Co-creation in game design

In the world of game design, it is crucial to ensure that the games we create for our clients accurately reflect their reality and address their specific challenges. We try to involve the client as much as possible in the design process, as they are always the experts of their own organisation.

While we often rely on proven game concepts, simply improvising or starting from scratch is not enough. To bridge the gap between game concepts and client needs, we embrace the practice of co-creation.

Co-creation involves actively involving our clients in the game design process, allowing them to contribute their insights, experiences, and perspectives. This collaborative approach ensures that the game’s content becomes relevant, relatable, and effective in meeting the client’s objectives. We leverage our clients’ expertise and input to create games tailored to their unique requirements.

Now, let’s explore three examples of how we have employed co-creation in designing games for our clients.

Distributed approach

In 2019, we designed a game for the international branch of the Danish Red Cross. They operate worldwide in regions affected by conflict and rely on volunteer work to enhance their operational efficiency. However, leading volunteers is a challenging task and ensuring they understand the values of the organisation can be extremely difficult. That’s where we step in to assist.

One of our most popular and reliable concepts is called Take Charge. It is very simple but great at facilitating dialogues about workplace culture, and we quickly saw a match with the needs of the DRC.

To develop the game, we needed many examples of behaviors that pushed the boundaries of established values. To ensure we didn’t conceive examples solely within an office in Denmark, disconnected from the local context, we adopted a different approach. We developed a template in a standard spreadsheet, incorporating a range of captivating headlines that would spark ideas. This methodology aimed to foster a connection with the experiences and perspectives of local volunteers in regions such as East Africa. In the template, we provided a few examples of what we were looking for to help get people going. Then, our client shared the template with a wide network of colleagues spanning various countries. Within a matter of weeks, we received lots of files brimming with a plentiful supply of behaviours, providing us with more than sufficient material to design the game.

We curated the selection with the client and adjusted some suggestions to fit the game’s framework. By gathering input from across their organisation, we ensured the content was relevant and relatable, successfully using it for onboarding volunteers and new employees worldwide.

Workshop approach

In 2018, the municipality of Copenhagen approached us with a request to develop a game. They noticed a trend among young individuals with the EUX high school-equivalent degree, which blends academic learning with practical experience. The municipality wanted to show that working for them for a few years could help these individuals acquire skills and understand their work-life preferences. This experience would assist in choosing the right career path for higher education and provide the municipality with much-needed skilled labor.

For this challenge, we needed something with a little more depth and opportunity for customisation, so we turned to another of our staple concepts, called Touchpoints. In this, we zoom in on different aspects of an organisation and write dilemmas around it. Depending on the choices made by the players, specific game effects will be triggered, tailored to meet the specific requirements and preferences of the client. Sometimes the effect is as simple as a point score, other times it might be lingering effects that will affect the choices and results of other dilemmas down the line.

We wanted to achieve two goals: capturing the realism of each dilemma and crafting an engaging narrative that resonated with the young players, so we had to closely collaborate with our clients. We hosted a series of workshops where we gradually co-created all aspects of the game with the client. With each workshop, we focused on new aspects of the game that needed to be fleshed out, going from overall narrative, over dilemmas and options and into which skills and preferences we wanted to highlight in the game.

This gave us everything we needed to build a game that would be both entertaining, engaging, and educational for the target audience, which helped the students becoming more aware of what opportunities their education provided in both the short and long term.

Expert co-designer approach

In 2019, a pharmaceutical company approached us as it was about to launch a new drug worldwide. They had already launched in a few countries and wanted to disseminate their learnings to other countries through the game, specifically around driving scientific dialogue around the type of drug.

In this case, we employed a concept centred around driving discourse through stakeholder engagement, a methodology we have successfully implemented with numerous clients.

We arranged meetings with a client expert who had been key to the launch in one country. He mapped out his experiences, leading to immersive sessions with whiteboards, post-it notes, and flowcharts. We grouped these into three or four main storylines and used them to design a fictional case country for the game

In this case, the expert helping us became more than just a co-creator. He became a trusted co-designer that we could consult when deciding how to break down the content into game mechanics. We were privileged to work with someone who committed fully, and we believe he also enjoyed his experience as a co-game designer for a few months.

The final product was first played at a conference for local teams from 20+ countries, and it was a great success. We helped the client take learnings from one market and share them with their colleagues in a fun and engaging way, so that they could then take these learnings and apply them in their own launches.

Customising the process

When we work with co-creation, every process is unique and distinct, ensuring that no two are the same. We always adapt the process to the solution as well as to the needs and preferences of our clients. We believe that it is an essential part of scoping a project that we align expectations about how, when, and why we involve our clients. This way, we ensure that the solution fits both the challenges it is meant to address and our client’s needs and resources