Today I wanted to give you an update of what we are doing in light of all of the lockdowns internationally. As well as all of the loss of business or contraction of business worldwide. Thanks to the same virus. I hope at the same time that you are staying safe, keeping your distance and doing whatever the World Health Organisation or your local governments or both are telling you to do.
The business impact
From our business perspective, it has been, to be perfectly honest, a bit of a scary moment because when the lockdown started to take hold of Europe, a lot of our projects were put on hold. Meetings that were arranged were obviously no longer possible because of travel restrictions and even meeting restrictions. So from a business perspective, this has had a major impact.
Now, a few weeks into this, we are seeing things stabilise. So we are hopeful that things will ease off. And from our corporate client perspectives, we see actually things progressing as normal or as much as normal can be, which, people now established in remote offices, et cetera.
Now, our business has been remote from the start. So, for us, it’s just business as usual in, in some sense.
So we were quite bizarrely taken aback by how much time it took, some of our client organisations to adopt and approach that we have been living day to day for years and years.
Team actions: inspiration posts
I wanted to share with you some of the things we have done and some of the things we are still doing and how maybe they could be useful to you.
The first thing I did when the lockdown happened was to get the team together and asked the question, what do we want to do? Can we do something to cheer people up? Because in the end of the day, in the serious games business, just like in the games business where you are in the business of motivating people, engaging people, and helping people to feel good, empowered and better than they did before they engaged with us or met with us.
So from our perspective, it was important to keep people in that tone and share that message. The whole team actually agreed with me. That’s not the most usual thing to happen at Gamification Nation. We all said, let’s do something nice.
And because a lot of us were affected and impacted quite directly, quite quickly, we started sharing the feel good inspiration of the day. If you followed us on social media, then you have probably seen the messages. But every single one of our team contributed to the feel-good messages.
Now in the feel good inspiration of the day you had a feel good game. A game that our team members used to cheer themselves up of feel-good songs we listened to, to feel better and a feel-good thing to do. Then I put together some cartoons to go with it too. To spread a message of joy, lightheartedness, because I’m sure there’s plenty of heavy stuff going on.
Free resources
What we’ve also done is created a trivia quiz and some fun polls, which could be a bit of fun. If you’re isolated on your own, you can play alone, but if you’re isolated and you’re connected with people, you can play together or even if you’re isolated alone and you have the internet working, you can still play with friends. We created a trivia quiz, a poll and COVID-19 myth busters quiz. They’re all available on our COVID19 free resources page. Test your knowledge, have some fun.
We’ve also created a 31 day learning inspiration calendar, so basically 31 learning resources that you could tap into because we’re very much about learning and learning games. It is a list of resources where you can find inspiration and new things to try and learn.You may have heard of some, you may not have heard of others.
Then we also grouped all of the games that the whole team came up with as feel-good suggestions. So we have 42 games that we play to chill and feel better. If you were short of game, game inspiration, there’s loads there.
I’ve also asked our guys to create a space on this page for free talks and podcasts. Basically, we have a podcast room and a gallery of my talks, which you can click and listen to. Feel free to explore, listen and I would love to hear your thoughts on it.
Our remote working tools
We’ve created some links to tools that we use when we’re working remotely to one of our favorites, the Miro boards, which are online whiteboards, which we use to collaborate and co-create things together.
And then Click Meeting, a online meeting webinar system, which can be used to push to social media as well. So, we particularly like those two. So we’ve added those to our list.
Free to download board game: A Planet called Hope
We have created a board game, called A Planet Called Hope.
Basically you get to reconstruct the world post COVID19 on a planet called Hope. It’s a collaborative board game that you play together. We’re making it available free of charge to download. It’s an arts and crafts project first. You cut out all the pieces, you make sure that you have them all.
Then, if you’ve chosen the black and white version, you may get your kids to colour them in and make them look pretty, or you just play in black and white and imagine the colour for yourself, or you print out the coloured version and use it from there.
We wanted to do it because we keep hearing people being bored. Families also getting to the point of Monopoly overload where there’s actually too many fights breaking out, which is why we wanted to make our game collaborative, where everyone around the table plays against the board.
It is a collaborative board game, which means you have got the play together to win.
We believe it’s a neat little game. We’d love to hear your comments.
You’re basically our play testers and beta testers. By all means comment on the page for the game to give us your feedback and if you really, really like it, we’re also releasing a actual physical version in our store once the printers are open again, and they can print our games.
So, yes, we hope that you stay safe, that you follow the guidelines.
We are very much in line with the whole games industry’s thinking of, play a part together. If you are apart right now, you can join online games. You can join each other through Skype or webinars systems. To connect and play at the same time.
A lot of the mobile applications today are enabling you to do that.
We are open for business
At the same time, we are also still working on projects, we have a few projects which are thankfully ongoing. And, we are working in the background on a major big announcements that hopefully once this whole business of lockdowns dies down, we can put to the market and get people using.
If you have a game design project, a serious game design project or a gamification project, by all means, talk to me.
We are still here to do business. We are happy to work with you, talk with you, and work on your projects.
I hope you get something out of our free resources. And if you do, please share it forward. Please let us know because it’s important for my team to also hear that actually they’re making a difference.
