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1
Setting the Stage
The Emergence of Playful Organizations
Organizations of all kinds are showing a growing interest in gaming, in all its variety. Games have long been used as tools to help students and employees learn about different aspects of organizations (see e.g., Faria, Hutchinson, Wellington, & Gold, 2009). People can learn much about management and communication within an organization by playing an interactive game that models reality. Such âserious gamesâ are consciously designed to be educational rather than purely entertaining. However, the flourishing entertainment gaming industry has not gone unnoticed. Organization researchers and leaders have been interested in how that industry operates (see e.g., Kim & Kim, 2011). Strategies for fostering creativity and innovation have been analyzed and applied to other industries. Most recently, organizations have started experimenting with common gaming principles and techniques (see e.g., Zichermann & Linder, 2010). Scoring systems, badges, and leaderboards have been introduced to stimulate specific work practices or simply make work more fun. Overall, organizationsâ interest in gaming is very broad indeed.
Gamingâs impact on organizations could therefore be profound. Organization leaders and researchers seem to understand and analyze gaming in a very broad sense. The interest in gaming is so broad because people value gaming for its creativity, spontaneity, and enjoymentâall factors clearly needed by organizations today. As sociologist Bell (1973) could argue, in a post-industrial society organizations cannot remain the inflexible, rigid, and boring bureaucracies of the past. Over the past decades, organization theory has evolved, stressing the importance of decentralization and flexibility (T. W. Malone, 2004). Gaming fuels and perhaps accelerates this evolution. As a result, gaming could change organizations extensively in terms of their structure, culture, and performance.
The question remains as to how gamingâs impact on organizations can specifically be understood and researched. Quite a wide variety of expectations of gamingâs impact on organizations can be raised (see e.g., Edery & Mollick, 2008). Consequently, a lot of research on the topic can still be proposed. After all, the topic is simply rather new still. It is also important to realize that the research that has already been done is very fragmented, because the gaming research community is diverse and gaming is understood so broadly. In any case, gamingâs impact on organizations is sure to be an important topic of research for years to come, and this book aims to contribute to the topic.
This chapter argues that an emergence of playful organizations is one way to frame and research gamingâs impact on organizations. A preference for play can subtly yet profoundly transform the ways in which people communicate and collaborate with each other at work. Play can thus affect organizations fundamentally, on a cultural level. As a result, the organization changes structurally as well. The organization becomes highly creative, spontaneous, and enjoyable. The emergence of playful organizations can be researched by focusing on online gamers, i.e., players of online entertainment games. It is hypothesized that online gamers have extensive experience with playful organizations; they create them to be able to play their games. They create organized communities often known as guilds and clans, which the online games enable and necessitate. Gamers do this voluntarily. The organizations they develop thus also motivate rather than obligate. Online gamers show how organizations can be playful. As experts in playful organization, they can offer examples of how work organizations can become playful as well.
Framing the Impact of Gaming on Organizations
Framing is one way to create order in the chaos of diverse expectations and discussions about gamingâs impact on organizations. Framing is the act of attributing meaning to events and phenomena. Frame analysis is thus the scientific inquiry into how a researcher can observe and define frames, what frames subsequently seem to exist, and how frames develop over time. The work of Goffman, a sociologist widely acknowledged as the founder of frame analysis (1974), has been used and built upon throughout the social sciences and humanities, although not without criticism (see e.g., Fisher, 1997; Scheufele & Iyengar, forthcoming). In recent years it has also been used in computer game studies, primarily to focus attention on the problematic ways in which people tend to understand computer games (Consalvo, 2009; Deterding, 2009; Glas, Jorgensen, Mortensen, & Rossi, 2011; Pargman & Jakobsson, 2008).
My frame analysis hopefully enables the study of âhow people understand an issue, and to track the way in which this understanding changes over timeâ (Fisher, 1997, 6.2), in this case concerning the issue of gamingâs impact on organizations. I define a frame as âan instrument for defining realityâ as opposed to âan instrument for describing realityâ (Donati, 1992, cited in Fisher, 1997, 5.4). This means that I am not describing different perspectives on the potential impact of gaming on organizations.1 This would assume that the impact of gaming is a phenomenon that can be objectively observed in different ways. On the contrary, I wish to show that gamingâs impact is subjective rather than objective. The impact depends on how a game researcher, designer, or player implicitly or explicitly chooses to interpret the role of gaming in organizations and its subsequent impact on them. This means, in accordance to Fisherâs definition (1997), that the frames I define in this section are neither mutually exclusive nor an easy fit for any one individual. They exist in parallel, and many researchers (including myself) implicitly or explicitly switch frames or adopt a couple of them simultaneously. They are essentially different âlanguage gamesâ (Wittgenstein, 1953) in which any researcher can choose to take part at any time.
I conceptualized four frames in total. This started by identifying the âsmallest common denominatorâ (Fisher, 1997, 4.12) in the highly diverse publications that I found about gaming and its relationship to organizations or society at large. For conceptualizing the first two frames, the works of Egenfeldt-Nielsen (2007), Konzack (2007), Williams (2005), and Woods (2004) were particularly inspirational. For the latter two frames, the works of Edery and Mollick (2008), Nieborg (2011), Raessens (2006, 2009), and Van Dijck and Nieborg (2009) were particularly inspirational. Reviewing these works, I find that discussions of gamingâs impact on organizations start from two ontological assumptions, one concerning gaming itself and one concerning gamingâs objectives. I treat each assumption as a dimension. This leads me to the four frames. A frame can define gaming as a designed experience or a socio-cultural phenomenon. Thus a frame can focus on gaming as an experience that results from playing something (e.g., a board game or computer game). Conversely, a frame can focus on how gaming is more than an individualâs experience. It is something that can be observed throughout society. It can be viewed as an industry or a frame of mind that serves society. A frame can subsequently define gamingâs objectives instrumentalistically or ideologically. Instrumentalistically, a frame can focus on how organizations can benefit from gaming. Ideologically, a frame can focus on how gaming can introduce norms and values into an organization.
The four frames are essentially combinations of âobject analogyâ and âevent/action sequenceâ frames (Donati, 1992, cited in Fisher, 1997, 5.12). The framesâ basis in gaming as a designed experience or as a socio-cultural phenomenon shows that the frames draw analogies in an attempt to create specific meaning around what gaming is.2 Subsequently, the framesâ basis in understanding gamingâs objectives instrumentalistically or ideologically shows that the frames portray a sequence of events, in this case the event of gamingâs impact on organizations over time. This combination of object analogy and event/action sequence framing led me to name the four frames: experience-instrumentalizing, experience-ideologizing, phenomenon-instrumentalizing, and phenomenon-ideologizing frames. Figure 1.1 presents the frames on the two aforementioned dimensions. The figure visualizes both the differences and similarities between the frames, as discussed in the following sections.
Figure 1.1. Framing the impact of gaming on organizations.
The Experience-Instrumentalizing Frame: Gaming Teaches Organization
Games have been designed for and applied in organizations for several decades under many pseudonyms, notably business or management games (Faria, 2001; Faria et al., 2009) and policy games (Mayer, 2009), as well as the more general gaming simulation (Duke & Geurts, 2004; Greenblat & Duke, 1975) or simulation games. The tradition was first popularized in the 1960s and 1970s with the emergence of systems thinking and simulations (Mayer, 2009). Arguably, simulation gamingâs roots can also be traced back decades or even centuries earlier (Duke & Geurts,2004, pp. 31â34; Egenfeldt-Nielsen, 2007, pp. 21â24; Wolfe & Crookall, 1998, pp. 7â8). Although its history is intricate and debatable, the work of Richard Duke has had a profound impact on simulation-gamingâs development. Duke showed the potential of simulation games by developing several influential games (e.g., Hexagon, see also Duke, 2000) and by publishing the equally influential book Gaming, the Futureâs Language (1974). Duke argued that games essentially offer a language for understanding the complexity of society and its organizations. Since this first popularization, many business, management and policy games have been developed, as well as combinations and spinoffs of these types of games. At the time, of course, the games involved little technology. They were and often still are physical board and role-playing games, at most computer-assisted. They nevertheless rely on high- or low-fidelity simulations of physical and/or social systems. They are known for allowing players to experience a certain system in which organization is required and from which players can subsequently learn. Many of these games have actually been applied in formal education rather than in organizations. Yet organizations have also applied games themselves as part of their internal education programs or to aid managers and employees in their daily jobs (see, e.g., eight cases studies in De CaluwĂ©, Geurts, Buis, & Stoppelenburg, 1996).
When developed for organizations, simulation games are generally designed to facilitate individual and organizational learning (De CaluwĂ© et al., 1996; Kriz, 2003; RuohomĂ€ki, 2003; Wenzler & Chartier, 1999). Individual learning entails training playersâ organizational skills, while organizational learning entails building âan organizational understanding and interpretation of [the] environment ⊠to begin to assess viable strategiesâ (Fiol & Lyles, 1985, p. 804). When focused on individual learning, games are often designed to train players in leadership skills (e.g.,,the game Virtual Leader, see Aldrich, 2004) or specific management skills (e.g., understanding and countering the âbullwhip effectâ in the Beer Game, see Sterman, 1992). When focused on organizational learning, games may be designed to allow players to develop a strategy or policy for, e.g., rail cargo transport (Meijer, Mayer, van Luipen, & Weitenberg, 2012) or for obtaining and licensing patents (Gasnier, 2007). Of course, games are also sometimes designed to accomplish both types of learning objectives simultaneously.
Research into simulation games has been mostly social-scientific, focusing on game design and effectiveness. Yet the importance of simulation in these games has led to involvement by different fields and disciplines of scientific research (e.g., politics, organization, management, psychology, engineering, or physics). Researchers from such fields and disciplines help develop and validate simulations of physical and social systems in the first steps of the game design process. An important consideration for this step is how to make the simulation playable, i.e., to allow people to take on roles in the simulation, and to incentivize them into action (Duke, 1980). After this design process, research focuses on an evaluation of the designâs effects. This question can be approached from a design-scientific perspective, focusing on the evaluation of the simulation gameâs design. It can also be approached from an analytical-scientific perspective, focusing on the evaluation of its outcome (Klabbers, 2006; Meijer, 2009). Put most simply, a design scientist considers whether the design has the desired effect or which design has the most effect. The analytical scientist considers what the effect is on the players or on scientific theories, moving away from the design itself.
A preference for causality is easily identified in the research endeavors surrounding the experience-instrumentalizing frame. The preference for causality is evident from several authorsâ efforts to determine the effectiveness of simulation games in general (Chin, Dukes, & Gamson, 2009; Dorn, 1989; Randel, Morris, Wetzel, & Whitehill, 1992). It is also evident from several authorsâ efforts to develop theory-based frameworks for game evaluation studies (Kriz & Hense, 2006; Tennyson & Jorczak, 2008). These authors have argued that general conclusions about a simulation gameâs effectiveness depend on the researcherâs theory of learning as well as his or her criteria for effectiveness studies. Randel et al. (1992) were much more hesitant to consider games generally effective than were Chin et al. (2009). Nevertheless, many like to consider games as causes of a learning effect while recognizing the importance of game-related factors such as player demographics or the quality of a post-game debriefing (De CaluwĂ©, Hofstede, & Peters, 2008; Kriz & Hense, 2006).
Thinking of games as causes of individual or organizational learning effects reveals an instrumentalistic perspective on gamingâs objective. Games are considered as designed artifacts that create a learning experience with a clear start and ending. A focus on a gameâs learning effects shows that this frame is instrumentalistic, i.e., interested in âtaking effective means to oneâs endsâ (Lockard, 2011). In this frame games are designed as instruments to benefit an organization, once applied. With such an instrumentalistic view of gaming, an interest in causality easily follows. The typical research question asked in this frame is the simple general question of whether and how the games work.
The Experience-Ideologizing Frame: Gaming Activates Organization
In the 2000s interest in the use of games for organization-related learning purposes was renewed. The term âserious gamesâ was popularized (Michael & Chen, 2005), although it was coined by Abt decades earlier (1970). An interest in computer games and game technology for learning purposes emerged following their ever-increasing popularity and continued development. The goals remained the same for many researchers and designers concerned with games for organizations: training relevant organizational skills and offering a means for organizational learning. Instead of developing board games or role-playing games that were at most computer-assisted, some researchers and designers decided to design, apply, and evaluate computer games (see, e.g., Harteveld, 2011, 2012).
The research was subsequently often quite similar in intent (i.e., based on a preference for causality). Consider, for example, Keâs (2009) review of the general effectiveness of educational computer games, finding it difficult to âquantify and synthesize the impact of games across different studies to create a standard effect sizeâ (p. 23). Or consider the emergence of renewed theory-based frameworks for systematic evaluations of educational computer games (Bekebrede, 2010, pp. 116â121; De Freitas & Oliver, 2006). For many researchers and designers the term âserious gamesâ has simply become a new umbrella term for all games that have a learning objective, including business, management or policy games (see, e.g., Woods, 2004).
A new strand of game design and research emerged simultaneously, influenced by what some authors called a critical socio-cultural or constructivist perspective (Egenfeldt-Nielsen, 2007, p. 79; D. Williams, 2005, p. 450). Egenfeldt-Nielsen offered quite a comprehensive discussion of the emergence of this new strand (2007, pp. 13â16, 21â44). I extend Egenfeldt-Nielsenâs work by further framing this new strand of game design and research, with which the deviation from its instrumentalistic sibling frame can be explained.
Several researchers have positioned computer games as creators of engaging ideological experiences with an educational potential (Frasca, 2003b; Gee, 2003; Konzack, 2007; Squire, 2002; Woods, 2004). These researchers argue that games allow designers and players to reflect on, critique, and activate society and its organizations. Well-known game researcher Bogost deems games especially suited to procedural rhetoric, âthe practice of authoring arguments through processesâ (2007, p. ...
