 Hello, my name is Mark Sorrell, and I'm the development director at Hyde and Seek. The process of making a game creatively is extremely similar to the agile production technique, a very iterative procedure. When you first think of a game, you think of game mechanics, you are building a kind of abstract machine because games don't really exist in the real world of a very abstract form. The only way of testing them is to play them. If you think of a game of chess, for instance, you can look at the chess board as real, chess pieces as real, the rules of chess are a real thing, but the game itself is only experienced in the minds of the players, and not only that but it's experienced differently in the minds of each player. They both play a different game in their heads and nothing different things at different times. Games are kind of unique in that they only exist in that form. A book is the same for everyone who reads it. They might have different interpretations of different things, but the text is the same, whereas games are naturally enormously emerging. So, hence, when you come up with the idea for a game, the mechanics that underpin it, you have to then play it in order to find out whether or not it works. So, you have to follow a kind of agile and intuitive procedure. You play the game, see if it's any good, if your assumptions were correct, if they were, you would find them, if they weren't, you would throw out and start a game. So, it's effectively very much like a agile system. In terms of the original creative spark that lets you come up with that game idea in the first place, I'm a great believer in the Dom Draper kind of concept of think about something very, very hard, then forget about it, and the idea will come to you. Obviously, playing a lot of games is extremely important, and understanding very, very much how and why the games that you enjoy work, and how and why the games that you don't enjoy don't work, and not only that, but how the games that people enjoy that you don't enjoy work, and why they enjoy them. There's an awful lot of the psychologists, I think, to game designers, a lot of behavioural psychology, a lot even more behavioural economics, a lot of some enormously important in games. So, play lots of games, read an awful lot about how people actually think, and how they actually work, be very Machiavellian, care about how the world is, no matter how you wish it were, and then once you've thought about that problem very, very hard, then go away and forget about it, and the game will come to you in the shower. Usually in real life, people don't take all that kind of effort to learn stuff, if they are given feedback and they are told, this is no good, they never come back. In a game it's very different. People will keep getting clobbered at the same level, 15 times, 20 times, 30 times, they play for a month before they move to the next level. Why does it not happen? That's because the nature of what games are. Games are structured play, and play is how we learn effectively. The reason why children play a lot more than adults is because they are having to learn a normal amount of things all the time. They are learning machines, hence they are playing machines. When you play a game, what you are effectively doing is building a model in your head of how you think the game works, and then you are inputting into this sort of black box that you have made in your head and seeing what the output is. If you have predicted the output correctly, then you can assume that your assumptions about how this black box works are correct. Let's try another couple of tests to make sure you are really right. If you were right, you will move on to a different test to learn a different aspect of how it works. If you were wrong, you will go back. Again, it's an iterative procedure. The reason why games are so good at doing it is because they are constructing this thing in your head that you can test. They are playful and designed to be something that our brains enjoy learning about. There is a famous games article, Raf Costa, whose book, A Theory of Fun, is an excellent primer for this kind of stuff. He says that boredom is the absence of learning, and I think he's pretty much right. That's one with boredom when there's no new stimuli, so there's no different thing we haven't seen before. Nothing we can learn. Games are all about learning because play is learning. These games is play is learning. They are all the same thing. Our brains are designed to do this. That is what they do. They learn new things. Games teach new things. That's why they are so incredibly addictive and compelling to us to do. So if you had to create a learning experience for adults, what is it that we can learn from a game designer? What you can learn from a game designer is how much you shouldn't gamify things. The idea of a game, learning is intrinsically enjoyable. The reason games are enjoyable is because you are learning something. So if you want to teach someone something through a game, it's possible to do so, but it's important that what you do is let them play with the system or the information that you're trying to teach them. What you're not trying to do is add a game onto the process of learning. The process of learning is already massively fun. The process of learning is why we play games in the first place. Playing a game off of a game can often have disastrous results. If you look at the way the difference between learning and education I think is really interesting. People learn things all the time for their own enjoyment. They'll quite happily sit and read thousands of Wikipedia pages. If you ask any nine-year-old about whatever their favourite topic is, be it ponies or renaissance painting or fighting with sticks, it doesn't really matter what it is. They will know everything. They will be desperate to learn more stuff and desperate to agail you with their knowledge. Learning is fun. Learning is games. It's play. So if you want to teach people something through games, what you do is you just set up an environment that lets them play with the knowledge, with the system, with whatever it is you're trying to get across and let them then prod it themselves and see how it works. Present it as the black box and let them see their app and let them build up their own picture of how this thing works. If you're trying to teach people something that they don't want to learn in the first place, then rewards can come in handy, but you have to face the fact that behavioural psychology has long proven that extrinsic rewards replace intrinsic rewards. If you enjoy doing something for its own sake and you then offer to pay someone to do it, then they'll enjoy it less because they're now focused on the money on the extrinsic reward. So if you want to teach someone something they don't want to learn, then you have to accept that what you're going to do is, yeah, they might learn it, and they'll never enjoy learning it and that you will then, whatever system, whatever gamified system you've put in place to encourage them to learn is going to be the thing they're interested in. It might work in terms of getting them to learn the thing, but it works in the same sense that Havlove ringing his bell makes a dope drool, rather than in the sense of genuinely making someone who wants to learn about the subject and is interested in it. So games can make you do stuff, but they can't make you like stuff. Thank you very much for your ideas.