ELC 053: Creating Long-term Engagement with Game Thinking

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Game Thinking Book Cover

As learning experience designers, we can borrow techniques for innovation from product design and game design. That’s why I was eager to chat with Amy Jo Kim, who has written an excellent book, Game Thinking: Innovate smarter & drive deep engagement with design techniques from hit games. “Game thinking is the art and science of engaging your customers on the path to mastery.” In this conversation, Amy Jo presents ideas for applying  Game Thinking to Learning Experience Design. Specifically, she focuses on ways to bring long-term engagement to new products.

Amy Jo started her career as a neuroscientist and eventually became a social game designer, community architect, and startup coach. She works with startups & game studios worldwide to help them accelerate innovation and create compelling experiences.

WE DISCUSS:

1. Five steps of Game Thinking: hypothesize, empathize, design, play test, and implement
2. The double-diamond approach to design: problem space and solution space
3. Extrinsic and intrinsic motivation
4. What it means to play test
5. The Minimum Valuable Product concept
6. How to find super fans to get good results from testing in a short amount of time
7. Three pillars of game thinking: super-fans, path to mastery and learning loop
8. How to overcome obstacles through leadership
9. Emotional journey to mastery
10. Important qualities of early adopters
11. Favorite method for unlocking creativity

TRANSCRIPT: Download the  ELC 053 Transcript

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TIME: 42 minutes

RESOURCES:

• Amy Jo’s website: amyjokim.com
• Book: Game Thinking: Innovate smarter & drive deep engagement with design techniques from hit games by Amy Jo Kim 
• Find out about programs: Game Thinking Master Class
• Podcast: Getting2Alpha
• Double-diamond approach
• Four Ways to Improve Your Strategic Thinking Skills