It's no secret that we're committed to bringing Innovation Games® to the public sector. In just the past

Facilitation Team for 2011 Budget Games

Part of this is accomplished by teaching others how to hold Budget Games in their communities. We take every opportunity to speak about Budget Games and are thrilled that Luke Hohmann's talk, Fixing Broke(n) Governments through Serious Games was accepted for Agile 2012. His presentation outlines the past two implementations of Budget Games, along with providing attendees with a toolkit that they can use to bring Budget Games to their community. 

Another way that we're spreading the word that games can do good is by supporting the launch of the Every Voice Engaged foundation. Lead by Executive Director Steven Dodds, Every Voice Engaged is working to support nonprofits and governments in using game mechanics to understand their members, community, employees and/or citizens, so that they can be better stewards. 

Since we've long known that Innovation Games can bring about results across the enterprise, we're thrilled to support an organization that's purpose is to bring that success to nonprofits and governments. And we want you to support this worthy cause as well. 

Go Pro and Give Back

For the next 30 days, we're offering new or upgraded Professional subscriptions to  Innovation Games® Online for just $495 and donating $250 of every purchase to the Every Voice Engaged Foundation. 

Simply register for the Pro Subscription using the discount code EveryVoiceEngaged. 

We get a lot of inquiries about the differences between online and in-person games. Quite often, these inquires have some not-so-secret agenda, as when advocates of one or the other forms of play try to convince me that one is clearly superior than the other. Ha! Those questions may be cleverly worded, but they forget that we've been playing games for more than 10 years. 

After writing the book -- and then writing the software platforms that powers in-person and online games -- I'm far too crafty to be fooled by these questions.  However, there are indeed differences between online and in-person games. 

I've come to think of game production as a small system of three interlocked phases of planning. The first is situating yourself in the Ideas Into Action™ framework so that you can be clear on the broad kinds of question you're going to ask, the goals you're trying to achieve, or the kinds of puzzles you're trying to solve. This phase is independent of whether or not you will play online or in-person games. If you're in the  Discover phase, you're going to choose open-ended games, and if you're in the  Prioritize phase, it is pretty certain you will choose a prioritization game.

Earlier this year, I got a call from a friend who works as a Learning and Development specialist at the University of Virginia. JoEllen had heard me rattle on endlessly about the Budget Games we had produced for the City of San José, CA earlier this year, and that story got her thinking. 

JoEllen Wilkins, University of Virginia

The  University of Virginia (UVA), like nearly every public university in the U.S., is facing budget constraints thanks to the current economic climate, and similar to other organizations, would like more of its employees to have a broader understanding of how those budget cuts affect the university as whole. JoEllen wondered if there was a way to use Innovation Games® in one of her training sessions to help the current crop of University of Virginia executives to shift their perspective from the departmental level to the University as a whole--particularly around budgeting. 

We wanted the new executives to participate in an exercise that would illustrate the challenges of thinking about budgets at the university level, rather than at a departmental level. So, we asked them to identify budget cuts based on a fictitious directive to reduce the university budget by 3%.

Our ultimate goal was to get people thinking about budgeting decisions before our guest speaker from the Budget Office talked to them about budget processes, funding sources, and so on. We used the game to "prime the pump" and played the online game ahead of our in-person meeting. It gave them some context for really absorbing the budget information that followed.