39 Strategic Lessons for Creating Great Nonprofit Games

After my last Nonprofits Life event on Gaming our social media team at TechSoup received many questions and requests — I am constantly speaking with leaders who are playing on this field and sorting out the new rules of whatever game we’re playing this week.

I learned so much while hosting this session with Josephine Dorado (JD), Barry Joseph (BJ), Michelle Byrd (MB) and Ben Stokes (BS) that I (EH) shared highlights and lessons learned below. To see the slidecast click Nonprofits Live! GAMES

STRATEGIC GAME DESIGN LESSONS FOR NONPROFITS

GAME AUDIENCES:

1. Games are a $60 billion global industry (MB)
2. 55% of gamers are now playing on their handheld mobile devices (JD)
3. The average gamer is 37 years old and almost half are women (JD)
4. 97% of teenagers in America play games (MB)
5. 60% of casual gamers are women (MB)

DESIGN PROCESS:

1. Think about your intended audience first when creating a social impact game (MB)
2. Games structure participation in vital civic actions like voting, budgeting, advocacy, movement-building, solving major challenges and simulations for disaster preparedness (BS)
3. Carefully consider context, how and where people will engage with you and why (MB)
4. Set goals with impact objectives including metrics of success (MB)
5. Determine the technology platform after designing for audience, context and impact goals (MB)
6. Experiences that include inspiration, incubation, play and refinement allow for creating new ways to play together in collaboration (JD)
7. Understand your role in working with professionals, game studios, designers and development team (MB)
8. Hard Fun = the challenge, strategy may lead to failure, learning and eventually success and innovation (JD, quoting Nicole Lazzaro)
9. Budgets range widely on nonprofit game projects – corporate entities, educational foundations, learning networks with innovative projects (BJ)

HOW TO DESIGN:

1. 4K2F.com keys include blissful productivity, the social fabric, urgent optimism and epic meaning (JD quoting Nicole Lazzaro and Jane McGonigal)
2. A dynamic design team will include developers, designers, artists, strategists, community builders, researchers and studies on the success or impact created through gameplay (MB, EH)
3. Real world games include game dynamics for civic learning, play and performance and crowdsourcing social change (BS)
4. Games are systems of interaction and human activity – it works for some things and defining the question of what you’re trying to do is essential for success (BS)
5. Live social actions in gameplay include scavenger hunts, games connected to events, crowdsourcing energy for new actions (EH, BS)
6. Nonprofits are able to create new systems through gameplay and strategic design (MB)
7. Designing games as rehearsals for the future includes a clear call to response and ask for the audience to participate (BS, EH)
8. Games are now an integral component of communication and engagement strategy for nonprofits (MB)
9. Nonprofits often default to games as communication strategy but this is just the beginning – we can create mass motivation to participate in civic life through gameplay (BS)

EXAMPLES:

1. Macon Money is one example of a game that creates an alternative currency for real world exchanges in the physical world, similar to economic stimulus (BS)
2. Farmville and FoldIt (showing the architecture of the AIDS virus) are related in terms of collaboration = crowdsourcing solutions through social play (JD)
3. Half the Sky, a game in design, is based on Nick Kristof’s bestseller based on social issues in the developing world including virtual goods that tie in with real world goods and actions (MB)
4. Geocaching allows players to find treasure in nature and map our actions through existing tools like Foursquare, Instagram, QR code readers and AR tools like Layar (JD)
5. ARIS is used for designing local, geolocative games at Global Kids connected to libraries and schools to talk about the history and issues in their community (BJ)
6. Transmedia storytelling is shining through projects like Breakthrough: America 2049, an ARG in Facebook that allows for various types of gameplay
7. Scratch and Game Salad are DIY game tools available for creating games with kids (JD)

RESOURCES:

1. To try your hand at game design try the Grow a Game Cards (BS)
2. Visit http://www.nonprofitgames.org to see our wiki of resources including everything featured in this blog post, Causebuilding Games extensive slidedeck and professional connecting points (JD, EH)
3. Games for Change started emerging in 2004 with Barry Joseph, Ben Stokes and a dynamic development group now led by Michelle Byrd and Asi Burak (BS)
4. Civic Tripod for Mobile & Games: Activism, Art & Learning by Ben Stokes is published in the International Journal of Learning and Media (BS)
5. Go to the GamesforChange toolkit to find a full interactive guide to get started in game design (MB & G4C)
6. Gamestar Mechanic is one game where kids can design in-game around social issues including the Playing for Peace and Media and You challenges (BJ)
7. HungerCraft explores social inequality using MineCraft as a way to rebuild the world in a game jam event (BJ)
8. Trackables used in geocaching games are being used to discover opinions on issues related to the 2012 elections (BJ)
9. Visit olp.globalkids.org has full details on the Global Kids blog about youth-created projects (BJ)

Ask your questions on games and design for nonprofits today at the TechSoup Forums, or hop over to request great products like Adobe CS6 that can help you design great games from your office.

Our next live video episode of Nonprofits Live will happen the third week of July on strategic cloud service navigation and we also invite you to join our event on hosting great Nonprofit Events with Social Media for Nonprofits and Eventbrite on June 20th at 11AM PST.

Filling in the gaps: Tekfarms

Learn more in our upcoming postst about our journeys and desire to create integrated networks of knowledge for microgeneration systems and safe sustainable practices at the home, village and community level.  We are currently meeting with partners in Los Angeles and worldwide capable of building new villages with sustainable power, food and lifestyle systems that can grow new opportunities in many climates.

From Amoration’s Tekfarms wiki:

Currently half of the people on this planet die of poverty, because they do not have basic access to resources.  * Starvation and food/water borne diseases  * Smoke inhalation from indoor cooking fires. Simple things contribute to over 30 million deaths a year.

Open technology can prevent half of global death — can we prevent several holocausts a year by sharing open technology?

Here’s to an interesting life!  http://ping.fm/Tf7vA (a test of Ping.FM broadcasting)

Foundation of Amoration

Code of Ethics for Spiritual Guides (quoted by copyright from Council on Spiritual Practices)

[Preamble] People have long sought to enrich their lives and to awaken to their full natures through spiritual practices including prayer, meditation, mind-body disciplines, service, ritual, community liturgy, holy-day and seasonal observances, and rites of passage. “Primary religious practices” are those intended, or especially likely, to bring about exceptional states of consciousness such as the direct experience of the divine, of cosmic unity, or of boundless awareness.

In any community, there are some who feel called to assist others along spiritual paths, and who are known as ministers, rabbis, pastors, curanderas, shamans, priests, or other titles. We call such people ‘guides’: those experienced in some practice, familiar with the terrain, and who act to facilitate the spiritual practices of others. A guide need not claim exclusive or definitive knowledge of the terrain.

Spiritual practices, and especially primary religious practices, carry risks. Therefore, when an individual chooses to practice with the assistance of a guide, both take on special responsibilities. The Council on Spiritual Practices proposes the following Code of Ethics for those who serve as spiritual guides.

1. [Intention] Spiritual guides are to practice and serve in ways that cultivate awareness, empathy, and wisdom.
2. [Serving Society] Spiritual practices are to be designed and conducted in ways that respect the common good, with due regard for public safety, health, and order. Because the increased awareness gained from spiritual practices can catalyze desire for personal and social change, guides shall use special care to help direct the energies of those they serve, as well as their own, in responsible ways that reflect a loving regard for all life.
3. [Serving Individuals] Spiritual guides shall respect and seek to preserve the autonomy and dignity of each person. Participation in any primary religious practice must be voluntary and based on prior disclosure and consent given individually by each participant while in an ordinary state of consciousness. Disclosure shall include, at a minimum, discussion of any elements of the practice that could reasonably be seen as presenting physical or psychological risks. In particular, participants must be warned that primary religious experience can be difficult and dramatically transformative.Guides shall make reasonable preparations to protect each participant’s health and safety during spiritual practices and in the periods of vulnerability that may follow. Limits on the behaviors of participants and facilitators are to be made clear and agreed upon in advance of any session. Appropriate customs of confidentiality are to be established and honored.
4. [Competence] Spiritual guides shall assist with only those practices for which they are qualified by personal experience and by training or education.
5. [Integrity] Spiritual guides shall strive to be aware of how their own belief systems, values, needs, and limitations affect their work. During primary religious practices, participants may be especially open to suggestion, manipulation, and exploitation; therefore, guides pledge to protect participants and not to allow anyone to use that vulnerability in ways that harm participants or others.
6. [Quiet Presence] To help safeguard against the harmful consequences of personal and organizational ambition, spiritual communities are usually better allowed to grow through attraction rather than active promotion.
7. [Not for Profit] Spiritual practices are to be conducted in the spirit of service. Spiritual guides shall strive to accommodate participants without regard to their ability to pay or make donations.
8. [Tolerance] Spiritual guides shall practice openness and respect towards people whose beliefs are in apparent contradiction to their own.
9. [Peer Review] Each guide shall seek the counsel of other guides to help ensure the wholesomeness of his or her practices and shall offer counsel when there is need.

This draft for public comment was released 10 August 2001. The current version is available on the Internet at http://www.csp.org.

Copyright © 1995 – 2001 Council on Spiritual Practices

Permission is given to reprint this Code, provided that the text is reproduced complete and verbatim, including the and this notice of limited permission to reprint.

Thanks to Formless Mountain for the graphic.

the search begins

Ever feel like there’s no place for you in this world?
I think it’s time to start building a place, somewhere.

If anyone has available land, let me know.