Record week in 9 days 7 full day conference!
18/10/2018 11:51
This week in october, I was dealing – within a nine day span – 7 conference days (including one full Designathon day) with 7 times a performance on stage!!! I was worried and stressed (many might not know, but I used to have stagefright severly some years ago)…. this time I managed to have a lot of fun playing around with the topics of play with the audience. Biggest challenge was inviting people to play, while ‘starving’ for lunch and drinks at the NRC Live’s The Future of Education program, but the mouse did manage to find the cheese, so we did manage to collaborate, even though many were getting up, extra applaus for that audience! The other events were the Games for Health Europe and THNK FSTVL. I learned so many condensed lessons, and had interesting talks, now I need to relax and recharge (plus contemplate)
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Ethics in design (and life)
02/10/2018 15:30
While developing (digital) tools or products for people to use, we always encounter ethic matters and questions to address, we often try to think we can avoid these, and leave these matters to “common sense” however we play a role when we build products… and to be honest, I personally love the thinking process on these topics when we try to innovate, solve a problem, or make a change with new concepts. Thinking of life as a system, looking at peoples behaviour as patterns, and providing people with a dilemma, is what we do in game design a lot.
Via a workshop I was asked in teams to make decisions together in the moral machine… a truly interesting experience to learn more about the person sitting next to you, who you just met, or the person you thought to have known for years… we had to decide one option together, and then see what morals do: The moral machine on machine learning
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as Published in Dutch Newspaper! “Addicted to learning”
24/09/2018 10:54
Since I was invited to be part of the program on the NRC Live event on the future of Education in octobre, I was asked to write an opinion piece on applying play in education for the Dutch Newspaper NRC, the title of the article is: “Addicted to learning” to explore the existing current worries on game addiction and how to trigger intrinsic motivation. With special thanks to Warchild and SamSam.net.
See the original published artikel here: https://nrclive.nl/nieuws/>>
Or for future preservation (in Dutch): Read more
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Apply Play book tour – Visiting Iran at the TGC
10/09/2018 10:49
This summer I was invited as speaker to talk about Applying Play at the TGC, the Theran Game Convention. I was not sure what to expect in advance, but was amazed with the curiosity and welcoming atmosphere I encountered. Read more
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Turncamp festival, who are you, what do you need, and what do you bring?
20/05/2018 11:32
The Turnclub as the aspirations to turn things around via Art.
“Therefore, in navigating a complex world, we need to be intuitive, creative, imaginative, innovative, flexible, and able to respond quickly to what is happening in the moment. Instead of having all of the answers, we learn to be comfortable in the “not knowing.” It helps to be able to see beyond the surface – to perceive beyond the obvious.”
– Alan Seale
At the festival in a beatifull location in Utrecht, Merlijn Twaalfhoven asked me to think of a creative activity plus solution to make people connect with their answers and questions, so we created a wishwall, everyone was invited to write a bit about himself, his context, his ASK and his favorite way of turning. Attached an envelop to collect all aswers and business cards for future continuation together…. 85% of participants of the festival participated to the wall.
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to solve plastic waste • in Turkey
17/05/2018 19:19
To teach design thinking and other 21 th century skills I was invited to do a workshop (similar as we did a workshop in Pune – India last year) at Bilkent Laboratory and International School (Blis) in Ankara Turkey.
In preperation to this workshop, we first gave exactly the same workshop to the teachers of the school on their yearly education day as one of the courses provided. These teachers have different nationalities but very similar passion about teaching kids plus best of all: a critical thinking attitude. So afternmaking them design a game concept plus prototype as a solution to create waste awareness. They asked good question about the process and end-results and the matters around playing. Read more
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Book launch Apply Play to get ahead of the game
22/04/2018 22:01
This friday april 20th was finally the booklaunch of Apply Play • to get ahead of the game.
I want to thank THNK Academy for providing me this location, in the modules, with my THNK class #5 participants, the idea of writing a book on gamedesign was planted, and now almost three years later…. it is DONE.
With the supergreat help of Darcie Goodwin, my super reader-helpers, and finally Rick Verhoog who managed to make it a beautifull product, and off-course the printers: Chapo.team it was a super evening with many personal plus business connections present. Read more
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Levelling level design
12/03/2018 20:53
Once upon a time a team of students at the University of Amsterdam were very confident about their game concept, and about developing their game. It was a matter of putting the elements and assets together. Then I told him to think about their level design… and again they answered to me: “the levels… we just need to adjust these and balance, once we got everything on the stage together”. Read more
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GIST – talking about designing games for a special targetgroup
11/02/2018 22:31
How to design games for a elderly, was the topic of my talk at the Game Developers Conference in Istanbul 2018. I showed samples and experienced, and shared why this target group is so great to use and learn about what a players wants and can do. How to design accessible and desirable games. The audience asked great questions about how to create games not only for entertainment, and how to create awareness on gaming for impact. The organisation was perfect and i received a gentle Thank you note after returning home.
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“The playful wonderland behind great inventions” by Steven Johnson
14/12/2017 18:56
Watch this animation and understand what fun can do….