video game designer, argues that games are not a waste of time. In fact, she says, “we need to look at what games are doing for gamers, the skills that we’re developing, the relationships that we’re forming, the heroic qualities that we get to practice every time we play.”What are these types of skills and how can they help us enhance our performance? According to McGonigal, they include resilience, perseverance, grit, determination, epic ambition, and collaboration. In this lesson, she teaches you how to bring the power of play to your team.Cultivate a state of playIt’s OK to play: A playful work environment will bolster optimism, enhance mental and physical energy, and facilitate learning.Think like a game designerCreate challenges that will pique curiosity, encourage knowledge sharing, and support flexible strategizing.Build in ways to make challenges incrementally easier for mentees, but also impose obstacles to stoke creativity and promote ...

While some say that games are escapist, video game designer Jane McGonigal sees them as training for real life. In fact, we can use the “gamer way of thinking” to increase employee motivation at work: If you want self-motivated employees, she says, allow them to take on challenges of their own choosing, just as a gamer would do when”opting in” to a hero’s journey.Challenge Mindset: A mindset that can only come about when you feel in control of a challengeAllow others to opt into challengesLetting people set their own goals will minimize one’s threat mindset.

Too often in adult life, reality and wild abandon don’t mix – and that, says game designer Jane McGonigal, is a problem. Despite McGonigal’s evangelical assertions that video games can change the world, “people kept saying, ‘Yeah, but it’s just a waste of time. Shouldn’t we be doing something more productive than avenging some Angry Birds?’”More than half of Americans play video games, and McGonigal believes the rest of us should practice what joystick virtuosos know instinctively: that there’s a difference between having a good time and wasting time. Just ask World of Warcraft fans, who have collectively written a quarter of a million wiki articles on the art of WoW.Why are gamers so obsessed? Because playing gives people a sense of purpose, and winning them makes them feel heroic. “There’s this kind of transfer of our confidence, of our creativity, of our ambition” from game-playing “to our real lives” says McGonigal. And there are organizational benefits as well: s...