Gaming is fun, right? Playing is so beautiful and interesting. Do you remember how it felt like in your younger days? To really get immersed in a game? Forgetting time and space around you? Getting into a beautiful flow?
But many people and mostly adults (from the industrial age) would say “playing” is just a free-time activity. Playing is not work. Playing makes no sense at all in business or professional contexts. Poor old-minded hard-working grumpy people. And they are totally wrong.
The psychologist Brian Sutton-Smith once said
“The opposite of play is not work. It’s depression.“
I think gaming is a key to make things happen even if you are an adult. Gaming even helps you to get better, faster and stronger in every creative and even uncreative activity you make. Gaming helps you to learn and get things done faster and it even helps you to gain fun out of otherwise daunting, routine or compulsory tasks. Gaming is a natural process of human development. We are all “Homo Ludens“.
We, the lecturers, staff and students of Karlshochschule International University strongly believe in the method of learning by playing. Well, sometimes you still have to learn boring, dry facts, but even this could be more fun if you know the right tools to make them more exciting. So we at Karlshochschule try to implement as many gamification elements into our study programs as possible. Sometimes it really works. Sometimes we have to work much harder on that. But anyway, one project in particular has always been very exciting to host and play, for many years now. It’s the international management game “Emerald Forest”. Especially our International Tourist Management students play this exciting and intense game – which is a combination of “internet-based simulation” and “live-role-play” – for one week. And it always seems to be incredible.
This graphic (made by Isabella Blatter, student of Arts and Cultural Management at Karlshochschule) shows you what it is all about:
While the project week is running the students create, develop and run virtual hotel brands. Here you can have look to a list of their created „fake“ hotel brands. The transmedia output is quite amazing:
Braugarten
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Skydeck Hotel and Spa
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Hotel of Centuries
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The Silva
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Vine
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Green Paradise
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Urban Eco
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CityScape
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The Blackwood
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The Spot
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All the crazy incidents, events and happenings during the game are covered by a Karlshochschule student media team (mainly form International Media Management, this year kindly supported by a volunteer from our partner university Howest in Belgium) in a blog, which is called “Karls Media House”. They also produce some very nice pictures, you can see them here.
We as Karlshochschule are very proud to support and host this and other management games because we believe that our students won’t get the chance in their professional life to experiment under these very well coached circumstances. We believe that in comparison to on the job training or conventional teaching, one week of playing can boost our student’s learning. In this game they are allowed to fail. Failure is never a good experience but here no one gets shot or fired. I think the value of this game is priceless.
If you want to know more about the concept of gamification, I recommend you this interesting list of books.
Are you interested in getting to know more about gamification in educational and business context? We also offer workshops and keynotes on that topic. Just get in contact with our Management Institute.