Abstract
What is it that makes games and play so powerful that many practitioners at the front end of innovation turn to it in order to become better innovators? Consider the risks and pressure usually connected to recommending or suggesting the use of certain innovations. As play will not likely earn a person bonus points if it is proposed in a board meeting, we wondered why people believe in play and why it works. So we thought that developing a deeper understanding of the issue would be relevant both for practice and research.
Welcome to the Service Design Games symposium issue of Simulation & Gaming. Service and organizational design games (SDGs) present fascinating conundrums to the study of gaming. First of all, no clear viewpoint or definition of SDGs currently exists, so they are defined more by the activities in which they are used than by any innate trait or structures (Eriksen et al., 2015). In general, SDGs tend to be more shallow in content than their educational counterparts, while still holding the same goals of knowledge innovation and construction (Hannula & Harviainen, 2016). They are highly effective in facilitating collaboration (Brandt & Messeter, 2004), because they allow participants to share past experiences and envision future ones (Vaajakallio & Mattelmäki, 2014). Practitioners and scholars from role-playing game communities might not acknowledge certain types of service design role-play (e.g., Boess, 2007) as actual role-playing, yet the results of those role-plays cannot be denied (Hannula & Harviainen, 2016). Furthermore, the very shallowness of the design is what enables these games to be tailored so they may easily fit various topics and participant groups (Ehn & Sjøgren, 1991). Therefore, what may be lost in depth is gained in adaptability (e.g., Hatami & Mattelmäki, 2016).
Even as SDGs include some form of post-play discussion and follow-ups (e.g., Vaajakallio, 2012), they rarely feature a comprehensive debriefing (as per Crookall, 2010), Instead, design games are built around the very concept of what simulation/games often seek to address through debriefing. Whereas reflection takes place only after the play in many other games (see e.g., Henriksen, 2008), SDGs are in and of themselves reflection tools. They obviously benefit from thorough debriefings, but the seeds of that process are to a great extent already included in their game play (Hannula & Harviainen, 2016). Their rules do not so much limit options, but are rather meant to give all participants a similar chance to present their viewpoints (Brandt, 2006) and to collectively imagine potential services, innovations and system improvements (Luojus & Harviainen, 2016). Not only this, they have also been documented as effective tools for the transformation of knowledge and for enabling knowledge transfer across boundaries (Sproedt & Boer, 2011). They are able to provide users and facilitators quick, yet deep, stakeholder insight, while retaining the playful and fascinating qualities that entice people to play them.
At the same time as it is efficient, this integrated approach also reflects the fact that many designers of service design games are not academics, at least not primarily so. Many of them have relevant degrees, yet consider themselves people who first and foremost do, guide, innovate and design, rather than research or report. They are practitioners who seek more efficient and/or more enjoyable innovation and facilitation through play–interested more in successful design/redesign of other things, than in publishing research results. This view strongly reflects the thoughts raised in Simulation and Gaming’s design symposium issues “The Art and Science of Design”, 34(4), and “Artifact Assessment versus Theory Testing”, 37(2). The design of games that are created (for e.g., societal change, service improvement, knowledge innovation and so forth) should increase the reflexivity of the actors involved in using those games. In other words, design in the small scale of a game should aim to influence design in the large (Klabbers, 2003). Expanding into academia from practice is a part of this process, as it allows for abstraction and then re-application and re-deployment elsewhere. Theory testing is not separate from practice through simulation and gaming. Rather, in successful design, they each feed into the other (Klabbers, 2006a). This is the process that facilitates usability, the key criterion for assessing successful design (Klabbers, 2006b).
We do see a constant academic presence of SDGs at venues such as the ServDes conferences. The study of SDGs and the mechanisms by and through which they function present their own set of challenges. Providing responses to meet the challenge is a key point of this symposium issue. Service design games have much to contribute to our knowledge of simulation/gaming. Until now, simulation/gaming and SDGs have presented as two separate communities that were destined to come into closer contact and really start interacting.
Several earlier forays have been made in the study of SDGs. On one side, the study of co-design in game development has been documented, often with design aspects in mind; particularly in regards to multiplayer online games (Banks & Potts, 2010; Czarnota, 2016; Kultima, 2015; Prax, 2016). It can be argued that game development has a design games and game design tradition of its own. Sometimes game design connects with the design games community. Design games scholars, in turn, have also formed some connection to game studies research, but these tend to focus more on classical texts such as Huizinga (1939) or Caillois (1961) than on more recent developments (see e.g., Vaajakallio, 2012). In this symposium issue, design game experts have taken one step further, bringing their work to full discussion with existing simulation/game research.
The Contents
The articles in this symposium reflect the practicality perspective, as well as the connections we seek to foster and facilitate. In From Game Design to Service Design, Sol Klapztein and Carla Cipolla (2016) provide a long exposition into two of the key working mechanisms and frameworks of service design games: the service design context, and the way game design, play and attributes relate to it. Using this background, which we believe can also function as a lead-in into the topic of service design education, the authors analyze a gamified carpooling system as a case example. Through this process, they present a Gamified Service Framework, useful for further design considerations.
In Otso Hannula and Olivier Irrmann’s (2016) article, Played Into Collaborating: Design Games as Scaffolding for Service Co-design Project Planning, the author’s explore a third key factor: knowledge construction through play. Exploring the way in which service design games function as scaffolds for co-construction of knowledge, they re-visit themes that are central to learning with games and provide simulation/game studies with a fresh new perspective on the processes with which we work. The authors discuss scaffolding for knowledge, but also for action and further design. As their core case, they utilize ATLAS, a design game which is also a fascinating example of how design games exist on the borderlines of what we might consider to be games. However, these games also function in a game-like manner, inviting people to play and to co-create.
Frederick M. C. Van Amstel and Julia A. Garde (2016) present their article, The Transformative Potential of Game Spatiality in Service Design design games and spatiality. Combining their own research data with the study of spaces and play in various contexts, ranging from simulation/gaming to recreational games, they draw from no less than three experiments – medical imaging, hospital care and environmental education. In doing so, they show how design games can not only help plan future changes and innovations, but can also inspire people to start implementing positive changes in the immediate environment.
The issue concludes with a case example, in the tradition of ready-to-use games often published in this journal throughout its decades. The design board game WORK-A-ROUND, a Simulation Game for Mobile Work and Workplace Design, by Jan Eckert and Niccoló Luppino (2016), is an example of not only a game ready to use (GRTU), but also the ways in which service design and organizational design may converge. By using a game to show how mobile work environments and more traditional office spaces relate, they also examine the ways in which types of play entice people to re-think their environments– a theme one of the authors has also examined further (Eckert, 2016). Like the article by Van Amstel and Garde (2016), it furthermore reflects the increasing trend of looking into not just digital servicescapes, but also their connections to physical environments, architecture and spatial concerns (e.g., Blomkvist, Clatworthy, & Holmlid, 2016).
Together, these works contribute to our pool of knowledge into service design game relevant research. Each serves as a primer into different traditions and approaches involved in the topic and is immersed with simulation and gaming research. The articles of this symposium are somewhat longer than those that typically appear in this journal. This is intentional. Each article introduces their unique topic and results to the readers, but also includes the theoretical framework information that is sometimes omitted from these sorts of articles. This format is used to facilitate understanding between the two target communities. In our experience, service design games are nearly unheard of within the simulation/game, serious game and game studies communities. In turn, the terminologies and long histories of results reporting from those fields may be utterly unfamiliar to the average designer or facilitator of service design games. In order to add to the utility of the articles, we asked the authors to be particularly inclusive of relevant theories and terminologies, so that each of the works in this issue could function as an introductory piece to the subject and also serve as an interdisciplinary bridge between the simulation/gaming fields.
We the three guest editors wish to thank all of the authors who offered us their manuscripts, as well as our invaluable reviewers who represented the study of service design games, simulation/gaming, gamification, game design and game architecture. The review board of this symposium issue consisted of Simon Clatworthy, Sebastian Deterding, Juho Hamari, Juha Kronqvist, Timo Lainema, Jung-Joo Lee, Tuuli Mattelmäki, Satu Miettinen, Kimmo Oksanen, Allan Owens, Elizabeth Sanders, Steffen P. Walz and Harald Warmelink. Their expert advice was crucial in selecting and refining these works, and enabled the assessment of all potential contributions from both service design and educational gaming perspectives. We are extremely grateful for their participation in this important cross-over between simulation/game and design game studies. We hope you will find the contents illuminating and inspiring, for both practical work and for further research.
This issue also includes two non-symposium articles. In The Gamer Response and Decision Framework Sam von Gillerm (2016) draws on both recreational play and simulation/gaming research, providing a framework tool for observing game features and gameplay choices and experiences relating to them. Ana M. Codita’s Integrating an Immigration Law Simulation Into EAP Courses (2016), in turn, shows the usefulness of using a simulation/game as part of an academic English course.
Footnotes
Author Biographies
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