Origins of Games

Gamestorming makes vivid for me the culture in which I wish to live.  It’s a culture which meets us where we are, which encourages us to stretch and grow, just a bit at a time, with every game we play.  Each game has an object of play, and so we can feel safe that we know why we’re playing it.  We can play games that are tried and true, we can adapt them and combine them, and we can create entirely new games, as needed.

In my own words, it’s a culture of the poor-in-spirit who want to take many small leaps of faith (as in I’d like to check this out) rather than just one big one (as in Trust me!)  Gamestorming makes real my belief that every way of figuring things out can be shared as a game.  I’d love to know, apply and share a directory of these many ways in math, science, engineering, medicine, finance, law, ethics, philosophy, theater, art, music, architecture, agriculture, homemaking and many other fields. Happily, Gamestorming is an inviting community, and for me, a logical place from which to reach out to other practices and appreciate them.

And so I learned of Dave Snowden and the Cognitive Edge research network focused on sensemaking.  They develop and share a set of methods, some of which, like Ritual Dissent, are very much games in the Gamestorming sense.  I believe that others, like the Cynefin framework, make for advanced games, which take some time to learn. I engaged Dave by way of Twitter. He tweeted: Give me a reference to gamestorming and I will happily take a look.  The best summary that I could find was the Amazon review, which reproduces the back cover.  So I thought a good project would be to create a Wikipedia article on Gamestorming.

Wikipedia’s guidelines for inclusion don’t allow articles to be created for neologisms.  A subject most be notable.  So I included academic references to Gamestorming, such as Jon H.Pittman’s syllabus for Design as Competitive Strategy, Christa Avampato’s use of Gamestorming in her social media marketing class and Franc Ponti’s talk on Trends in innovation for restless people. I submitted my article for review by Wikipedia editors.  Within an hour or so, they put it up: the Gamestorming article.

I include below the references to the origins of the many games.  The Wikipedia editors took them out of the article.  That’s unfortunate because the Gamestorming authors took care to credit the people who created, popularized or inspired the games.  Some of the games have roots way back:

• Button is inspired by the Native American Talking Stick tradition.
• Heart, Hand, Mind is inspired by Swiss educational reformer Heinrich Pestalozzi
• NUF Test is based on patent tests.
• Poster Session derives from the poster sessions in academia.
• Show and Tell is based on Show and Tell that many of us know from elementary school.
• Storyboard is credited to Walt Disney Studios, see Storyboarding.
• The Blind Side is inspired by Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham’s communication model Johari Window.
• Toyota founder, inventor Sakichi Toyoda developed the 5 Whys, the basis of Toyota’s scientific approach.
• Affinity Map: Jiro Kawakita in the 1960s developed the KJ Method, also known as Affinity diagram.
• SWOT Analysis is based on Albert S Humphrey‘s SWOT Analysis.
• Card Sort: Card sorting is used by information architects.
• Elevator Pitch: Elevator pitches are commonplace in the venture capital community.
• RACI matrix is a tool of team management.

Since the 1970s, notably in Silicon Valley, new games are contributing to a culture of facilitating creativity:

• 4 Cs is based on a game by Matthew Richter in the March 2004 publication of Thiagi GameLetter.
• Anti-Problem is based on Reverse It from Donna Spencer’s design games website, http://www.designgames.com.au
• Brainwriting is credited to Michael Michailko’s Thinkertoys and also Horst Geschke and associates at the Batelle Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, and also related to 6-3-5 Brainwriting developed by Bernd Rohrbach.
• Bodystorming was coined by Colin Burns at CHI’94 in Boston, Massachusetts. See: Bodystorming.
• Business Model Canvas was designed by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, and featured in their book, Business Model Generation.
• Campfire was inspired by Tell Me A Story: Narrative and Intelligence (Rethinking Theory) by Roger Schank and Gary Saul Morson.
• Customer, Employee, Shareholder is based on the Stakeholder Framework developed by Max Clarkson in A Stakeholder Framework for Analyzing and Evaluating Corporate Social Performance in the Academy of Management Review (1995).
• Design the Box is attributed, independently, to Luke Hohmann, Jim Highsmith and Bill Schackelford.
• Context map, Cover Story, History Map, Visual Agenda and The Graphic Gameplan are credited to The Grove Consultants International.
• Fishbowl is based on ideas from Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making by Sam Kaner et al.
• Force Field Analysis is based on Kurt Lewin’s framework Force Field Analysis.
• Graphic Jam is inspired by Leslie Salmon-Zhu of International Forum for Visual Practitioners.
• Help Me Understand is adapted from Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision Making by Sam Kaner and inspired by Five W’s and H in Techniques of Structured Problem Solving, Second Edition by A.B.VanGundy, Jr.
• Heuristic Ideation Technology is documented by Edward Tauber in his 1972 paper HIT:Heuristic Ideation Technique, A Systematic Procedure for New Product Search.
• Image-ination is based on Picture This! adapted from the Visual Icebreaker Kit.
• Make a World is inspired by Ed Emberley’s book.
• Open Space was invented by Harrison Owen, author of Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide. See: Open Space.
• Pecha Kucha / Ignite, first held in Tokyo in 2003, was devised by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Klein Dytham architecture. See: Pecha Kucha.
• Post-Up is based on exercises in Rapid Problem-Solving with Post-it Notes by David Straker.
• The Pitch and Value Map are by Sarah Rink.
• Red:Green Cards are by Jerry Michalski.
• Speedboat, 20/20 Vision and Prune the Future are based on Luke Hohmann’s innovation games in his book Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play.
• Talking Chips was inspired by the email program Attent by Byron Reeves.
• Wizard of Oz was pioneered in the 1970’s in the development of the airport kiosk and IBM’s listening typewriter.
• The World Cafe as practiced at The World Cafe.
• Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and especially, James Macanufo contributed many new games to the Gamestorming book.

Please, let’s remember all who have created games. They are our points of departure for Gamestorming as a culture.