Playful Organisations & Learning Systems

Playful Organisations & Learning Systems, based on Igor Mayer's work at NHTV's Centre for Games & Digital Media, argues that games shape society culturally, economically and technologically, and that organisations and complex systems can be made more effective by deliberately incorporating playful design. The work distinguishes intrinsic value, such as enjoyment and flow, from extrinsic value, including learning, therapy, training and organisational change. It contends that entertainment and serious games are not sharply separable and should be considered together, and it treats competing terms such as "serious games," "applied games" and "gamification" as a matter of definitional choice rather than settled fact.

The evidence presented is promising but uneven. Studies cited include neuroscientific findings linking extended Super Mario play to increased hippocampal grey matter, and a neuro-feedback project supporting stroke recovery. In team settings, research found that competition in gamified platforms modestly improved performance, though effects varied with personality. High-performing emergency management teams showed less intermediate-phase coordination, and in the TEAMUP serious game, avoidable mistakes correlated strongly with team cohesion while completion time did not. The author acknowledges that research on behavioural change remains largely case-based and that negative results are rarely reported.

The document's most developed applied example is the MSP Challenge, a multi-player game for North Sea maritime spatial planning commissioned in 2011 by the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment. It has been played around twenty times across Europe and extended through INTERREG projects into the North Sea and Baltic regions. Other examples, including the Smart Meter readiness game and the AMELIO VR project, are described with few quantitative outcomes. The central conclusion is that games support experiential, single-, double- and triple-loop organisational learning and can inform decision-support, performance evaluation and the management of complex systems, provided that cross-disciplinary collaboration strengthens the rigour of the field.