From the Sandbox: Games as Archetypes for Big Thinking. By Edward Harran.
May 13th, 2011 by Nathalie de Meyeres
Every day, our community manager, Nathalie de Meyeres, reads through her feed of all Sandboxers’ blog posts. Every week, she chooses the most inspiring, funny or brilliant ones and reposts them on this blog. This post was written by Sandboxer Edward Harran on his blog – find the original post here. Follow Edward on Twitter.
I love how the internet accelerates serendipity. Over the last few days, I have been going through my back log of notes, scribbles, audio posts and drafted blog posts. My intention, I suppose, was to see what hidden connection and themes that there might be. As I was going through the archives, I opened Twitter and the global brain directed me to @rexster video blog on Angry Birds.
“Angry Birds has taken the world by storm and as an avid player I realised that it follows one of my keys Innovation mantras, “Aim, Fire, Adjust”. We have limited resources with which to solve a problem and we need to try different ways of using the resources to solve the problem. When it gets tough you have to run a range of iterations to work out how to get through the level. Basically fail fast and fail forward.”
Which sparked my memory of an old drafted post that I hadn’t published yet.
The Title -Five Life Lessons from Bejeweled Game
A timely coincidence. A perfect “opportunity window” ( Sam Bell taught me that #winning corporate buzz word). Aim. Fire. Adjust. And Publish.
Bejeweled is amazing puzzle game, where you match coloured jewels together in lines of three. Its fairly simple in nature and incredibly addictive. The dynamics of game mechanics, even the most simplest ones, are such powerful metaphors for lifehacking and general awesomeness.
Here is what I found:
1. Make decisions and take action.
Since you are on a time limit, you succeed in the game by making aligned jewels quickly. You look, you connect, you execute. Don’t frey over if one decision is better than the other. Just use your intuition, decide and connect. Create montemum. When you make a decision, no matter how small or big, it creates openings for new things.
2. Creating action creates new potential you can’t see right now.
In bejewelled, when you are connecting jewels together, sometimes you will find that you have connected more jewels in the process. New openings emerge. Which leads onto ->
3. Things match up unexpectedly. Patterns will connect in the midst of focused attention. You will get your bonus round.
When you are making decisions, you are always focused on connecting a set of three and suddenly, you end up connecting six or seven, or more. Since all the pieces are interconnected, when you decide on connecting a jewel, it has an effect on the patterns around it. Connecting three reds leads to blues opening up in the far corner. A green in the bottom right. Then you get your bonus points. You didn’t intend on getting a bonus round, it just happen. Remember that a lot of things in life happen unexpectedly. When you are looking for one pattern, another pattern will emerge around you – and then in that process, you get bonus points without you having done anything. Our myths of individualism reward those who seem like they had control over their plan, but really the winners are the ones who are opening up patterns. We think they instigated the bonus rounds but really it was just the game opening up for them.
4. Stay sharp during the dip. When your attention is focused during the hard times, emergent opportunities will reward you.
Sometimes you reach a crisis point in the game. There is a lack of jewels to connect and you have to really look closely to find the ones that connect. In this moment, you have to stay calm under pressure. Eventually, as you do this, rather serependitiouly, it opens up a new board and before you know it, you have a new board you are playing with. It is easy to become scattered when you don’t have a lot of option, but when you stay focused on the options, even when there isn’t a lot of them, it will eventually lead to you having a rich board again.
5. Even if you lose, you can play the game again. Create your own scoreboard.
Sometimes, you get a bad jewel board. It happens. The great thing is, though, you can just start again. You lose yes, but you can always play again. You don’t need to listen to the scoreboard – you can create your own. For example, instead of aiming towards the leaderboard, I gave myself rewards for reaching 10,000 each time. You can define your metrics of success – you don’t have to go with what the game tells you. Its incredibly freeing you feel when you decide how you define your success. Play the game – and see what synthesis you find.
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Three Lessons for me in this experience:
1. Getting your thoughts down allows you to maximise the awesome coincidences that appear via the global stream. When you get your authentic voice down on something, even if you don’t share it then and there, it creates a seed. When you are tapping the network, the hive mind, you never know when the seed will get the soil it needs.
Resource: John Hagel ‘Power of Pull’ -> http://bit.ly/fmEqAC
2. If you open your eyes just a bit, the weirdest abstraction can provide all the answers you need. Look around you just a little.
3. I look forward to where all this gamification stuff / buzz/ hype is heading.
Resource: SCVNGR’s Secret Game Mechanics Playdeck -> http://tcrn.ch/fFTPE8
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Open Questions:
What do games teach you about crushit it? What lessons – innovation / life – can you find in games? What does Mario Bros teach you about business? What does Sonic teach us about social innovation? How is Nintendo and Sony seeing the opportunity they have to move their core business into new areas of “real life gaming”? When are you going to read Jane Mcgongial book?What is beyond the gamification hype? Why was Tetris so successful?
