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Developing Games Fosters an Experimental Mindset

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So, for the past week or so, I’ve been developing the Impediments Game. You can see some of my efforts: interation 1, iteration 2, Interlude, and Iteration 3. Now I have no experience or expertise designing games, so as you might imagine, there has been a great deal of trial and error involved in this process. Whenever you add a new element or change an existing rule or component of the game play you are doing it with some sort of hypothesis in mind. For example, If I add “Accelerator cards” it will give the players a way to overcome the negative impact of impediments. That’s the kind of hypothesis I’m talking about. How do we actually run an experiment to test the hypothesis? We play the game!

Game play gives us the tangible feedback that we need to validate our hypothesis. Playing the game gives us both subjective and objective data. How does the game play feel? Was it fun? How long did the game take? How many cards did you use? Which strategy won out?

What I’m experiencing as I play the game is a lot of different questions – questions that can form the foundation for the next experiment:

  • How would the game work without cards (I could try using points…story points? The person with the most story points wins?)
  • What could I add to the game to promote teamwork? Would there be some sort of benefit accrued by helping your opponent?
  • Should elements like risks, impediments, and accelerators have a limited lifespan?

Of course the real joy of games is that you can run your simulations over and over and tweak things until you are happy with them. That’s what I mean by an experimental mindset. I see all too many teams that seem unable to come up with meaningful experiments to try and modify their performance. They have a hard time coming up with the “What if…” part of the mindset. Perhaps they should be playing, or even better, making their own games.


Filed under: Agile, Games, impediment, risk Tagged: Agile, Design, experiments, Games, Impediments, Model, Scrum

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