Are you a game hobbyist?

Greetings!

One of my areas of focus in NASAGA is to make it easier for game hobbyists and enthusiasts to get involved. One way I want to do this is to gather cases of NASAGA members who got into what they are doing because of their passion for games. For those people who already know games, we want to raise awareness of how they can turn their passion into something valuable for an organization.

So, the purpose of this request is to collect your stories. I'm seeking people who came to an organization with ideas that came from their love of games. What I'd like to know is:

- Where in the organization did you find traction for your game-based ideas, and

- How did you go about proposing your new ideas?

I have a presentation at the Board Game Geek convention in a few weeks on this topic, and the goal of the presentation is to help board game enthusiasts to see different places and methods for approaching organizations with a game-based idea.

You can reply here, or if you don't want to reply in public, you can send an e-mail to scott@scottnicholson.com

Thanks!

Scott Nicholson

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Comment by Pierre Corbeil on February 1, 2012 at 1:24pm: Simulations Publications Inc..., or SPI. Once a wargamer, forever a wargamer. I have been playing wargames, since I was about 17, the old Avalon Hill Gettysburg game being one of my first. In the late 60's, small companies sold games in put-together kits, and I could experiment those. Despite the utility of computer games, to me a game will always have hexes, cardboard counters with NATO symbols on them.

When I started teaching, I began experimenting with games as learning tools, and my interest became a 30-year long career in the study of games in education.

You are right, passion comes first. My first question to a prospective trainer or colleague would be, Do you prefer rigid or fluid zones of control ? If no answer is forthcoming, I will look at the next candidate.

Is this too strict ? Perhaps the question, Which version of Civilization do you prefer ? could be a second chance....

Board games are a mechanism for interactive learning. They are flexible, as opposed to computer games which are programmes, which mean that players can bounce ideas off each other and propose on the fly scenarios. If computer games may encourage anti-social behaviour, it is because there is a constant positive feedback loop from acting on a picture on a screen. In a board game, the participants may be violent to each other's pieces, but the presence gives negative feedback to aggressive behaviour. A half-dozen friends playing Kingmaker will lie, cheat, and steal but within the game mode, not with each other.