This week, I’m off to the SeriousPlay conference, another once of my favorite organizations in the Games for Good movement. (My other favorites are Games for Change and the Games, Learning and Society conference, which I STILL Haven’t been to!) SeriousPlay is seriously awesome. Last year Jesse Schell was a speaker- and he was inspiring as…

People often ask me about “Gamification” and “Badges”, two words that make any game designer cringe. Badges are the most visible but reductionist and often harmful version of an otherwise complex study. “ification” or “ify” usually suggests that something is NOT something and you’re shoehorning it to make it that. A dead giveaway is that nobody…

I just spent an incredible week at first the Association of Children’s Museums and then at the American Association of Museums conference. I love these things- lots of fabulous fellow nerds talking about ed tech plans and trends and how to make more people care about education, arts and culture and museums. All good stuff.…

I love museum games. But I often hear “We have zero budget and therefore, we can’t build anything.” I see why people would think you can’t have playful, interactive experiences for your visitors if you’re not a large organization but I hate hearing it because it is just completely and absolutely not true. Meaningful play can absolutely be…

People often bring the Green Door crew on to a project to make it fun. “We want people to be happy. Can we add badges to it? Can we add some graphics? How about points?”This is known- of course- as chocolate covered broccoli or: gamification. Can we have all the mechanics of a game without…

When I was a kid, I remember watching movies and TV and genuinely being upset that there was a media monopoly: I had to watch the stations’ programs because I couldn’t produce my own. They could reach millions of people. I never could. Well those days are long, long over, aren’t they? I remember that…

I was really struck by Nina Simon’s post on “Magic Vests” and then Jay Cousin’s post on “Tag Cloud Hats”– all about getting strangers to interact with each other in a positive way. Nina talked about how as a gallery guide at a science museum, she would wear her magic docent vest and people would chat…

PLEASE PLAY! Part 2: “Who will play my game??!” I hope you’re asking this because it is exactly the right question. Sometimes people forget that if they build a game, people will not magically come out of the woodwork to play it: user acquisition is one of the hardest parts of game building. Part one…

This last weekend I was a judge at the Mass Digi Games Challenge. It was a completely exhausting and really wonderful experience- practically a full 8 hours of games. There were a lot of games. http://www.massdigi.org/gamechallenge/ They ranged from half-done student projects to fully fleshed-out game design studio projects but for those of us who have…

Disney: building rides for a participatory generation… I spent a week geeking out at Disney World last year and I think the absolute coolest part of the whole thing is to see four generations of play/fun/pretend trends standing there right next to each other. It’s practically a museum of public play. Bear with me as I…