Rob Alvarez Bucholska
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How to Win at the Game of Life (Without Playing by the Rules) | Episode 406

 

If you feel like your inner explorer’s been benched for too long… you’re not alone. We’re rebuilding new learning quests inside a Skool group. Might be your next side quest. 🎯 professorgame.com/freecommunity-web

Education wasn’t built to empower—it was built to control. In this episode, Rob Alvarez breaks down how education evolved into a grind loop and how we can flip the system using gamification. If you’ve ever felt like your inner explorer got benched, this one’s for you.

Rob is a host and consultant at Professor Game as well as an expert, international speaker and advocate for the use of gamification and games-based solutions, especially in education and learning. He’s also a professor and workshop facilitator for the topics of the podcast and LEGO SERIOUS PLAY (LSP) for top higher education institutions that include EFMD, IE Business School and EBS among others in Europe, America and Asia.

 

Links to episode mentions:

 

Lets’s do stuff together!

Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,

Rob

 

Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Rob Alvarez (00:00)
We used to learn and work through play, exploration, curiosity. Today, kids sit still, memorize facts, and ask for permission to go to the bathroom. Research shows this isn’t failure. It’s actually design. But what if we could flip it? I’ll show you how to reclaim joy in learning, work, and life using strategies inspired by games.

So let’s start by making a quick analysis of actually where has education come from so that we can at least understand it a little bit better. And this is what Peter Gray does in the article that I link below. makes a brief history of education. Prehistoric, times learning was freeform, intuitive exploration, quests. Kids were learning and playing simultaneously all the time.

And if you ask me, adults were doing exactly the same. You were hunting, gathering, and you were learning about this in a relatively safe environment for kids, because the adults were there to make sure these things were working, Just to keep them kind of safe, not super safe, kind of safe. They were constantly playing, role playing, trying out things. All the stuff that they got to learn was through that. They didn’t sit them down, put them…

in rows to explain to them how to hunt rabbits, deer, or whatever it is that they did, or which were the plans to pick up. They went out there and they did those things and they explored and they managed new ways to do that because they had the space to do that. They were not asking for permission or saying which is the right or the wrong answer. They would have never figured out new ways to feed had they never tried them out and you know, some experiments and failed experiments.

along the way. Children were natural explorers in their skill tree of learning. So they had a skill tree, just like in games that you have these many games that you have these skills trees that you’re developing. was recently playing the Witcher. You have all these skills that you’re developing. In the Witcher. You kind of click buttons and get there and do some of that work in life. You’re actually doing that. Even if you don’t acknowledge that that is happening right now. And if, if you feel like your inner explorer has been

benched for way too long. You’re not alone. I’m building learning quests inside our community. You can find that also on the links below. This might be your next side quest, but let’s keep on moving. When did this start changing? According to the article, I’m not an expert in history, but it sounds to be pretty legit and some research behind it. You know, Peter Gray has done a good job at that. Agriculture later industry.

made it such that instead of being in that hunter gatherer, small groups, things needed to work slightly differently. Hunting and gathering was active, essentially daily activity that could be interesting. It changed every day. Whereas with the start of our agriculture and later industrialization, these tasks were a lot more boring. when you do agriculture in general, you might find agriculture to be

inspiring and exciting, but it’s not something like very active. It’s not something you just, you go around and do stuff. It’s usually you, I’m very broadly generalizing this and don’t get me wrong, but it’s, in very general terms, you plant the seeds, kind of take care of those things. There’s a lot of labor, a lot of work that you have manual. You have to do things over and over and over again, the exact same thing again, quote unquote, do it right so that you get the result that you want.

weeks, months, sometimes even years after you planted that seed. So you don’t get very fast feedback. You have a very repetitive job that needs to be done. And it’s not very fun in general, for most people at least. that’s where you needed to cater as far as learning. It needed to cater for something different. It was not about learning and exploring the world and seeing where were your interests and what you could be good at, where you were interested in doing in your relatively small tribe.

within that, relatively safe environment, now you have to do agriculture. This is inserted, he talks about other things like the social status and all that, and that’s all fine and good, but it doesn’t serve what we’re building right here. And then came industrialization. If you think, you know, agriculture has that sort of one right after another, imagine factories. What do you do in a factory? In a coal mine, it’s a repetitive,

heavy work thing. And guess what? And you can look this up and you can even see novels written just about this topic. Who were the workers? They were kids, very young kids who instead of being out there playing, exploring, learning how to do whatever it is that they were to do when they were to grow up, they were forced labor. They were the closest thing to a slave in those times

this was literally forced labor. They never said, ⁓ I am five years old. What I want to do right now is go inside that coal mine, fill my lungs with all these toxic things that it can be, stop playing, just listen to these overlords that are telling me.

what to do so that I can extract some value and then feed my family. They’re not thinking about these things. Trust me, my daughter’s two and a half years old. I am a hundred percent sure that that is not what she’ll be thinking when she’s five, seven, ten, et cetera. For a while, she’s not even going to consider those things and that’s fine. They have learning space for all of that. Today, translate that to today and many things have happened. And again, the article is super interesting. It’s long, but it’s super interesting.

How does schooling look like today? What does it train people for? What are those skill checks that they were checking for? It’s about compliance, just like in agriculture and in those child labor, forced labor back in those days. what has changed? The system is essentially, of course, he talks about how education was.

you know, they were hitting kids and all that stuff. that’s been sort of the physical abuse part has been stripped away. I would say, if not entirely, almost entirely, or at least in most places, the emotional and psychological abuse. Well, in a significant part, if you start considering it the way that I’m discussing, you could still argue that a lot of it is also that part of, again, that abuse of

the capabilities and the things that they should actually be doing, what their bodies and their minds are created for, the way and the place how they thrive. I am not targeting specific educators and individuals who are within the system. Honestly, like me, I am a professor at a university and I understand all these things and some of them oftentimes I actually have to do. But instead of building for skills, skills that are useful out there, it’s about compliance, about memorizing.

Usually, most of the time, it’s not about, you came up with an amazing answer that actually fits another model or that’s actually interesting. I had never thought about it that way. It’s, uh-uh, that’s not what we said in class. The right answer is this one. You’re checking for compliance, memorization, regurgitation. What happens after that? All you do is forget. They’re training us to follow the instructions without deviation, which works again, quote unquote, amazingly for

those forced labor industrial workers, kids back in the day, maybe for agriculture in some ways, raise your hand to speak, ask for permission to go to the toilet. These are not checkpoints. They’re obedience checks. We’re checking for their obedience and their compliance. most of us pass not by becoming smarter, not by learning all of these amazing skills that we will actually be needing in life and work, et cetera, but by learning how to look like

were playing that game the right way. And Peter Gray puts it bluntly. He says, schools weren’t designed to educate free thinkers. They were designed to mold obedient workers. The system rewards conformity over curiosity, standardization over self-direction. That’s why creativity and autonomy often get punished instead of praised. The system didn’t fail you, it did what it was built to do. That hits.

That hits really hard, at least for me, especially now having a very young daughter as I do. So, at the next level, what are those sub bosses today, the common core? It still applies all those grinding reward punishment loops.

Gray talks about how learning is naturally driven by all this curiosity.

by play, those are our default motivators. But then you add grades as external rewards, punishments for, divergence, whatever that looks like. You you stand up too much, ADHD, give them a pill. you didn’t raise your hand for speaking, or you gave me an answer, which actually might have even been a thoughtful thing. you can look at the thought process happening while they’re thinking, it’s not the right answer. What I said is you had to memorize this, you didn’t say this, you said something else that honestly sometimes might even be as correct.

It didn’t say the thing that you’re supposed to schedules that ignore the natural rhythms. They have no say in what or how they learn. Basically, we’re activating the opposite of play, which again is the natural way of us to learn. We’re creating a grind loop. Grinding, grinding, grinding, grinding, grinding. I was very good at the game of school.

Don’t get me wrong, I managed to play that game very well. That did not necessarily mean that I was great at using my skills in real life after that. Psychologists talk about this in terms of shifting the intrinsic motivation that we have becomes shifted through extrinsic rewards. So instead of being motivated by something that intrinsically motivates us,

We’re trained to start ignoring all those internal, those intrinsic motivations to learn, to create through play and exploration and our curiosity. Those are slowly being beaten down over and over again. gamers’ll know this and it’s as when the XP grind stops being fun.

and it actually starts being soul crushing. The loop breaks, you lose your why. When you do that in a game, drop the game, that’s it, no big deal. What about when that is about the next 18 years of my education or the next 10 years, five years, whatever you have left within the formal education system? Burnout sets in. It’s not because you’re lazy, it’s because your agency has been stripped.

And this happens during school and after school in our jobs, in our workplaces. Then we are required some things that school did not teach us we can discuss that later. But all that creativity, all that exploration, all that curiosity that we do need in our jobs and to create a better world essentially through products, through private enterprise or public enterprise, NGOs, all of that that we need, we’ve been holding it down for years.

And it’s not like it suddenly explodes and it’s there. We’ve been trained to keep it down and our brains are trained to keep down. We act like the kids are disengaged. Maybe they’re just exhausted from pretending to care for these quests that they never chose.

That hits hard. All the reflections that I was doing while I was reading the article, they started hitting me over and over again. So how about we start reclaiming our game? Play, autonomy, community. There are many strategies that we can do. There’s things, know, unschooling, let’s grow. Like there’s many things that could happen, but this is not always accessible for anyone. But there are things that we can actually learn from all those strategies.

We can use autonomy choice boards, so to speak. We can build many skill trees. We can let our students, ideally the kids, so that they start building that muscle over again. Choose from a menu of tasks. Potentially they even have the same outcomes, but they get to decide their own path. This taps into their autonomy and lets them follow their own curiosity, which is that thing that we’ve been pushing down.

for centuries on kids with different levels and different ways. Today it’s kinder, but again, the problem is it has the same objectives. Project-based learning, quest lines are a completely separate world from what we know like these worksheets, You can turn units into challenges, real world impact, designing a game, running a campaign, building a product, the quests become the actual curriculum.

We start building and understanding that it goes from that. And again, it’s not about changing the whole educational system. You as an individual can start doing these things for your students. if you’re already not a kid like me, this is something you can start building on for yourself. Gamified work cycles, XP loops for adults. You can use this in teams and communities, sprints, badges, boss battles and milestones, checkpoints.

These things that feel like you’re gaining momentum, it’s not about micromanagement and somebody telling you what to do in every single step. Because if you haven’t found this out yet, you don’t have a micromanager out there in life telling you what is your next best step, the next best thing for you. Very few are going to get that insight into somebody giving you that exactly for you. That is something you have to figure out yourself. It’s part of growing up in a way and adulting.

You are required to do that. That is part of what you do. You can get mentors and all this and that again, starts building into what games are great at doing. Strategies like risk recess, inspired by it again, let grow. You can give kids and ourselves, I remember I always talk about the example. I still, I’m still trying to figure out if you know, please let me know in the comments why Google’s 10 % time disappeared. They had some time for people to do this.

Risk recess, this thing of unstructured time to explore, build things in Google, in the case of kids, even just to be bored. No agenda. And even if your kid is going to school formal and all these things, they also get out of school and it is important to give them time for this. Be bored, have no agenda. This strengthens their self-directed muscle and leads to surprise innovation.

you will be excited, you will be amazed by the things that they’re able to come up with. And then things that are as simple as reflection routines. it’s about having an experience and then reflecting what are the things that you learned from that. This sometimes happens in games and they give you sort of that point, oh, you gained this new, and then they sort of explain it to you, or then they give you a boss fight to use the skills that you learn. So it’s sort of directly,

motivated, you can do this for yourself, After project a unit, what did you learn? What were you surprised by? What would you differently? Reinforces learning as a feedback loop. It’s not about the final grade. It’s about the process you were into. And yes, maybe you still have to put grades, but grades are just a number out there. It’s an extrinsic reward out there. How about that thing that I’m motivated by?

Rob Alvarez (15:17)
What would your day look like if you followed curiosity instead of instructions?

Imagine replacing that grinding with growth, that control with actual cooperation.

If this hits close to home, maybe you’re already sensing it’s time to play a different game. I’m exploring this with other builders, gamers, and rebels inside of our community. This might be your next side quest. If so, go ahead and click on the link in the description.

 

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