Recently, I facilitated an online Innovation Game®. The technology just worked and I was really happy with how it turned out. I did a little retrospective and recalled 8 things that I did to make the experience better. Here they are.
1. Write down the question you are trying to answer. You've absolutely, without a doubt, unquestionably got to understand and be clear about the question you're trying to answer. Make this the first thing you do in planning for your game. Reserve one entire page in your planning documents and write it down. I use my favorite 36pt font and make it the first page of my prep documentation. I don't allow myself to get into the fun part before completing this step. Tip: The Innovation Games(R) site has a set of tools and templates to help you plan. Here's the link.
2. Start out with a simple, universally understood image or graphic. The next step in the planning process is to start developing your visual collaboration image. My general rule of thumb is the simpler the image is, the better. My last game was about soccer so I started out with a soccer field. Even if you've never played soccer, odds are that you know what a soccer field looks like. You can identify where the goals are and where the out-of-bounds lines are. Paying notice to these simple but important details can become vital metaphors that will guide your participants to provide more insight and make your game results even better. In the next step you will use this image as the base for your visual collaboration "canvas". Tip: If you're good at sketching, you can draw your own graphic or you can find royalty free images on the web for very cheap.
3. Paste your image into PowerPoint and resize it – right away. Right now, the Innovation Games® site works best with images that are exactly a ratio of 94.13% width to height. Don't worry; you don't have to bust out the calculator. Fortunately, there's an easy way to achieve the optimal ratio for your image right in PowerPoint. The Innovation Games® site looks really good with images that are 546 pixels wide by 580 pixels high. After you paste the graphic in, go up to the Picture Tools – Format tab. You'll see a couple fields to enter the image dimensions (in inches). To get the right ratio, I just enter in 5.46" x 5.80" and voila, you have a canvas to work with! Tip: If you're image looks too weird for your liking because of the aspect ratio, you can search out other ones but in my case I didn't worry about this. The point was, it looked like a soccer field and that's what I wanted. Additional Tip: Invest $49 in the Snag-It program from Techsmith. You can use it to easily capture your PowerPoint graphic and save it in png format for uploading to the Innovation Games site.
4. Enhance your canvas using simple shapes. You want to guide your participants to give you the insight you're looking for without skewing their contributions. To do this, I try to use very simple arrows. Here's the graphic I ended up with. I added a simple arrow on the left hand side that represents a "rise in popularity level". I also added some logos (Tip: check on copyright usage first) and added a callout to give the participants a tip on the kinds of things that would be in that zone. I'm not sure if this really helped but it's something I did.
5. Treat your graphic regions like metaphors. I used the metaphor of "Attacking" equal to "Rising in Popularity". I named my layer that way to avoid confusion during game play. Here's a snippet of the game play interface. Players saw this during the game. I wasn't able to take a screen capture of the game setup that shows the outline of the regions but just by reading the names of the regions and layers, you can probably guess where the regions are located on the soccer field. I named them in such a way that gave the players vital in-game understanding. I think this helped avoid confusion about what the regions mean to the players.
6. Be creative but pick powerful symbols for your item images. I used soccer balls as well as yellow and red penalty cards for my item images. The concepts of scoring goals (with soccer balls) and being penalized (with yellow or red cards) has a strong base for understanding and are also quite inspiring for the game players. I can tell you that in the Innovation Games(R) software, these images are best when sized 27 pixels by 27 pixels square.
7. Develop a script. I've facilitated a few online games now and I have a pretty good template that I use. The soccer game that I facilitated really seemed to go well. Click here to get the script I used.
8. Go agile on your facilitation and hold a retrospective. Here's a copy of the result of the game I facilitated. One of the things that I thought would happen but didn't is that players would put penalty card items in the attacking zone. There was one but I think the strength of the penalty metaphor was too much of a stretch to understand that you cannot make progress by having a penalty when you're attacking. The game turned out fine but I think the next time I'll probably make my item graphics even simpler.
Hope you enjoyed this and found it useful!
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