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Using AI to Build Better Learning Games | Episode 436

 

Have a product challenge around retention? Quick intro chat → professorgame.com/chat

Leif Sorensen reveals why most corporate learning games fail. We discuss the “magic powder” fallacy, where companies try to cram too many behavioral frameworks into a single experience. Leif breaks down his process for building AI-generated learning games at Actee and explains why focusing on the transfer of learning is the real secret to changing behavior. The episode also explores the post-COVID failure of traditional LMS platforms and how facilitators can run better sessions by focusing on player engagement instead of memorizing game content.

Leif Sørensen is the founder and owner of Actee, a global platform using games to develop soft skills and support learning and change in organizations. He works closely with companies, consultants, and learning professionals to design engaging, research-based learning game experiences. Leif is a frequent speaker and podcast host, focusing on gamification, leadership, and how games can make complex topics easier to understand and act on.

Rob Alvarez is Head of Engagement Strategy, Europe at The Octalysis Group (TOG), a leading gamification and behavioral design consultancy. A globally recognized gamification strategist and TEDx speaker, he founded and hosts Professor Game, the #1 gamification podcast, and has interviewed hundreds of global experts. He designs evidence-based engagement systems that drive motivation, loyalty, and results, and teaches LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® and gamification at top institutions including IE Business School, EFMD, and EBS University across Europe, the Americas, and Asia.

 

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Lets’s do stuff together!

Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,

Rob

 

Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Leif Sorensen (00:00)
They think it’s a magic powder that you can spread over and then everything will be solved almost like a wand that you can just put on anything and then people leave with a bigger head and that’s simply not the case.

Rob (00:11)
Hey, Engagers and welcome to Professor Game, the number one gamification podcast where we explore how games, gamification and game thinking help us boost engagement.

multiply retention and build stronger products. I’m Rob Alvarez, I’m the founder and also coach at Professor Game. And I’m also the head of engagement strategy at the Octalysis group, the leading gamification consultancy and behavioral design around the world. And I’m also a professor at top global institutions like IE Business School, the EFMD, EBS Business School, and many others around the world. And before we dive into today’s conversation, super interesting with Lit Leif Am I saying that right?

If you’re struggling with retention churn engagement in your product, writhing, stop struggling. Just let us know what you’re looking for. Click on the button below. Let’s get on a chat and we’ll get you sorted. And as I said a few seconds ago, today we’re talking with life. Life, need to know, are you prepared to engage?

Leif Sorensen (01:15)
I am engaged already. I’ve been engaged for a long time, both in your podcast, but in gaming for like a lifetime. Sure. Super engaged.

Rob (01:27)
Let’s do this because Leif Sorenson, Leif Sorenson, that a good pronunciation?

Leif Sorensen (01:32)
No, that’s perfect.

Rob (01:34)
He’s the founder and the owner of Actee, a global platform using games to develop soft skills and support learning change in organizations. And he works closely with companies, consultants, and learning professionals to design engaging research-based learning game experiences. And he’s a frequent speaker and podcast host focusing on gamification, leadership, and how games can make complex topics easier to understand and act upon.

So life, there anything that we’re missing that we should mention for that intro?

Leif Sorensen (02:05)
I think what we are missing is that I’m actually very, very, very much engaged even more than games in transfer of learning. learning is actually the core of my skill set. That’s where my love actually lies is actually how can we make people learn more in a better way than what we usually do. And games is just such a powerful tool in that toolbox. And that’s actually the…

The core for me in games is actually the learning part.

Rob (02:37)
Amazing, amazing. Love that. So life, if we were to sort of shadow you for a bit and see what you’re up to, what would a day with you or a week, whatever you want to go for, what would that look like? How would we be feeling around all the stuff that you’re doing?

Leif Sorensen (02:51)
Yeah, if you shadow me, you will start my day every day. I start with a stand-up meeting with the developers here at Actee because we are a platform. We constantly develop. We have a developer team and I am engaged into the product development. It’s very close to my heart. I’m also in sales, but I always start with the development team because if you don’t have a product that people want to use, if the product doesn’t solve any problems out there,

You basically have nothing. So if your game is not good, if nobody wants to use your game, you’re out. And game today is for me, it’s not a board game. It’s not a physical, it’s also physical, but it’s not a physical thing first and foremost, it’s an online platform. So that’s where I start up. So where are we going? And for, if we look for the last year back, it’s like AI, AI, AI, AI. It’s like, it’s been a growing thing.

in my job is getting better at understanding what we can use AI for, how we can use it and doing a lot of trials and testing. But it has really spun off a lot of great things into gaming, if you ask me. But that’s my start of the day. then typically I have a team around me and then it’s all about what is in front. Sometimes it’s the…

Business that comes in, also drive Germany as my area. We only have 30 % of… I’m from Denmark, so only 30 % of our income is Danish. The rest is from the rest of the world. So we have people playing from all around the world every day, all the time. So I’m engaged in clients outside of Denmark most of the time. I drive Germany as a market, so I have a lot of engagement there too. But it’s all about games. I do nothing else than games.

all day. it’s whatever I do. ⁓ I think what really interests me in gaming and what have really made the change is how easy it has become to build games, to be honest. That’s what we have been very focused on here. And it’s a new thing. We just launched it in November. So it’s a new thing that you can build a game with AI, prompt a game and a game is there. So that’s the totally new thing.

Rob (05:09)
Sounds amazing. so like, we, we always start also with some stories, right? Especially with the story of what we call first attempts and learning or fail or your favorite failure, however you want to, you want to call it. And there’s, there’s many things that we learn from games and failure and how to approach it as one of them. So we would like to be around you in that story of failure, learn some of those lessons, see what’s the feedback that you gathered that makes you make better decisions after that. How did you get up from it?

I don’t know, wherever that story leads us.

Leif Sorensen (05:42)
When ⁓ thinking about failures, I can point to like a million of failures, to be honest. It’s a super great question. But I think for audience who’s about playing games and in my world, playing games is something that happens in a learning space. So I think I should point out some of the failures that I can see or one of the failures that I can see there and which stands out most for me.

One of them is that when you build a game or when you do a game, regardless of how you do it, one of the biggest mistakes and one of the mistakes we have been also trying to fight for for years is not adding too much into the game. ⁓ We have very often been in dialogues with clients and they have, we work with big corporations who’s ⁓ adding a game into a learning setting where they want people to learn something specifically from that game when they leave.

⁓ leave for some learning engagement workshop somewhere in the company or somewhere around the world. And what they want when they build a game is very often like a thousand things they want in. They want people to understand change. They want them to be great at teamwork. They want some leadership profiles. They want 10 models that they should live with knowledge about. And I think the biggest mistake is actually going with that flow because you really want to do something good for the client.

So how can you actually educate your clients because games is not, it’s a nice thing. It’s a thing you and I know about. It’s a thing people in the gaming industry knows about, but clients, they don’t know about it. They think it’s a magic powder that you can spread over and then everything will be solved almost like a wand that you can just put on anything and then people leave with a bigger head. And that’s simply not the case. So the biggest mistake I think…

we have made and we still are making is that we make games too complicated. We add too much into them or we expect too much of them. And I think that’s, it’s very often that you create a game, you play that game and then you realize this is difficult to understand. don’t understand. is too much.

Rob (07:56)
I used to do learning games at IU Business School in our multimedia department. And one of the main things that was part of my, it sounds like it’s repetitive and it almost was in a way in that sense was drilling down that, know, this, especially the ones that we made were for a session, a session. So this was the, you know, let’s say it was a marketing professor and then this professor realizes, yeah, but you know, this, this situation also is very good for,

financial decisions. So it could also be a finance material and then, you know, an operating and started spreading out. It’s like, that’s all fantastic. And maybe it ends up there, but what is the one thing that they have to leave? That was, we were always drilling down on that one. in that sense, I have many stories I could share about these ones, some of them proprietary that I can’t, but is there, is there a time when, or again, a story that you can share for sure.

of the time when this happened, didn’t essentially didn’t go well, maybe on the first try and, and, especially because when we talk about these sort of generally, we, we, we get the idea of we’ve lived through them, but sometimes the audience has not necessarily gone through the pain of this happening. So is there a time when, when you remember that this happened that you can share as well?

Leif Sorensen (09:10)
Yeah, I can share ⁓ story. It’s a little bit in the same. We work with a big international telecom company. They’ve been a client for, I don’t know, 12 years. And they are constantly using Actee and they have been using Actee for 12 years. ⁓ I think some years ago, we do certification because it’s not, we don’t go out as consultants. We only deliver the platform. We took ourselves away from the consultancy business.

in 2018, that means that we’re not consultants anymore. You cannot purchase us to go out. So we have a certification model where our clients that can be consultants and it can be internal in-house L &D people who then join the certification. And then on that certification, we kind of educate them or give them an idea about how do you actually use GAME when you have people in a workshop, either online or face-to-face. And at that time,

It’s very expensive for getting people in a big ⁓ global company to get them all together ⁓ in the Middle East or in somewhere. So what they wanted was that what was a two-day program, they like to squeeze that program into one day. And they were a big client at that time. I was really, really, really fond of them and I didn’t want to lose them. So I was going along with it, even knowing that doing this,

Meaning that nobody who’s ever participated on this workshop is not going to be able to use games at all. Because at that time it was a little more complicated than it was today. But I went along and I went there, I think it was in Budapest, and not even having 20 people, but having 35 people on such a program. And what was supposed to be a two-day program was boiled down to one program. And out of the 35 coming, I knew, because that’s always the case, that

you might have five people who’s ever played a game before, learning game, so who understood what does it actually mean to facilitate a game as a consultant. So reversing their position. And this is the LND from a global organization. So out of the 35, there was five people who have played the game before. and before half of the day were gone, they kind of understood the game and was really into what did they get out of it as players.

But then having them in one day shifting from understanding what they are about to learn themselves to become teachers was just impossible. And in the end of the day, I had 32 out of 35 frustrated L &D people saying, you’re never ever going to be able to use this game. It’s too complicated. It’s too… And I just knew that from the beginning. And I just knew I should never ever, ever have said yes to… ⁓

to that situation and I was so much right in the terms that nobody was capable of using the game afterwards. And ⁓ I think that is one of the mistakes and I can come with the same story on building the game where we also go along with the client, we have these models, we want to embed them in and we say, yes, instead of saying, you know what, it’s a very bad idea, it will not be possible. I can share stories like that too.

But I think that’s the most obvious for me. And sometimes I’m also trying to practice and as a team, we are together practicing to be honest enough to actually have that dialogue with the clients and say, you know what? It is not going to be a good idea. You are actually going to lose value. And we are short-term thinking if we go along with it, because we are going to lose you as a client. You’re going to be unsatisfied with us. And there’s another…

like a strategic mind ⁓ thing here, which is also coming into play. And that is when you are negotiating the terms for an assignment using something complex as a game, it’s when you are negotiating, you have a little bit of leverage. Once you said yes and you don’t deliver, it’s all on you. So it’s very, very difficult to fight your way back, but it’s much easier to fight your way to the right point in the beginning than it is.

after you have said yes and comply to something that you actually know is not going to work out.

Rob (13:30)
can totally relate to that for sure. Love the story. ⁓ And it shows very clearly when, and it’s not even ethical sometimes it’s not, I did the wrong thing. not the wrong thing. You know, you, you try your best, you honestly try to deliver in those terms, but then following your expertise and you know, the stuff that you’ve been doing and there’s sometimes you’re, you’re backed by science as well. like, well, this is the right thing to do. You don’t want to do it. You know, I understand.

There’s other providers out there who can just give that to you. I can tell you from the experience I have, you can see your case studies, you can see what we’ve done. This is not the way. This is not the way. And holding that position is really hard. Or at least finding a midway like, you know, maybe it’s, I don’t know, if you think maybe a day and a half is still challenging, but feasible, is that well, not two days, not one day, maybe a day and a half. You know, we need a few more hours or we have some pre-work online before, I don’t know. There’s always, there’s always a way.

It’s always a pathway that can be kind of acceptable to the client, but it is true that it’s hard.

Leif Sorensen (14:35)
Yeah,

but I think the hard thing is also, there has been a huge shift in my gaming industry, which is the learning gaming industry. And the shift has been that we fight over time as we do with others in the industry. So it’s not like, it’s not games only. It’s all the learning industry we’re fighting over time. It’s about time that people want to spend with us. And 2000, the COVID pandemic.

did something really terrible to the learning industry because what it did is that it actually allowed ⁓ a lot of ⁓ great ideas flowed into the business. So there was a lot of money, a lot of great ideas that evolved into some LMS’s, LXP systems. And we all thought that the whole world is going to be so happy about sitting in front of the screen and clicking.

and thinking, it’s a nice way of learning. We are all going into the LMS and learn something. And whenever I’ve done a speech, I’ve asked the audience, so can you just raise your hand, any one of you who has been into your LMS in the last 30 days? And you’re lucky if you have 2 % raising their hands. Nobody is visiting the LMS and the LXP. So it was a totally failure of investments into a system where there was no engagement.

And you had to do it self-paced and move on and so on, because you’re not interested in it. It’s simply not working. how it influences how we do today is that you still have that concept. have created amongst ourselves that concept or the idea that we can add so much into a piece of online software. And in our case, it’s a game. And that’s actually, we have to draw back and think of quality instead of think about.

quantity in the learning industry today and in games also. It’s also what we are fighting. And I think that relates back to the story. So to me, it’s about quality, talking about the quality. What is it, like you mentioned, what is, if we should choose one thing that we would like people to live with, regardless of whether they played by themselves, they played in teams or they played against each other, what would we like them to live with after? If we can pinpoint that and go with that only, we will achieve it. And we might even…

be capable of making a little more of that time because we can do a level two, we can do other things with games that are much more engaging than what you can do with

Rob (16:57)
And you know, with all this experience that you have, you’ve been kind of hinting at some of this. I’m guessing that when you create one of these solutions for your clients, you follow some form of a process which adapts pretty well to the platform that you’ve developed, Actee. ⁓ Can you run us through that process? What does it look like?

Leif Sorensen (17:14)
Yeah, the process has shifted in the last year because we now have the AI option to develop games. So basically now you prompt a game and when you prompt that game, you actually choose a model or a theory that you would like them to learn. That means that, and then you decide how many options should there be in the game? What are the scenarios? You could even upload files and then that game comes out. But all of that work was done.

prior to AI coming in on the scene by us, and it would take us a month to build you a game. And we would do interviews in the organization and discuss what are the models that are imagining a leadership development program for new leaders. Let’s take that as an example. So you have new leaders, they are upskilling from being ⁓ regular employees to become leaders of a team. Then what leadership model are you already using in the organization? And if…

If the company is thinking we are using John Carter, not Carter is a bad word example, but Daniel Goldman. We’re using Goldman AI, emotional intelligence in our organization. We like that to be included into the game. And then if we can avoid them mentioning 10 other models and just go with the Goldman model, that’s a great idea. You can add more models in also. Then you create a scenario. So what is the typical scenario? What is the company looking like?

So it’s a production company. It’s mainly for team leaders out in the production. So that’s the context that you describe. So you look basically into the context of the game. So who is it that is going to be in the game? What is the personal gallery that people are likely to meet? And then the next process, which is very, very, very important, is to understand where are the potential frictions? What’s the issues that you’re going to meet as a player of that game? And if it’s a new leader,

What are the typical conflicts that that new leader is going to be put into? Because the worst game that we have done that a thousand times, because sometimes it gets political, is to create a game where you know what option you should click on. mean, that’s like doing the, we all know the compliance training today, right? We all know what to click on. It’s super boring. Doesn’t work. So you have to have a game where you have dilemmas, where there’s really something at stake for the player.

don’t know what to choose and maybe there are six options and those six options, three of them are actually perfect and free is maybe not perfect, but they will solve issues. And you have some reacting positively to your options, you have some reacting to your options. So that kind of friction point is important to have into the game. the process is one, understand the context where the game is going into, because that also ties into this distribution model.

It ties into what the storyline should be. It ties into what the friction points is. And then secondly, you also need to understand how they are going to play it. Are they going to play it by themselves, as synchronically, or are they going to play together as teams and have an opportunity to reflect and discuss with others? So once you have that in place, you build the game. And that was how we did it before. Now, all of that…

All of that knowledge that we have done since 2010, we have added into the AI situation. So now you basically prompt it and then comes the game. ⁓ But it’s built in the same kind of way. You have to choose a model before you build the game. The more context you give, the better game you get, the more it’s related to your context and then you edit the game afterwards. ⁓

Rob (20:57)
Brilliant.

And is there, is there, are there any challenges that you’re facing with, with AI? Because for me, it’s usually, I got, I’m doing more and more with AI. fact, I’m leading a workshop with, with using AI for in higher education, but it’s always a struggle if. I mean, I’m guessing you give it to people who are not necessarily experts at doing this. And the biggest issue with AI as I’ve seen is when you really don’t know what you’re prompting about.

The biggest risk is that AI is giving you some output because it’s a specialist in giving you output, but not necessarily in giving you very good output. If you don’t have a critique or, or, you know, there’s expertise to say, is missing something. It’s missing this and asking the AI to reframe, reframe until you get the right thing. Have you been facing any challenges whatsoever in this, this sort of side of things with AI?

Leif Sorensen (21:52)
Yeah, I was about to say we have faced challenges in all of the elements that you described. All of them, without a doubt, to be honest, because like you said, that is actually the core of the issue, but maybe I should share some of the things that we have solved and how we have solved them. So the biggest challenge we have had is that out of a sentence, you are supposed to create a game.

And that game can be built on different theoretic models and it should give an output of options. It should give you a context. That means that you are a manager of X and Y, you are working in this company, X and Y. So you should have all of that description and the options that are tied down are tied to the situation, the friction that you have. But because we have built so many games before, we used all of our knowledge on

friction, context, all of that. And we tried to add that into our prompt logic, which we have been successful with. So once we were successful on getting a story and get the options, then we had a problem in connecting them into the theory and the model. So each theory or each option should be connected to a specific theoretic framework or specific approach, because after the game, the player gets a profile. So you have been playing this game, if you look at Goldman.

this is how you’ve been playing and the users can add their own theories in. So that was like the second problem. And we wanted it to be dynamically possible to add your own and to choose a theory. So the options and the descriptions that you get are connected to the theory that you have in the game. That was a huge problem, but they were not the biggest problem. The biggest problem were actually the, it’s a game.

And what is unique about the game is actually not how you describe it. I mean, you can take any book and read that. That’s what comes out of the books. That’s what the models are good for. The game, the problem with games is that it has a movement pattern. It gives you points. And in our games, you get points and you have a game board where points are determined by how you move on that game board. And how you move on that game board is also giving you an idea about how successful are you in using that theory that your game has.

That is complex. And the first issue we kind of had was that imagine you build a game, you have five chapters, you have six options in each chapter, and suddenly the AI uses all of the resources in chapter one, or it doesn’t use any resources in chapter one, two, three, and four. And then in chapter five, suddenly you move all the way from the beginning and suddenly to the end of the game.

those problems were like the first one that we needed to solve. And then when we solved that, the issue that then occurs was suddenly we had a game where everything was like in the middle. had, regardless of what choice you took, it moved the same kind of idea. mean, it became, it was such a games that it created like, regardless of what choice you took of the sex, it had the same movement pattern. So you have 10 people you have, you’re trying to take through some specific situation as…

Except like in the storyline, you are set in a place where you have to move somebody through some situation. And regardless of what option you take, it’s going to move almost the same. It was really, really boring. So we had to work with the fact that saying, okay, we have to have some options that are more closely connected to the theory and some that are not that closely connected to the theory. That means that some have to be moving people less and some have to be moving people more. So we have the deviation and the friction between people.

who you are trying to do something within the game are further in front or further in the back. So those problems were like huge problems. And this is, I’m now talking about it in 10 minutes, but to be honest, it took us a year. and we’re not a big company, so lucky for us, we were part of a project with Roskilde University where we were building games for ⁓ environmental improvements in society.

And that actually allowed us to spend that much time on developing an AI ⁓ engine that was actually capable of that. But we used that project for actually building that. It’s called Game for Green. There’s a ton of game on it with Roskilde University. Super, super awesome opportunity for us because that actually allowed us to create a really great engine and with the help of Roskilde University and that project.

Rob (26:29)
Amazing, amazing. know, after hearing these questions in life, I’m guessing that maybe a few names might have come to mind and like, oh, I’d really like to listen to this or that person now answering these questions that I’d like to learn from, get inspiration from. Is there anybody that you would recommend, so to speak, as as a future guest at Professor Gaines?

Leif Sorensen (26:49)
Yeah, who will be a future guest in my space? ⁓

Sune Guddiksen, he’s a professor at the Danish Design School. He is like the person I know that knows most about games and he’s not like limited to game platforms like I am. He’s into design. We’ve done some projects in the past. We did a book together, two books actually. He’s like, he’s amazing. And he is an amazing nerd.

in the game. He’s very playful himself. He’s very much involved in League of Serious Play on Danish Design School. Unfortunately, I have no projects with him for the time being, so I have nothing running with him at the moment. to me, he’s always some of the inspiring persons I go back to when it’s about games.

Rob (27:47)
He is very amazing. Amazing. And in that same vein, is there a book that you would recommend? And of course, why.

Leif Sorensen (27:53)
To me, would be theories about transfer ⁓ of learning. There are some great Danish authors that are not translated into English called Valgren and Ackro.

who’s writing about how do you transfer learning, not specifically from games, but specifically from a learning situation to another situation. And that approach is to me very, very valuable in gaming. If you are talking about learning games and not only being engaged and having fun, but if you want people to live with something, the transfer theory offers a lot of insights into what should you be aware of when you design your game. And that’s also why I bluntly say that

scrap all the noise and go with the one thing that is the true importance that you want people to leave. What’s the really value that you want to get out of the game? That comes from the transfer theory. If you want people to take something from one context to the other, it’s actually very difficult and that has nothing to do with games. That has something to do with us as human beings. It’s a difficult ⁓ skill to actually have and grow.

Rob (29:08)
So in transfer learning any, any particular book is ideally of course, if it’s translated to English, so our audience can read it, but is there, is there any, any book in that sense or no?

Leif Sorensen (29:16)
There

is Robert E Haskell that I think is a good book, Transfer of Learning. And then there is ⁓ Valgren with a W A H L G R E N and AA R K R O G. And they made a book just called Transfer. It’s like a little easy book to get into. ⁓ It’s in Danish, unfortunately. I don’t know if it’s translated, but these two I would recommend.

⁓ They are great books to support the games. If you are new to gaming, of course you need to learn about the game elements. What’s important in game elements, rules, clicks and engagement and so on. How easy does it need to be to win the game? All of those elements. But if you’re not new to games, if games is something that you work with already and you want to think about learning, I think you should go to Transfer.

It’s the most valuable part.

Rob (30:19)
Fantastic. And we get to the difficult question, right? We have to have a difficult question. Life, say is your favorite game?

Leif Sorensen (30:26)
What would you say?

⁓ yeah, my favorite game.

We, I don’t know if it’s an English game, we play it at home right now. It’s called Horse Race. I don’t know if it’s an English game. It’s a board game.

I have some great pictures. played it in the weekend with one of my kids. ⁓ He’s an adult, but he bought it secondhand and it was a hundred percent. It had all the elements there. And it’s basically about, it’s a game about capitalism, which sounds strange, but you are on a horse field and you can bet on horses. So you are kind of, you are given a certain…

amount of money and those money can be spent into buying horses and then you bet on horses. And then while having horses, while you win, you can then buy certain businesses around that horse field. And it’s basically capitalism in the very raw format. And it’s like monopoly times 10 complexity level. And it’s just super interesting because they have balanced what you consider. It’s always like games have that issue. When you start playing a game,

It’s difficult to understand it. You need to spend that 15, 20, frustrational minutes before you get into the game. And that game has so many elements that it made me think, this game is just way too complicated. But to be honest, it took 10 minutes and then you were just into it because it was clearly that you could win. It had 10 rounds, but each round…

were really interesting to try and see if you could optimize something. And then they also had ⁓ enough elements of coincidence because you had that element of turning a card that was a card that could suddenly blow the whole thing up, not only for you, but also for other players. So all of the elements combined game elements wise, it was a really fantastic balanced game, to be honest.

Rob (32:38)
I’m looking it up and I found something. it like a wooden thing where your horses have holes and they’re moving around?

Leif Sorensen (32:45)
Yeah, it’s not wooden. No, it doesn’t have to be wooden. can show you a picture of it if I can do that on the screen maybe. Let me see.

Rob (32:47)
It doesn’t have to be wooden, I guess.

Leif Sorensen (32:59)
It’s a really ⁓ great game.

Rob (33:03)
Let’s

see if I found the right one. Okay. Okay. Derby. Okay.

Leif Sorensen (33:06)
Can you see this one?

Derby,

yeah, it’s called Derby.

Rob (33:12)
derby. All right. All right.

Leif Sorensen (33:14)
This

is like the main board up there. So one is like the main board in bank. But it’s really, really fun all the way through. And it took at least a day to play it. And we played over two days and we left it on the table because it was so interesting to play. And we were only three people playing. So that’s my favorite game for the time being.

Rob (33:34)
It sounds like a very interesting one. Life, before we take off, know, there’s this time is now for you to have any final words that you might have any advice, whatever you want to go for. And of course, let us know where we can find out more about you, about Actee, wherever you want to lead us.

Leif Sorensen (33:52)
I think

Considering using games, for me it’s considering using games is outside of the marketing space. To me, it’s purely within the learning situation. So it’s in universities and it’s within a topic. It’s in organizational learning, it’s people behavioral science that I do my time with. That’s where I spend most of my ideas. And I have one thing that I think is very important is that you consider

using games is super, super, super engaging. It’s super, super, super easy once you have done it at least one or two times, but it’s the one and two times that is the critical moment. That’s the barrier that you need to overcome. And to overcome that is similar to start teaching a new book. You need to read the book point one. And secondly, you need to practice. So because you have technologies,

You should practice, but you should not practice the content of the game. Don’t worry about what is said in the game, what is the options, what the… Don’t go into the content of the game. Go into the context of you playing the game. Understand how you lock people in. Understand how you open up reflections. But do not worry about what people are experiencing on the screen at all. Focus on your own.

What you need to do when you have people playing the game, focus on how to lock them in, focus on how to find the host view, focus on how to find the profile, focus on what questions you would like to ask them. That’s it. But prepare on that and don’t worry about you don’t know the theory or you don’t know what’s inside the game. You have like a ton of examples in your life where you don’t know enough games have the same thing. Don’t worry about that. Ask the ones who played it. you have a group of people playing and…

and you’re in doubt what happened, ask them. It’s them who’s just played it. It’s not you. You will not be remembering anyway. A game from us is like, I don’t know, is it 40 pages long? I mean, you cannot remember 40 pages in a situation where you’re trying to teach somebody something. Absolutely.

Rob (36:05)
Absolutely, absolutely love it. So Life, thanks again for joining us today, for taking the time to share your knowledge, your experience with the Engagers. However, Engagers, as you know, at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s…

Game over. game inspired solutions, how about you join us on our free online community at Professor Game on School. You can find the link right below in description, but the main thing is to click there, join us. It’s a platform called School. It’s for free and you’ll find plenty of resources there.

We’ll be up to date with everything that we’re doing, any opportunities that we might have for you. And of course, before you go on to your next mission, before you click continue, please remember to subscribe using your favorite podcast app and listen to the next episode of Professor Gabe. See you there.

 

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