What are serious games?

The Serious Gamers believe a serious game creates a psychological safe environment in which harmful patterns can be uncovered and new behaviours can be experimented with.

Our main reason for playing a serious game is to explore topics for learning and reflecting. This means the most added value comes from two things. One is understanding how to facilitate and frame the game properly. The other is guiding players during the debrief on what patterns and behaviours there were and how they relate to outside of the game world. Awesome side-effect is how a lot of serious games are also serious fun. Or as we like to say it: "Serious games put the fun in functional!"

🎥 We want everyone who signs up for this workshop to know that we will record the whole session.*

[Example of a previous energizer with physical objects]

Why join this session?

This session we will experiment with a different format. More focused on exchanging experiences and not only on learning new games. Join if you want to share some of your stories around serious games, let others in on your challenges, hear from peers when they were successful or failed horribly, and everything else that comes to the table.

We will combine the openness of a fireplace chat, with the playfulness of serious games. Curious what kind of conversations it will spark! ✨

[Our Wheel of Debrief]

What will you take away?

These are the things you will 'walk away' with after attending our session:

• a zoom-in exercise and/or an energizer
• a conversation method with a playful twist
• experience an existing game used in another interaction
• pointers and prep to facilitate it yourself
• energy and inspiration ;)

[Example prep for the pilot of our online series]

Relevant notes!

🧑‍🔬 Another thing we love to experiment with is new business models. Like you see on this event the option to 'pay-what-its-worth' in the form of a Donation ticket. Also exploring Patreon as a way to see if we can spend more time on discovering, creating and sharing serious games with our community. If you join our highest tier Patreon, you'll get first and free access to this event and the following ones!

💻 We are using Zoom during this experiment. Having it installed on a laptop or desktop might be required to participate during the whole session. Afterwards you can host or facilitate the things we try out here in your own video conferencing software (depending on the features it supports).

🎥 *We want everyone who signs up for this workshop to know that we will record the whole session. The main goal is to reuse parts of it in an instruction video we will share online. This way we can inspire more people on how to facilitate and debrief serious games in an awesome way. Small parts of the session might also be used for other means, for example on social media or for getting players excited for future sessions.