Philip Zimbardo on Time

This surprised me, as it actually touches on games and mastery and gamification.  It's worth watching all the way through, as are all the RSA Animate videos.

Excellent presentation I found on SlideShare

Titled "Meaningful Play. Getting Gamification Right". Lots of good stuff here.

Three key attributes:

• Make believe, Rules, challenges
• Goals, Feedback
• Free, safe play space, Shared toy objects

Time for me to wake up and get back into this. I've been sponsoring/supporting projects on KickStarter and thinking about the possibilities of defining a project and seeking funding through that mechanism.

Where to start

This weekend, Shawn and I went for a walk and talk and took a bunch of photographs in downtown Austin. One of the main topics of conversation was Mastery Quest, and how we get started.

As you probably know, I have a strong emotional connection to the area of software development, and am committed to helping to improve the learning and recognition in that space. I've been wondering, though, whether that area is the right one for us to start in.  It's large, complex, has many nuances, lots of languages and environments and platforms. Is that too big for us to bite off right out of the gate?

Shawn, not being a techie, and sharing my love of photography, posed the question "How about if we start with photography?" While it's got no less nuances and richness than software development, it does seem to me to allow for a much easier start. It's an art, a craft, a science, an avocation, a career choice...

And as with software development, there are also many sites out there that already contain some part (even in some cases LARGE parts) of what we'd like to see as part of Mastery Quest.

Consider the Digital Photography School. It offers/they offer tips, challenges, a community. And the Photography Forum, which offers many of the same things. At this point in time, I would readily recommend either to someone who wants to learn about photography. What I feel they lack, however, is the combination of fun and structure that we want to create. There's no shortage of information or challenge. However, if I come along and say "I want to improve a bit every week, and I want to focus on certain areas," it's entirely up to me.

That's not a bad thing. Don't misunderstand me. I think it's important for each of us to take responsibility for our own growth and development and learning. But I also think it's important to integrate the lessons from gaming.

What I'd like to see us do is partner with these sites and figure out how to incorporate the lessons and tips and challenges they've created into a larger framework/structure. A lot of it is already there. Now let's add the fun, and the "experience points", and the recognitions.  Not prizes and awards, but recognition of things accomplished through avatars and badges and such.

What do you think? 

Finished at Fifty: Is This The Future Abyss That We Are All Looking At?

Hello.

My name is Peter Pilgrim and I am writing for Mastery Quest. This is a semi-joint blog entry from my original post on xenonique. This entry is about Ageism in our IT profession and why we should find it. Let us begin with a couple of Twitter messages.

@peter_pilgrim: Ow! I watched panorama via the iplayer finished at fifty http://tinyurl.com/3dm2yzn and the future prospects were bleak

@imccaffery: @peter_pilgrim i know the future is bleak i was on the programme

British Television viewers are probably very familiar with Panorama, the investigative journal program on the terrestrial BBC ONE TV. I watched this program using the iPlayer [sadly only available to the UK - This is the UK link to watch the episode on BBC iPlayer site]. The episode was called Finished at Fifty, and followed four individuals who were aged 50 or over as they attempted to find employment. The 30 minute programme included Lord Digby Jones, a former business leader, who volunteered his advice for free to the four individuals. Some of the advice was about changing career, other advice was to refresh the approach to job hunting, the other bits were uncompromising.

I found this report, Finished at Fifty, to be one of the most alarming looks into UK job market. I found it difficult to understand why people are labelled by business and society finished in their middle ages. I am not old enough yet to be in this upsetting age bracket, but I know plenty of people who are, and also the future prospects for all are being squeezed.

On the one hand, we have young graduates from university, who are struggling to find that very first job and with the other hand, industry is behaving in ageism way. Hence the twitter call in the first section of the article. I tweeted my feelings and empathy about prejudices against older people, and it was Ian McCaffery, one of the individuals from the Panorama report, a former bar manager, who lived in Salford, near Manchester, who got back with a response.

I know the future is bleak, I was on the programme - Ian McCaffery

How on earth is this entry tied with mastery quest?

• Without stating the obvious, our industry is about knowledge share. If we as a society and collection of business do not value wisdom or experience, then it makes innovative endeavours like Mastery Quest defunct.
• If we start to prejudice against younger and older workers, then ultimately we are hurting the future prospects of out industry. We should not allow business leader to select on band of the population for their exploitation or making a profit.
  
• Mastery quest is about taking control back from middle persons, recruitment agencies, human resources and puts the knowledge share back in the minds and hearts of engineers, designers and developers.
• You have to give respect in order to earn respect. I will observe for you that in many professional sports, there is always the incredible talent, the person who is the upstart, the usurper, the new king or queen in waiting to be next champion of whatever. Often you find that the new talent in order to become a great talent has to follow a unique destiny, a path apppointed and found by the sudent themselves, it usually is student who finds the master.
• Ageism, the horrid principle of, the disenfranchisment of the old and wise generations, in at odds with the relative youth of our information technology profession. In much older professions such as engineering, science, law and medicine they have long-valued wisdom, experience and skills obtained from long-term practice
• Ageism seems to be a business model 2.0 of a silver bullet / a short-term fix or gain to avoid or escape what is surely must-be long-term peril. Today, the new story is about the over-fifties, should tomorrow be the over-forties? This is morally wrong.
  

Mastery Quest is a very nice idea in that it aims to bridge inexperience with experience is some form as yet unknown. It could be start of a real change and thinking. I hope so.

This is slight difference to my original blog entry, which you can read here.

Learning and Networking

I love the Mastery Quest idea, but I have little experience with World of Warcraft or other online games. My teammates play Quake every day, but I've only watched and listened to their girlish screams and giggles.

So I was interested to read an article in today's New York Times about couples who met playing WoW. The article says that WoW is not only a game where monsters are meant to be vanquished, it is also "a social networking experience." Players "meet and gab via the game's instant message feature, or through voice communication software."

This got me thinking. One of my most important sources of learning is my professional network. If I'm getting an error I can't figure out from some tool, or need to learn a particular new skill, I often ask one of the user groups I'm in or ping my tweeps. I've gotten a huge amount of help this way over the years. It's also how I find out about important blog posts, articles or books. Conversely, I try to pay this forward and help others learn.

Could Mastery Quest provide a professional network opportunity as well as a way to build and measure skills?

The lightning keynote from ACCU2011

I recruited a fellow in the audience to record my lightning keynote with my Flip camera.  Here are the results.  I expect the more professional version to be up somewhere soon, too.

Peer recognition

One of the questions that I'm struggling with is this: "What does peer recognition look like in Mastery Quest?"

We all know that we can recognize when someone does and does not know something, or have a particular skill, once we get a chance to work with them. Some people leave us breathless with admiration, while others leave us astounded with disbelief.

"How did this person get through the screening?" we ask.  "How could we have let someone who so clearly does not have the skills we need get this far?"

I suspect that all of us have had this experience at one time or another. Someone has a great resume, writes a great cover letter, interviews beautifully, and answers every challenging question well. In the software developer realm, we may have asked them to do a code kata, and they wrote clean, elegant code and explained it well.

Then, we get them on the job, and discover that they're just not that good. Is it the process? Are we so easily hoodwinked?

One of the visions I have for Mastery Quest is that this kind of thing doesn't happen any more, because of a combination of experience points, reputation points, and peer recognition.  Those three are all interrelated, of course.

It's not enough to have the time spent doing something, although that counts.

It's not enough to have a knack for it, a talent for it, although that counts.

There are a number of important factors that will help both employers and professionals. One way to identify whether someone really has both the experience and the skill is through peer recognition. If I say I've done 10,000 hours of skill X, you have to take my word for it. On the other hand, if my colleagues are willing to put their names to my experience, then it has more credibility.

That means that when a manager wants someone who knows skill X, rather than testing the candidates or questioning the candidates, I want to see a system that makes it clear as to whether that individual has skill X or not.

What about those of us who have been around for a long time?  We'll need some method of grandfathering us in. I don't know what that looks like yet. I don't pretend to know how to get all of this done. That's why I've invited others to do this with me, and am delighted with the latest post from Shawn Thomas.

Coming up soon: gaming the system.

Games and stereotype threat

A young girls sits alone, silently crying on a dimly lit staircase in her home, a small piece of paper hanging loosely from one hand. She knew this was going to happen, she knew that she was not good at taking standardized tests. And she knew that girls were not good at math. She knows this the same way that ‘everyone’ knows it; it’s just common knowledge.

She has an older brother who sailed through the same test and received outstanding scores, and who did half of the homework she did on a regular basis. How could she have thought that all the work would pay off and that she would do just as well or better than her less than studious brother? As soon as the exam proctor at the head of the room said ‘Go!’ on test day she knew that she had been wrong, and now her fears were confirmed. She is just not good at math. Or is she? According to Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson her scores were biased by something they call 'stereotype threat.'

Stereotype threat is the anxiety creating risk of confirming a stereotype about a group with which one self identifies. It is the x factor that leads many potentially great performers to choke in the moment. It is the x factor that led our heroine to underperform on her college entrance examination and to subsequently limit her postsecondary options. It is certainly not the only factor influencing performance, but it is one that has absolutely nothing to do with the knowledge or ability being measured. As such it is a bias that should be removed if we are serious about understanding an individual's level of development.

According to ReduceStereotypeThreat.org, one method for reducing stereotype threat is to ‘reframe the task.’ As a measure of performance or mastery, gaming may provide a great opportunity to do this reframing and reduce the bias of stereotype threat. It would be a bit extreme to say that this alone provides reason to create games for the purpose of education or measurement, but I believe it should be listed as an advantage of the method. As we move toward the creation of a system that facilitates and tracks progress toward mastery, it should be one factor that is seriously considered when design decisions are made.

Community ownership

Most education is provided by some organization or institution that, with the best of intentions, attempts to decide what we should know, or what skills we should have. This is not a bad thing, as many of these efforts are led by people just like you and me. They've been practitioners, or they've seen a gap in offerings, or they've seen a need in the market, so they step up to it to do something.

The problem is that most of these forms of learning are one-size-fits-all.  Each of us has different learning preferences, speeds, and focuses. You may be interested in Java, I may be interested in C#. Should the learning provider create versions of classes in both languages, and invite people to one or the other, or should they create one class that teaches concepts and techniques, and assume that the language doesn't matter?

When you are the provider, you are forced to make specific decisions about investment and potential return on investment each time you consider these options.

Community ownership will offer a very different set of options. There is no cost (at least, beyond that of some individuals or groups who donate their time). There is, therefore, no consideration of return on investment.

Let's say that I see a challenge that addresses a particular technique in Java. "Oh, that's cool! But most of my friends don't speak Java - they speak C#. Hmm." At that point, if the challenge moves you to take action, you can create an alternate version of the challenge (the "quest") in C#, share it with some other C# folks in the community to get their agreement, and make it available to the general Mastery Quest community.

Of course, key to this is my idea that all quests serve three purposes:

1. Learning
2. Gaining real, useful experience
3. Fun

There's no doubt that some quests will not quite meet #2.  

For example, at the end of the ACCU2011 conference in Oxford there was a crypto challenge.  Solving the challenge required solving some quadratic equations (well outside my range of capability, btw). For those to whom this seemed like fun - whether because they like quadratic equations or because they can't resist a technical challenge or they love cryptanalysis - the activity certainly satisfied #1 and #3.  I'm not sure how useful it would be. Note that I'm not saying that it's NOT useful, just wondering.

And that's okay. Some learning is valuable, even if we can't see where or when or how we'd use it. Like learning Algebra for most of us, right? 

The idea of community ownership, then, is about a community of practitioners coming together to define quests, learning, and achievements that they - the community of practitioners - believe contribute to real, useful, fun, meaningful learning. Ultimately, then, those who complete the quests, along with some real-world experience (10,000 hours types of experience), can be recognized for their experience and achievements.

No certification organizations for us, but a community of peers whose goal is to see that all the other members of the community have every opportunity to learn and achieve, and to gain recognition amongst their peers and their marketplace for that learning and achievement. I believe that this will "lift all the boats".

First public talk on Mastery Quest!

I was privileged to be invited to present on Facilitation Patterns at ACCU2011 in Oxford, England.

At some point, one of the organizers - Ewan Milne - invited me to deliver a "lightning keynote". At this conference, on the last day, they invited four of us to each deliver a 15 minute keynote.

This meant, of course, that I had to pick a topic, plan the talk, and put together some slides. I decided to talk about this thing - this Mastery Quest concept and vision - for the first time to more than a small group of people. There were dozens - 100 - 200 - in the room, and I loved it!

Here are the slides.

Steven "Doc" List - Lightning Keynote at ACCU2011 - Life is a game

View more presentations from Steven List.

The video will be up within the next week.

Leveling up by doing

On Twitter, after seeing one of my posts, Dave Nicolette said "That game already exists. It's called Real Life." I agree, in part.

The Software Craftsmanship movement is approaching the development of skills and experience in a new, old way.  From their Manifesto:

As aspiring Software Craftsmen we are raising the bar of professional software development by practicing it and helping others learn the craft.

That is, while they are not specifically eschewing training and other traditional means of learning the craft, they seem to be more focused on doing the work in collaboration with others, and particularly others who are farther along the path.

In the martial arts, at least the Japanese/Okinawan martial arts, a teacher is known as "Sensei".  From Wikipedia:

The two characters that make up the term can be directly translated as "born before" and implies one who teaches based on wisdom from age and experience. 

When I was training in Shotokan karate, we were taught that Sensei meant "one who has gone before." Not "master", but one who was farther along the path than we - the students - were.

In medicine, after completing one's formal education, in the United States one spends time as an apprentice (Intern) and then journeyman (Resident) before being examined by a board and considered ready to practice medicine as a true practitioner.

As a software developer^*, I may or may not receive any formal training.  I may or may not ever get to work with someone who is sufficiently farther along to help me learn. I may end up working largely on my own, under the supervision of someone who has no skills in my chosen (or discovered) profession.  There seem to be so many ways in which I can fail to learn, improve, or achieve mastery in this scenario. And this scenario is far too common.

Organizations are driven by their organizational imperatives, and by the biases, constraints, and limitations of their leaders and managers^**. While there are some that are beginning to recognize the importance of "upskilling" their employees, many leave it to the individuals, and the individuals don't know where to go.

A core component of the idea and vision which we're calling "Mastery Quest" is to provide means for these individuals to learn and be mentored and upskill themselves. Combining community-created and community-owned challenges and quests, individuals will have a way to learn as they go.

A part of that will be receiving "experience points" for work that they're doing anyway. Is a developer doing Test-Driven Development? Get someone to attest to the amount of time they've been doing it for experience points.  Is a veterinary technician successfully drawing blood from a small dog or any size cat? Get someone to attest to this achievement, and get experience points.

These things should - and do - count.

Now the question is "how do we set this up so that we can make it a reality?"

---

^* Or a veterinary technician or tester or office administrator or...
^** Leaders and managers may be the same people, and often are not.

Learning by doing

From the essay "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years" by Peter Norvig

The best kind of learning is learning by doing. To put it more technically, "the maximal level of performance for individuals in a given domain is not attained automatically as a function of extended experience, but the level of performance can be increased even by highly experienced individuals as a result of deliberate efforts to improve." (p. 366) and "the most effective learning requires a well-defined task with an appropriate difficulty level for the particular individual, informative feedback, and opportunities for repetition and corrections of errors." (p. 20-21) The book Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday Life is an interesting reference for this viewpoint.

Elsewhere in the essay, Norvig also references the work of Malcolm Gladwell ("Outliers") in which he cites "a study of students at the Berlin Academy of Music compared the top, middle, and bottom third of the class and asked them how much they had practiced". Ten thousand hours seems to be the key. According to Norvig:

The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again. 

In thinking about how we improve our educational and recognitional (certification) approaches in the work/career world, I believe we have to not just provide opportunity, but also make it desirable.  Fun.  Challenging (in a good way).

Quests

What does a quest look like in a professional/career context? How do we provide a framework for these clearly (?) defined challenges that lead a participant through some steps to achieve some specific learning?

I'm loosely defining "quest" as different from other achievements, through the following characteristics:

• Clearly defined goal
• Measurable and verifiable
• Takes multiple steps
• Has an outcome
• May be collaborative
• Requires some research or action

I'm not sure that this doesn't include anything and everything.  Where it is distinct is from the gaining of experience as part of one's employment, education, or volunteerism.  While these things should accrue "experience points", they are not quests.

So let's distinguish between quests - activity in service of achieving some specific goal - and time-based experience. Both accrue experience points, and quests also accrue some other kind of points or recognition.

Badges? Bangles? Tokens or icons?

Game Frame

Here's another book that looks at using concepts and frameworks from gaming in the real world. I haven't read it yet.  I will. :)

Mini-Challenges and Mini-Achievements

One of my thoughts for this program is that it should be possible for a participant to get a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment quickly. I think of these as "mini-achievements".

They should be challenges that drive a small bit of learning, force the participant to do some work or research, but take a short period of time.

Each one should be fun, and accomplishing it should provide a sense of satisfaction, while delivering something useful.

Here's the example I recently used with a couple of friends who are familiar with the VI editor (aka VIM):

• Using a single command, reverse the order of the lines in a file

The first friend figured it out on his own (as far as I know). He had fun, and got a sense of accomplishment.  The second friend looked it up using Google.  He too had fun, and got a sense of accomplishment.

Both of them now know several things: how to satisfy this particular challenge; how to deal with similar challenges; how to find the answer, if they need it.

There should be lots of these in each domain, so that participants can get "experience points" in little increments as they have time.

Certifications? Hah!

One of the things that spurs me on is the number of different kinds of certifications out there, and how meaningless so many of them are.  Maybe that's only true in the IT / software development space.  Regardless, there are some prime examples of what's wrong with the concept.

• "Certified Scrum Master": attend the course, and you're a CSM. Ridiculous.
• ICAgile certified classes: ditto
• PMP (PMI certification): might have a little more meat, but it's out of date, incredibly cumbersome, and doesn't really show whether you are a project manager, just that you have the knowledge about what a project manager does.

And so on.

One of my goals for Mastery Quest is to create community-driven, community-recognized, and employer-accepted status as people start to achieve and "level up".

Mastery Quest Manifesto (work in progress)

I'm working on creating a manifesto^* for this grand vision.  Sometimes it's just too big for my head.  I'm inviting others to join me in creating this thing, because it's too big for one person, and it will take years to mature.

Here's the manifesto as it stands as of this writing:

There is much to be learned from games, and particularly MMORPGs**. These types of games incorporate some key concepts and technologies, which we believe to be of value:

• Micro-achievements
• Measurable progress
• Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
• Social media supporting
• Collaboration
• Learning
• Teaching
• Working at your own pace
• Self-direction
• Self-organization

While these things are not unique to MMORPGs, they are certainly key aspects of them.

We believe that it is possible - and desirable - to incorporate these things into an approach to approaching and achieving mastery in a variety of endeavors.

That approach should enable individuals to:

• Participate in communities focusing on the same endeavor
• Participate in communities of individuals who are at the same level of accomplishment/mastery
• Seek out individuals who are at "higher" levels of mastery for mentoring
• Record specific achievements
• Have fun while reaching higher levels of achievement/accomplishment
• Achieve growth within their realm of endeavor in ways that are recognized, accepted, and acknowledged by their peers and their larger professional/employment community

Further, that approach should enable the community to:

• Create challenges (quests, achievements)
• Mutually "certify" each other's achievements
• Create a recognized and accepted "brand" in the employment and commercial marketplaces

---

^* Manifesto: A manifesto is a public declaration of principles and intentions, often political in nature. Manifestos relating to religious belief are generally referred to as creeds. Manifestos may also be life stance-related. (from Wikipedia)
^** MMORPG: Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. That's an online game in which thousands, tens of thousands, or millions of players are in the game, interact with each other, and play through avatars in various roles.

Lessons from Jane McGonigal

Her web site.

Quotes from the book

"Reality is Broken"

"The truth is this: in today’s society, computer and video games are fulfilling genuine human needs that the real world is currently unable to satisfy. Games are providing rewards that reality is not. They are teaching and inspiring and engaging us in ways that reality is not. They are bringing us together in ways that reality is not."

"Why would we want to waste the power of games on escapist entertainment? Why would we want to waste the power of games by trying to squelch the phenomenon altogether? Perhaps we should consider a third idea. Instead of teetering on the tipping point between games and reality, what if we threw ourselves off the scale and tried something else entirely?"

"When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation."

"Teasingly trash-talking allows us to provoke each other’s negative emotions in a very mild way—we stimulate a very small amount of anger or hurt or embarrassment. This tiny provocation has two powerful effects. First, it confirms trust: the person doing the teasing is demonstrating the capacity to hurt, but simultaneously showing that the intention is not to hurt. Just like a dog might play-bite another dog to show that it wants to be friends, we bare our teeth to each other in order to remind each other that we could, but never really would, hurt each other. Conversely, by allowing someone else to tease us, we confirm our willingness to be in a vulnerable position. We are actively demonstrating our trust in the other person’s regard for our emotional well-being."

"By letting someone tease us, we’re also helping them feel powerful. We’re giving them a moment to enjoy higher status in our social relationship—and humans are intensely attuned to shifts in social status. By letting someone else experience higher status, we intensify their positive feelings for us. Why? Because we naturally like people more when they enhance our own social status."

"Happiness hacking is the experimental design practice of translating positive-psychology research findings into game mechanics. It’s a way to make happiness activities feel significantly less hokey, and to put them in a bigger social context. Game mechanics also allow you to escalate the difficulty of happiness activities and inject them with novelty, so they stay challenging and fresh."

FIX # 1 : UNNECESSARY OBSTACLES Compared with games, reality is too easy. Games challenge us with voluntary obstacles and help us put our personal strengths to better use.

FIX # 2 : EMOTIONAL ACTIVATION Compared with games, reality is depressing. Games focus our energy, with relentless optimism, on something we’re good at and enjoy. We are finally perfectly poised to harness the potential of games to make us happy and improve our everyday quality of life.

FIX # 3 : MORE SATISFYING WORK Compared with games, reality is unproductive. Games give us clearer missions and more satisfying, hands-on work.

FIX #4: BETTER HOPE OF SUCCESS Compared with games, reality is hopeless. Games eliminate our fear of failure and improve our chances for success.

FIX #5: STRONGER SOCIAL CONNECTIVITY Compared with games, reality is disconnected. Games build stronger social bonds and lead to more active social networks. The more time we spend interacting within our social networks, the more likely we are to generate a subset of positive emotions known as “prosocial emotions.”

FIX #6: EPIC SCALE Compared with games, reality is trivial. Games make us a part of something bigger and give epic meaning to our actions.

FIX # 7 : WHOLEHEARTED PARTICIPATION Compared with games, reality is hard to get into. Games motivate us to participate more fully in whatever we’re doing.

FIX # 8 : MEANINGFUL REWARDS WHEN WE NEED THEM MOST Compared with games, reality is pointless and unrewarding. Games help us feel more rewarded for making our best effort.

FIX # 9 : MORE FUN WITH STRANGERS Compared with games, reality is lonely and isolating. Games help us band together and create powerful communities from scratch.

FIX #10: HAPPINESS HACKS Compared with games, reality is hard to swallow. Games make it easier to take good advice and try out happier habits.

FIX # 11 : A SUSTAINABLE ENGAGEMENT ECONOMY Compared with games, reality is unsustainable. The gratifications we get from playing games are an infinitely renewable resource.

FIX # 12 : MORE EPIC WINS Compared with games, reality is unambitious. Games help us define awe-inspiring goals and tackle seemingly impossible social missions together.

FIX # 13: TEN THOUSAND HOURS COLLABORATING Compared with games, reality is disorganized and divided. Games help us make a more concerted effort—and over time, they give us collaboration superpowers.

FIX # 14 : MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER FORESIGHT Reality is stuck in the present. Games help us imagine and invent the future together.

Here's part of it! SkillShare

The idea of members of the global community teaching each other is a part of what I envision for what I'm calling "Mastery Quest".  I think that SkillShare is powerful and exciting.

http://www.skillshare.com/site/about

The Vision

I was talking to my friends Maura and Shawn (Shawn and I both love photography) this weekend, telling them about the ideas I’ve been developing as I read Jane McGonigal’s “Reality is Broken”. Between McGonigal’s work, Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” and his talk about 10,000 hours to achieve mastery, and all the recent references to 10,000 hours (like in Seth Godin’s blog post), I got to wondering about how to combine it all.

Here’s the result of my developing and wondering and pondering and talking:

I want to start on open source project to create something – game, system, website, whatever – that incorporates elements of alternate reality games (as described by McGonigal) including the four defining traits of games^*, somehow tracking and recording practice toward 10,000 hours, and that focuses on intrinsic motivation with a tickle of extrinsic motivation.

My first focus would be on facilitating the adoption of Agile principles and practices in organizations, although it’s far from limited to that.

I’m not defining it any further than this for now, because I want to engage folks “out there” to work with me on this project. It feels LARGE. It’s certainly larger than I can envision and implement myself. Does it intrigue you? Would you like to join me in creating something that could make a significant mark on the world?

If you’re reading this, then you know how to reach me. That’s your first quest. 

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^* “When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation.” ~Jane McGonigal, “Reality is Broken”