Rob Alvarez
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I Build War Games for the US Government (And I Hate Video Games) | Episode 447

 

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Episode Summary

Eleanor Ross, Creative Director at Expert Theory and one of the youngest recipients of the National Training and Simulation Association’s Top Under 40 award, breaks down how she designs wargames and simulations that put learners inside high stakes decisions instead of watching from the outside. She walks through the moment a Team USA group tried to buy Greenland mid game, the Logic, Function, Form framework she uses to build every simulation, and a year long Taiwan resilience exercise she ran for the Irregular Warfare Center. Listeners come away with two best practices that make any simulation stick, a debrief discipline and deliberate role reversal, plus a clear view of how AI tools now let a team produce news articles and role player materials in under ten minutes. Ross also makes the case that heavy topics like terrorism, invasion, and irregular warfare land harder when they are engaging, and that good design starts by deciding what people should feel when they walk out.

About the Host

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.

Key Takeaways

  • In an early Arctic simulation run as an alpha test for the Canadian Department of National Defense, a Team USA group went off script and tried to buy Greenland, a move no one had prepared for, which forced Ross to build the response live.
  • Ross and her team at Expert Theory adjudicated that unplanned move and used their AI backend to produce news articles, tweets, and formatted materials for a role player in under ten minutes, a turnaround the wargaming community historically treated as impossible.
  • Her Logic, Function, Form framework stacks design like a pyramid: Logic defines what players should know and feel on the way out, Function defines the actors and goals that get them there, and Form covers constraints like the 30 or 90 minute time box.
  • A quality debrief is the most important best practice in simulation design, because the takeaways people carry out are set up by the structured discussion, not by the game itself.
  • Putting participants in roles they would never hold, such as US military officers playing the Somali government or the US embassy in a Fort Bragg deployment game, forces the perspective shift that makes the lesson land.
  • Ross builds her design philosophy on Rutger Bregman’s Humankind and its claim that people are inherently good, using games to surface the nuances behind how opposing sides actually see themselves.

Topics Covered

  • 0:00 – A wargamer who hates video games
  • 2:59 – Inside a wargame designer’s week
  • 4:18 – When Team USA tried buying Greenland
  • 7:45 – Why failure is a junior mindset
  • 13:02 – A Taiwan resilience wargame for DOD
  • 17:26 – The Logic, Function, Form framework
  • 20:34 – Best practices: debrief and role reversal
  • 24:30 – The books behind her design philosophy
  • 26:33 – Perspective taking through languages
  • 29:27 – Making heavy topics engaging
  • 31:12 – Her favorite game: Votes for Women
  • 33:01 – Building games in six minutes with Providence

Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide and see behavioral design applied to real products and services: professorgame.com/WildCD

About Eleanor Ross

Eleanor Ross is Creative Director at Expert Theory, an AI powered simulation startup building immersive learning experiences for clients including the U.S. Department of Defense, Johns Hopkins, Duke, Georgetown, and Penn State. She designs and facilitates simulations that restore agency to learners by placing them inside complex, high stakes decisions, and her co-authored research with the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology and Education Center has shown that simulations measurably deepen learning while strengthening confidence, teamwork, and decision making. She chairs programming for the Women’s Wargaming Network and is one of the youngest ever recipients of the National Training and Simulation Association’s Top Under 40 award. Her work focuses on the Arctic and high north, irregular and gray zone warfare, and leadership.

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Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,
Rob

Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

A wargamer who hates video games

Eleanor Ross (00:00): I entered gaming in a really weird way. I entered it from the perspective that I hate video games, which I know is like very rare in this space. Maybe I should publicly say this aloud, but it’s out there now.

Rob Alvarez (00:12): So, Hey, Engagers, welcome back to the episode of Professor Game Podcast. We are the number one gamification podcast and we discuss how games, gamification and game thinking help us boost things like engagement, retention, and build actually stronger products and services. I’m Rob. I’m the founder and coach at Professor Game and I’m also the head of engagement strategy in Europe for the Octalysis Group, a leading gamification consultancy, and I’m a professor of gamification, game-based solutions at top global institutions, including IE Business School, EFMD and the EBS University. And before we dive into today’s conversation with Eleanor, if you’re missing something around retention, around churn, engagement with your product or service, make sure that we get a chat together or at least that you download our free guide, the Core Drives in the Wild. You will see in that guide how to successfully use motivation in many different business scenarios from our past guests like Eleanor. That is all reflected in the guide, it references the episodes, how that works in the real life, and of course my own commentary from this. So if you wanna have access to that, all you have to do is click on the link in the description. And Eleanor, after that massive pre-chat, we do need to know if you are prepared to engage.

Eleanor Ross (01:32): Absolutely, I’m really ready.

Rob Alvarez (01:35): You have Eleanor Ross today, who is the creative director at Expert Theory, which is an AI powered simulation startup building immersive learning experiences for clients that include the U.S. Department of Defense, Johns Hopkins, Duke, Georgetown, and Penn State. She designs and facilitates simulations and games that restore agency to learners by placing them inside very complex, high stakes decisions rather than just looking from the outside. Her research, including a co-authored study with the National Counterterrorism Innovation Technology and Education Center, has demonstrated that simulations measurably deepen learning while strengthening confidence, teamwork, and decision-making. She also chairs programming for the Women’s Wargaming Network and is one of the youngest ever recipients of the National Training and Simulation Association’s Top Under 40 awards. Eleanor, is there anything that we’re missing that the audience should know about you?

Eleanor Ross (02:25): No, think that’s a really, I know we wrote, I think I wrote that bio and it’s like hearing it aloud is a lot, but I appreciate you reading the whole thing out.

Rob Alvarez (02:34): Absolutely, absolutely. You know, I was reading aloud and, you know, one of the things that I’m reading here is that you were one of the youngest persons to receive this award. And the immediate, like the immediate reaction in my brain is like, oh, now I’m going to ask her how young she is, but then you’re a lady, so I shouldn’t ask. That’s the inappropriate kind of question to ask. So we can just move on to ask about your day, Eleanor. What does your day look like? What are you doing these days or, you know, weeks, whatever you want to go for typically?

Inside a wargame designer’s week

Eleanor Ross (02:59): Yeah, I would say I feel like I’m a broken record. I’ve listened to a lot of your podcasts and everyone says no two days are the same. And I feel like in a game designer’s world, it’s true. No two days are the same. I mean, I woke up at like six this morning. I lifted, I made a smoothie and now I’m on this podcast. But yesterday I worked on an Arctic game for a Swedish partner. The day before I was at Sierra Space Conference demoing our Providence platform. I’m the creative director, so I run a team of war gamers or simulation designers. And I say we’re like researchers at heart, which I think a lot of gamers are, who deliver research and analysis creatively. Yeah, not two days are looking the same, but I say it’s nice to be able to merge like analysis, creativity, and put it into one. And I think I get to do that both days, which is why I really love my job.

Rob Alvarez (03:49): Amazing. Love that. So Eleanor, let’s dive right in and, you know, take a first stab at that question that we love, which is what would you say is your favorite fail or first attempt in learning? We’ve realized how, you know, we all fail in life in professional stuff as well, but it’s one of those times where you either learn and really shift your practice or do things differently. And it’s something that oftentimes when we hear that painful moment, we can really learn from somebody else’s experience, which is not always the case. Yeah.

When Team USA tried buying Greenland

Eleanor Ross (04:18): So when you pose this question, I thought for a second, I thought what do I really want to talk about and I decided on this example really at the beginning of my career in game design. I was running an Arctic game. I do a lot on like the Arctic high north, I do a lot on like irregular warfare and gray zone warfare leadership. I would say like those are like if I would specialize those be the three things I really focus the most on. I was doing one of my first Arctic simulations which I don’t call them war games usually, they’re just simulations in my opinion, for a think tank based here in DC. And this was pre-Trump era, and this is important context given what I’m about to tell y’all. And we were running a game and one of the teams was Team USA. And the US team decided that they wanted to buy Greenland. And this was nothing that we had prepared for. We run what we call immersive exercises at Expert Theory, which is the company where I work, which are much more interactive, matrix style games, I would say, than previous games that you might encounter otherwise. They’re fully interactive. One move comes in, we will adjudicate it with a team of subject matter experts, adjudicators, and our proprietary AI system on the backend, produce materials, and come out. Well, I’m really new at this point, right? So I’m creating and this is the first time someone has gone really off script. No one had thought it. I hadn’t thought about this, right? And I think a lot about a lot of things, I had not thought about the US government trying to take on Greenland. And so I think like in that moment, I personally saw it as a failure of mine, right? That I hadn’t produced these materials, that I hadn’t seen this game through this lens. And this was a like a beta alpha test of the game that we eventually did run for the Canadian department of national defense. So it was a tester. But that moment really made me think like, what am I doing? How can I not be aware of everything that’s going on? Am I not smart enough? Am I not capable enough as a game designer on the back end? But one of the things that really taught me is my team. I think a team is so important with who you’re working with. And my team is absolutely amazing. The people I work with from our CEO, David, to our product owner, Jesse, to someone on my team, Caroline, and many more. We together adjudicated, we had like a subject matter expert in the room, a war gamer, who was the head war gamer, and then we have our AI system. We were able to produce news articles, tweets, format them really prettily, and send them out to teams with a role player all within 10 minutes. And like previously, that is very unheard of in like the gaming community, right? Very static, you build something, it’s your baby. And I remember thinking after the game, like, am I a failure for not having this knowledge ahead of time and having to, right? Like, it’s a little like, shouldn’t I know? I’m having to retrain my thought process and think like, no, these people, this is the beta game. Like, they’re making you think more creatively and pushing you to ideas you wouldn’t have previously thought. And I think that’s what that like first big failure in game is really.

Rob Alvarez (07:29): I have a question and this probably has to do with the way that you guys do things. Even if it weren’t a beta nowadays, after having realized this and realizing that you could produce that, is it really a failure? Like, can you really incorporate every single possibility of what’s going to happen?

Why failure is a junior mindset

Eleanor Ross (07:45): You’re exactly right. It is not a failure. I think that’s like a very junior game designer thing. If something doesn’t go right, you think automatically it’s a failure. I was listening to you, Rob, and one of your things you said, you know, the first thing you do when you bring on someone new is you say, you give them an old game and you say, what sucks, right? And I love that. Or maybe it was one of your guests, but like, I really love that because you want to learn and you want to iterate. And I think whether a particular part sucks or not, or something doesn’t go 100% to plan, like a failure in your eyes, it’s not a failure, right? Because you have to go back to what I call, and I’ll probably talk about here, the Logic, Function, Form framework, which is how we design games and this kind of theory I came up with. Logic, so you go back to the Logic. What are people trying to get out of the game? And if you have made that logic, whether or not the game took a left or right turn or decided to flip to completely upside down and someone was like, let’s buy Greenland. If you’re still hitting that end goal of like what people were wanting to walk away from, it’s a resounding success. So you do need to have that like 360 view where you could step back.

Rob Alvarez (08:58): Amazing, amazing. It reminds me actually of when I was doing my master’s degree, I had this amazing professor who I had met before. So we had sort of professionally engaged together in a campaign. And I actually took that elect. It was political marketing and I was starting an MBA. So I had nothing to do really with my degree. I just took it because it was her and I was very interested in the topic. And she conducted throughout the whole period. She did a, what could be called a war game as well as simulation where you had like four candidates, I think it was, and you were associated to the local political parties. And you were trying to make it to mayor. But of course anything goes, right? Like, and then they said, we launch a campaign on this and this happened. So she had to sort of bring in that information. And then she also connected it because she was also an expert on social media back in the day. So she connected people to creating their Facebook profiles and how the people were interacting there. So it was like, there was a lot happening. And now I realize, well, I kind of already did, but it’s clearer now. Like you have all this plus AI plus this. She was doing this all by herself. Like it would probably be amazing to use your methodology for her simulation nowadays.

Eleanor Ross (10:05): No, I mean, the way I was entering the sphere during the gaming era, I would say, it’s, not sorry, not during the gaming era, the AI era, right, is when I really became and grew into myself as a game designer. I don’t know how y’all did it. I was talking with Rob before this, I’m gonna say y’all a bunch, I’m from the South, but I don’t know how on God’s green earth you guys all did that and created all the materials on the fly, especially your professor there.

Rob Alvarez (10:30): Yeah. Yeah. And it was literally her, like there was nobody else. She has a consultancy and all that, but this was her just teaching a class and she enjoys it like hell. Like we talked many years later, I was doing gamified stuff and materials. We talked about potentially collaborating and making this into something that could be digitized and all the challenges. There was no AI at that point. Like how could we do that? This is scorecarding and all that. And I remember like, this was literally just her. Like if I had my suspicions before, they already confirmed it. Like she’s now a good friend as well. So shout out Carmen Beatriz. I mean, if you’re hearing this, you know, big shout out to all the work you’ve been doing throughout the years with that amazing simulation. Yeah, good stuff. Very, very interesting. And key lesson as well, I think. Where the fact that something has not, like, I think in terms of RPGs, there’s, well, like tabletop RPGs, you don’t have to consider every single option. You have to be able to respond to that. Like you need a framework to be able to know where you’re standing and where you can go once things don’t go where you expect it. But as long as that is moderately true, you can always come out on top as well. And you know, people are going to enjoy this more than the typical other thing that they’ve been doing. So we were, I think we’re still in a space where it’s so innovative that even if it’s not incredibly amazing and you didn’t consider absolutely everything, it will still be like a hundred times better than the typical alternative that there would be for that activity, especially in learning nowadays where I’m not going to get into it. Learning nowadays is what it is.

Eleanor Ross (12:02): It is what it is. We are piloting right now our platform, I think in like 10, 15 different schools where teachers can just create games and run them right then and there. Like I say, if you need to create a game in like 90 minutes, you could create it and run it right away for your students and the responses kids give. From high school to university, it’s just people are wanting something more tactile, right? Yeah. I think people are wanting to engage in like a game. So any version of it, no matter how, I don’t want to say basic, but like no matter what level you’re doing at, people are just gonna be so grateful that you’re engaging them in that way.

Rob Alvarez (12:42): Absolutely. Absolutely. So let’s actually turn it around Eleanor and look at a proud moment for you. Something that actually went well. It doesn’t have to be the first time. It doesn’t have to be the alpha beta. Whenever it went really well, we want to be there with you. And you know, if you feel there’s any success factors that you can share as well, we’d love to hear that from you.

A Taiwan resilience wargame for DOD

Eleanor Ross (13:02): I think my proudest moment actually came about three weeks ago. So I was running some of it is NDA, so I can’t go into all the details, but I was running a resilience and resistance workshop for the Irregular Warfare Center, which is part of DOD, DOW. And it was a three day long exercise examining the before and after of what an invasion in Taiwan would look like. So if anyone here games or does wargaming in any sense, there are, I don’t even want to say how many, way many, many lots of war games out there about the actual invasion itself, right? Is it a blockade? Is it kinetic? Are there boots on the ground? Does the US help? But not a ton actually look at like what happens before and what happens after. And so we developed with Arizona State University and some amazing partners there, for the Irregular Warfare Center, a game that will explore and teach participants about the before and after, right? Kind of train them in these tactics of resilience, resistance, and teach them what works and what doesn’t. This was a year-long affair. I think the reason I’m so proud of it is because my team, I think we have been working on it for a year, and my background is very heavy research. And so it was a lot of fun just being able to dig deep into this. And we ran it for practitioners. We even had someone from like a former diplomat who came out for a little bit. We ran it for students to bring in like different perspectives, professors, people involved in the defense community at large currently to grow the impact. And we expect to run it in future locations as well in the next few months, next few years, hopefully.

Rob Alvarez (14:30): Nice. Are you of throwing this into, you mentioned Taiwan, did I get that right? Yeah. Have you thought about actually launching it in Taiwan?

Eleanor Ross (14:54): Yeah, we’re exploring options now. It just depends on kind of who wants to run it. There’s a lot of hesitancy, right? I think like good games, often our people are scared to run because they’re bringing you ideas. This is uncomfortable, right? It’s saying what happens if China succeeds? How do we keep the resistance alive? You know, saying that it’s like if someone came to me and was like, we’re 20 years, we’ll make it not political for now, right? So we’re 20 years from now, US government fails. And someone came to me and said, well, 20 years from now, what if the US government fails? Do you want to run a game on how to resistance and resilience now? And after the fact, I would say, what are you saying? America’s strong, we’re never gonna fall, right? So it’s a bit of a touchy subject, but hopefully we’ll run it in Taiwan at some point.

Rob Alvarez (15:41): Yeah, yeah, I get it. It’s interesting. I have a couple of friends and well, they’re both from Taiwan. One is living in Taiwan now as well. I didn’t get the feeling that there’s an overall awareness of this whole sort of hovering. I mean, everybody’s aware that this is a hovering threat, but that it’s like very real, very vivid. This is not from back in the 1920s. This is, you know, something that happens every day and you know, economy goes up and down depending on how, you know, it looks like the Chinese mainlanders are feeling about Taiwan this week, you know, and how their discourse and did they blink their eye two times during the last discourse or were they looking in the direction of, you know, Taiwan while they were like, everything is like really matter. I don’t think, I’m not sure. I have no idea. I haven’t been there. I only know from these people and what I’ve read, but it could be something interesting. I wouldn’t say that they’re close to it. These people are, I mean, not run something like super public for sure, but it could be interesting for, you know, maybe private groups even or response teams and that kind of stuff could be. And universities are usually very open to the discussions, but I don’t know. Not from Taiwan. Haven’t been.

Eleanor Ross (16:57): No, haven’t been to Taiwan personally myself yet either. I interviewed a lot of people from there. But yeah, I think like I was just really proud of this one game because it showed the situation from a very different perspective. And like it really brought it to light after years of work, a year of work on it.

Rob Alvarez (17:15): So you spend a year or more, maybe sometimes less. What does creating a new simulation look like? Do you have a process or are there some fixed steps or I don’t know, how does it work?

The Logic, Function, Form framework

Eleanor Ross (17:26): Yeah. So I say, when I’m onboarding like a new game designer to our team, I have what I call the base level Logic, Function, Form framework. And I briefly mentioned this a little bit ago, but I think if you break things down, especially in game design, you really need to understand the themes of what you’re trying to get out with whatever you’re trying to produce. Right. And so these three, Logic, Function, Form, are all kind of working at the same time, but it’s like a hierarchy, like an invisible pyramid that I’m creating for the group. So Logic’s the base, right? You’re asking yourself, what do you want people to know when they walk out of the game, when they actually leave, right? Like what feelings do they want to have? What takeaways do you want them to have? This is a game that’s less about analysis, right? I’m talking about more impact games, knowledge, leadership, soft skill training games. So that’s the Logic. Function is, okay, how do I get there? What actors need to be shown? What goals need to be included for that to happen? And then Form, which I find often, more with junior game designers, but also just like often clients, to be honest, that’s the number one thing they think about. Like we only have 30 minutes, we only have 90 minutes. We only have four days sometimes, I would say. And you need to think about that as well, but you have to integrate it into the larger picture. So those are the three things I kind of stack on. And it sounds very basic, but I find if you pull back to the actual building blocks itself, it makes it an easier game to develop from the start. And if you have a strong foundation, you can really insert all that creativity that is fundamental and foundational to the games I design, because I believe games should inherently be engaging if not fun. And so if you have a strong foundation, then you can include that, like a K-pop group, which stands for in a game we run, it’s the Arctic game I mentioned. It’s not a Korean pop, it’s Kim pop, like Kim Jong-un, because North Korea is a team and they decide to develop a K-pop group. So you can insert other ideas that may be a little more out of the box if you have that really strong base foundation.

Rob Alvarez (19:43): Interesting, interesting. I’ve never sort of seen it through those lens. So thank you very much.

Eleanor Ross (19:49): Yeah. No, I think that like if you have the development and you’re often like with clients, I think you’re pulling a little bit sometimes with them. Like they don’t always 100% know the end result they want. So then I think we’re kind of like investigators, right? Like a good game designer needs to be able to investigate the research and they simultaneously need to be able to investigate the knowledge gaps that exist there too.

Rob Alvarez (20:14): Amazing. Amazing. Love that. So Eleanor, is there a best practice when you’re creating these simulations, is there something that you say, you’re developing a simulation, if you’re not going to do it like I do, which probably is the case, at least do this. And for sure you’ll have, well, almost for sure you’ll have something at least better than before.

Best practices: debrief and role reversal

Eleanor Ross (20:34): Yeah, I think there are two main best practices that I would say. If you are doing a simulation for learning or trying to analysis pretty much any type. First thing is I think you need to have a real quality degree discussion. Okay. If you do a game and people just walk out of there, even if it’s five, 10 minutes, right? You need some time where people are actually going over why they thought about it. For our games, often we will do happy hours after the fact. And these are very professional games I’m running. They’re for government or big clients. And we’ll say, okay, we’re going to do a happy hour after. And people will go to them and they’ll still talk about the game and they’ll have those takeaways. But those takeaways are predicated by that debrief that you set up initially. So that’s number one. And then number two, I would say, is you want to have people in roles that they not inherently would be. So let me give an example. I ran this game down in Fort Bragg, which is an army base in the States, in North Carolina. And it was a game that we created to map what it would look like on a deployment in Somalia and the different actors you would need to engage with. So there’s the AOB, which is more military side, US embassy, and the Somali government. We were running this for US military. I promise you, because I was there and running it, that none of them were Somali military, none of them were Somali government, no one was US embassy. But we purposefully put them in those roles and made the world feel real so they would see it from those different perspectives. Whether you’re running like a leadership game, a more traditional tabletop exercise discussion based or any style, you should put people out of their zone, at least some if not all the time because you need them to have a basis of knowledge, but I would say over half.

Rob Alvarez (22:50): Interesting. Love that. Love that. So you’ve mentioned as well that you’ve seen a few of the episodes and some interviews. Is there somebody else that you would like to listen to on Professor Game? A future guest that you would be curious to hear answering these questions.

Eleanor Ross (23:04): Yeah, I’m really steeped in the war gaming community. So my response is probably gonna be more war gamers. I’m running the programming and I’m the COO of the Women’s Wargaming Network and our president, Dr. Yuna Wong is absolutely amazing. Her perspectives on integrating AI into gameplay are just really fascinating. I think something that could add a lot of interest to your listeners, to your engagers. Or John Curry is, I would say one of the living godfathers of wargaming based out of the UK. I really love listening to him. I always feel like I learn a lot. And so those two would probably be my go-tos.

Rob Alvarez (23:40): They sound like very exciting characters to interview. And also people I had no idea that they were doing this work in this world. That’s like one of the reasons, it of course it helps me as well to find new guests and all that, which I mean, to be fair lately has been less of me reaching out and more people sort of finding the podcast. But it also helps bring in very different perspectives because initially it was like a circle. I was trying to move in and then I went to a conference and got new people. It started expanding a bit, but of course, even in a conference, you see somebody who didn’t know before and that person has a different circle. So that’s just expansive and you really get very different perspectives that way. So I love the recommendations for sure. And keeping up with that, I’m guessing that it might be a book in the war gaming space or I don’t know. What would you recommend to the engagers to read?

The books behind her design philosophy

Eleanor Ross (24:30): So I would say if you’re looking just for a foundational wargaming book and that will give you a lot of knowledge on how to break the disbelief, right? I think that’s one of the things we all try to do in games. Like you want the fake world to feel real. I would read Peter Perla, The Art of Wargaming. Really foundational text. They say like, listen to this once and it was like, if you’re in the wargaming field, there’s three ways you can prove to other wargamers you know what you’re doing. Number one is you grow up doing like Kriegspiel, which is like aggressive Russian military tactics many a century ago. Number two is you played games your entire life. And number three is you quote Peter Perla. So if you need to like do something, you can just read that book and get a quote or two. But the book that I think is actually most foundational to my game design and my philosophy behind all what I do is it’s a book. It’s called Humankind. It’s by Rutger Bregman. And I know it’s like a bit off the beaten track. Okay, but I fully believe with all my heart that this is not a game take, this is a life take that people are inherently good. And we just need the situations and the circumstances to prove it. Right. And that’s what games do. They show you that humans are humans. Humankind for me is a book about breaking down those ideas on what we like, the assumptions we make about each other that I think is that we often see during games when people have to act out another way or, you know, negotiate or talk from a different perspective. And so that’s my like guiding light in game design. When I’m coming back to something and trying to figure out how to make people see the reality and see the nuances, right? When I’m designing a game and I’m portraying China, you know, China does not think they are bad people, right? When, if I’m designing a game from the Chinese perspective, America does not think America is bad people. Right? And I think adding those nuances in and integrating it in is something that has really made the game design much richer.

Perspective taking through languages

Rob Alvarez (26:33): That is for sure. Always enriching with different perspectives is something, you know, you can be convinced or not convinced, but when you start seeing different perspectives, you’re able to really come up with your more honest opinion because now you have more perspective than before. I heard from a friend many years ago that he said, well, if I ever get to have kids, I want them to learn like five languages in the first seven years of their lives. Just because, and especially if they’re very different. I tried Chinese by the way, a while ago. And it feels like it’s like breaking your mind apart because it’s, you know, not only is of course language very different, and then you have also the written text, which is also extremely different. Even some small things like the way they speak also reflects part of the way that their thought is structured, not how they think and it’s not political or anything, but like the way their minds are structured. And from the dumbest things, like you say me and you say me like this, usually in the West we say me, they say me on their nose. So that was my Chinese professor, the one who told me, I had no idea about this before. I was like, okay. Yeah. Like from the most basic things like that, it’s like, wow. Okay. Interesting. I wouldn’t even expect that it was so different. And you start to understand other things as well. Like again, in Chinese, I spent a year trying to learn Chinese and I got almost nothing. But when you hear Chinese people, you sometimes get the impression that they’re screaming at each other. And there’s nothing about people screaming at each other. It’s just that the language includes tonalities. So depending on which tone you’re using, you could be saying a completely different word. So they need to have higher tones as well. Not because they’re screaming at each other, it’s just the way the language literally is spoken. So that just opens up, it’s like, okay, now I understand all of these other assumptions that I had before make no sense. Yeah. I love the whole getting more perspectives.

Eleanor Ross (28:24): No, yeah, I fully agree with that. I mean, that’s my background too, you know, is languages, right? I don’t know if I mentioned this, like we went all like war game coded, but that’s like lived right out of high school. I was like, I don’t want to go to college. So I moved to like rural Senegal by myself and learned Wolof, which is like the local language. And it’s similar. It’s like, like Mugama is like I want, but you say like want I, and like the flip and the nuances in language, whether when I was living, I lived in Morocco and France and all about, it shows you their perspective. And I think that’s what we’re missing in game design often. It’s like you have to be able to flip the perspective into theirs and not see it from your own lens.

Rob Alvarez (29:09): Absolutely, absolutely. And in this whole war gaming and simulations and game design, what would you say is your superpower or that thing that you do at least better than most other people? Again, it doesn’t have to be unique. I would say that, you know, Thor is not the only one who flies in the Avengers even. So it doesn’t have to be unique, but it’s something that you say, well, I really do this better than most of them.

Making heavy topics engaging

Eleanor Ross (29:27): I think what I do best is make heavy topics fun. I was running a really, that game I mentioned that I ran for down at Fort Bragg, it’s a very heavy game. I didn’t get into it, but it’s about terrorism, right? It’s a very heavy terrorism based game. And there was a rapper in it. I forget what we called him. It was a terrible name. He released terrible lyrics and we included the lyrics in the things we produced. We get to the people. Because if people are engaging in the materials more, they’re going to remember it more. And there’s stats, so many studies, if people reach out to me, I’ll send them your way to back this up. But I think making heavy topics feel tangible in a way that is engaging makes them last longer. And so as a result of making them more engaging, the insights stay.

Rob Alvarez (30:12): Love that. Love that. I think it’s, you know, they always ask like the typical question that I get asked and people that sort of start thinking more about it is what can you not gamify or use these principles for? And they’re expecting something like, oh, I don’t know, like death or, you know, burial services or something like that, which, you know, kind of makes sense. You don’t want to make it necessarily fun, but there’s many, many heavy stuff that you could be doing. You know, it’s really hard. I’m not saying don’t do it. You can’t do it. I’m just saying it’s really hard because it also starts involving other things and then culture gets in the way and appropriate politics and being politically correct and all, like it starts just expanding. So it’s a very, very important, again, especially where you’re standing right now in Expert Theory and the work that you guys are doing. So thank you for sharing that. But now I have a difficult question for you, Eleanor Ross. Since you’re a game designer as well, I’m guessing that it’ll be a tough one in some ways. What would you say is your favorite game?

Her favorite game: Votes for Women

Eleanor Ross (31:12): I, so I entered gaming in a really weird way. I entered it from the perspective that I hate video games, which I know is like very rare in this space. Maybe I should publicly say this aloud, but it’s out there now.

Rob Alvarez (31:26): Somebody is going to look for you now in DC.

Eleanor Ross (31:28): I know, I’m like a docs, like you’re gonna come for me, but it’s okay. I’m okay with who I am, right? And I don’t like video games. If I can talk to people, I’d rather just go out and on a walk and talk to someone or play a board game. I do like board games. But I think the game that I like the most is it’s called Votes for Women. It’s by Fort Circle Games, which is a group that’s based in DC. And I played it for the first time like a year, a year and a half ago at Labyrinth Games. It’s like a local place where you can play games in DC and they have war game Wednesdays or gaming Wednesdays and I went and I played it for the first time. It’s like a suffrage movement game and it’s just fun. And I think a lot of games are overly complicated and it’s not an overly complicated one. It’s very intuitive to play. And so it’s something you can pick up really easily.

Rob Alvarez (32:18): So the title, if I got it right is Boats for Women.

Eleanor Ross (32:22): Votes, votes, you’re- Yeah, the scent, I think there’s actually like a woman on a boat on the front cover. So you’re not too off. Like she’s like, you know, like Lady Liberty. Yeah, a little bit. No, but votes like you’re voting for women. It’s about the suffrage movement. It’s just really interesting. I’m a history geek. So many people in the like in the gaming world are geeks and I’m proud of that. And it’s like such interesting facts you get to learn throughout.

Rob Alvarez (32:34): It’s confusing for me. Amazing, amazing. Love that. Is there anything else that you would like to say to tell the Engagers? Of course, let us know where we can find out more about your work, your job, or whatever you want to share with us.

Building games in six minutes with Providence

Eleanor Ross (33:01): Yeah, I would say that one thing I would like to add is gaming is easy in some ways and also so difficult in others. And I think the hardest thing is realizing how easy it can be if you just take that step. And once you see it, seeing is believing. You see your students or your company or whoever engage with it, you’ll really feel the impact and you’ll feel the impact also on a company wide level as they actually improve. So at our company, we have a platform that we’ve developed called Providence to help you create games in literally six minutes. We’ve created or run them in six minutes. You can do that with your company. They’re more matrix like discussion-based games, like I just talked about, but they update the world in real time. Well, then if you have like longer, you can edit it and iterate upon it and create it over like an hour or two or running versions of these. So if you’re interested in a demo or just wanting to hear more about how game design, please reach out to me over LinkedIn. I’m Eleanor Ross. There’s a judge named Eleanor Ross. That’s not me. I’m Eleanor Ross, the War Gamer, or you can reach out to me at my Expert Theory work email. I would love, love to chat about anything game design, honestly, and prove to you that gaming is becoming more accessible and AI and tools like this are democratizing access to it. And y’all can do it, whether with us, whether with Rob, whether with ChatGPT or Claude, you can integrate it into your life and everyone else will be the better for it.

Rob Alvarez (34:29): Absolutely. Absolutely. So thank you very much for sharing all this context with us, for coming today to this interview, investing your time in all that. And remember, Engagers, if these kinds of problems that you’re facing have to do with retention, churn, engagement for your company especially, we have created a free guide exactly to let you know how the Core Drives work in the Octalysis framework. And you can just pick up the guide by clicking in the link in the description, to make sure you understand how you can apply these in those corporate settings for yourself. So go ahead and click in the description and get your Core Drives in the Wild guide so you can do this yourself or understand a little bit better what is going on and why people perhaps are not engaging with your product. And without further ado, thanks again, Eleanor, for joining us. However, at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over. And thank you once again, Engagers, for hanging around after this interview. And as I mentioned at the start, if you are interested in looking at our guide of the Core Drives in the Wild, especially for corporate and business settings, now as a consultant in the Octalysis Group, I have access to some significant and interesting data and I can talk a lot more about the way we see things through the Octalysis framework. Just go to the link below, click there and we will send you an email sequence with all of these cases or drives one by one analyzing different situations and giving our strategic advice. So, Engagers, thanks again for staying around and I’ll talk to you and see you soon.

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