Rob Alvarez Bucholska
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Gamification Inspiration from House M.D. | Episode 358

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From the eccentric problem-solving approach of the TV series “House, M.D.,” to the essential role of team dynamics, we elucidate how these principles translate into the mechanics of creating engaging and effective gamified solutions. Join us as we delve into the multifaceted world of gamification and discover how an unexpected source of inspiration offers profound insights into the art and science of gamifying experiences.

Rob is a host and consultant at Professor Game as well as an expert, international speaker and advocate for the use of gamification and games-based solutions, especially in education and learning. He’s also a professor and workshop facilitator for the topics of the podcast and LEGO SERIOUS PLAY (LSP) for top higher education institutions that include EFMD, IE Business School and EBS among others in Europe, America and Asia.

 

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Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,

Rob

 

Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Rob:
Hey, this is Professor Game, where we interview successful practitioners of games, gamification and game thinking who bring us the best of their experience to get ideas, insights and inspiration that help us in the process of multiplying engagement and loyalty. I’m Rob Alvarez. I’m a consultant and founder of the professor game and professor of gamification and games-based solutions at IE Business School, EFMD, EBS University, and other places around the world. And if this content is for you, perhaps you will find our free gamification course useful. Find it for free at professorgame.com/freegamificationcourse, all one word: professorgame.com/freegamificationcourse.

Hey, so welcome, engagers, to another episode of the Professor Game podcast. And as you know, every now and then we like to make special or different episodes. And this is not going to be an exception to that in this case. And this is based out of a one of the things that Marigo Raftopoulos, past guest of the podcast, mentioned during one of her talks that I attended. And she was talking about how in gamification, we draw inspiration from games, right? And what game designers do and how they do it in games and how they design and how they create these games and how we observe, play and so on. And so, well, if we’re drawing inspiration from that, it would be interesting to understand as well how do game designers were the ones we’re drawing inspiration from, essentially, where do they draw inspiration from? And essentially the conclusion was that he draw inspiration from life or real life, just things happening out there and how they can be used in this or that way for the game they are creating or they will create in the future where they write down their ideas or whatever that’s going to look like. So in this case, I had a, you know, quick flash in my head a few days ago when I finished watching a tv series that is not even new or anything. It’s not going to be anything surprising like, oh, he’s watching this. It’s actually, you know, by today’s standards, it’s actually a little bit old. And I realized that there were many things that were happening there where I thought, hmm, well, that’s interesting. That’s something that maybe I could use, or maybe I saw it and said, that’s something I’m actually using, or that we are actually using already in gamification, game inspired solutions and whatnot. So I’m going to drop it on you. Initially, I thought it was going to be a relatively quick episode. Then I started writing down my ideas and I have my notes, of course. I want to make sure I say and I mention all the interesting things that I’ve found, at least, or that I could remember during this recap that I made. And it actually, I think there’s going to be plenty more ideas than I, at least initially expected. Okay, so one of the things that happens the series is, as you can probably tell by the title, is House, the Doctor house MD, also known as the series. They also, you’ve also heard of them probably as Doctor House, or the character itself is Gregory House. It’s this doctor who is very different from what we typically expect in a doctor. Doctor usually not look like, but the way they usually behave. It’s this guy who has a limp and is always using a crotch. And, you know, he has this attitude, and he takes a bit too many pain pills, which is not something we’re going to cover here, for sure. But there are interesting things that we can draw right there. One of the first things that almost immediately strikes you when you see this is, you know, you’re expecting, and that’s the way they sell it to you. And you see it throughout the whole series is this guy is like super genius, right? He knows so many things, and he can observe things and read people in such a way that to uncover these truths that are of underneath everything and the stuff that they see, and you would say, well, this. This person is. And as a character, he is actually a lone wolf, a person who only relies on him or herself, only trusts him or herself himself in this case. And you say, well, this person definitely works alone, even after you see that every single time, not only for, you know, and it is true for tv purposes, of course, having a team makes it so that they verbalize things and what’s going on instead of being in the back of their heads, necessarily. And, you know, there’s more interesting stuff to go on tv, but let’s not get into that, even for the reason of actually doing their differential diagnostics, which is what they’re typically doing during most episodes, they do it as a team. It’s not just one genius person, even though he probably is as a character, if he were a real doctor, you’ll be a genius, right? And he would be able to figure out most of these things. You would think that he would just figure these things out by himself. He does not. He relies on a team. Although, don’t get me wrong, if you’ve seen the series, you’ve seen the character, you probably realize that he’s constantly shooting down the ideas of the team. They say something, he says, oh, you’re a moron, or, oh, you’re stupid. Or he insults them. And you know, he insults them for sure. But it’s not a bad word, bad mouthing kind of way in many. But he does, right? He tells them that they’re stupid, et cetera, et cetera. Even though he’s constantly shooting down their ideas, which is definitely not something I recommend in any way, right. What I do recommend is the fact that even though he is doing that, he is pushing them constantly to come up with new ideas. It’s like, oh, that’s a stupid idea. I need more. What else? What other things are possible? What else fits the symptoms? Of course. They’re always trying to see what known diseases are out there that have these or those symptoms and how they can fit into what they observe or they find and figure out about the patient. Eventually, even intentionally, he looks for crazy, long shot and even stupid ideas, right? There are times when they’ve done all these things. Everything that fits, they’ve gone through, and they figured out new things and something new that fits. But eventually, there’s nothing new to figure out. They’ve already tried these ideas and they don’t work. And he says, look, now it’s time to go for stupid, crazy, long shot ideas. And he goes for it. He really does. Even though he might shoot down some stuff, especially at the start, eventually, when they start going through things that don’t work, the reasonable ones that could work, he starts going for long shot, crazy stuff, right? When we are doing brainstorming and gamification or many other creative endeavors, it is crucial, it is fundamental to have these crazy, stupid, weird ideas and to put them out there, right? Not shoot them down like house does with his team. But yes, to put them out there oftentimes from the, and again, even from those stupid ideas, sometimes it’s like, oh, somebody says something and from that, you know, even though it’s not the idea that they said he figures something out or thinks of something new, that leads to the actual final idea, the final solution to the patient’s illness. Right? So what is interesting here is not how he shoots them down. It is how he constantly encourages and pushes the team and of course, himself to come up with something new all the time. Right? Because when people get to this doctor, it’s not because, oh, I have a headache and you get to. He also does some stuff at the clinic, which, again, this is more for the tv series itself and the drama that it creates than for the actual sort of main theme of all this. But it’s not the kind of doctor that you go to, oh, I have a headache. Oh, I broke my foot and I need to fix. It’s the kind of doctor that they go to when everything else fails. The things that doctors are used to treating and they treat correctly with what they observe and what they see, is not solving the problem. So they come to this person to figure out that 0.001% of things that other people are not going to figure out, because it’s, you know, it’s not part of their training, it’s not part of what they do day to day. These people, house and his team, are, every day or week. I don’t know exactly what the timelines are. They never reveal much in that. Constantly dedicated just to figuring out these strange, long shut, weird cases that regular doctors are not able to solve. So that’s. He constantly needs to be pushing those boundaries. So when he’s doing those differential diagnostics or DDX or something like that, they call it for shortening. They’re going for this, for crazy ideas. The show also comes to, you know, shine a light on something that perhaps we, our brains, even, even after seeing the show and figuring this out, my brain still doesn’t process it entirely. Right. And I know it happens to many other people. That’s why I bring it up. Medicine is in many ways an inexact science. It’s not. Oh, you see, for many cases, of course, you see a broken bone and an x ray. It’s a broken bone, and you know exactly what you need to do to figure it out most of the time. But oftentimes, when it’s. There’s many, many, many situations where it is not exact science, right? They see symptoms, they look at test results, and most of these times, the symptoms, they could be of, many, many diseases could have these symptoms, right? There could be symptoms that are not showing up, that are in there as well. In the test results, they usually are showing indicators, right? They’re. They’re saying, oh, you’re, you’re looking at these indicators, and when you see these things happening, what we have observed in the past is that those test results indicate that there’s this underlying disease or that thing, but they’re not really, it’s not like, oh, I’m looking for some headphones, right? And you see the headphones, and you see this and you say, oh, these are headphones, right? They’re headphones. You know, they are headphones. When you’re looking for a disease in these cases, you see things. It’s like the way our brain processes some things. You see some stuff quickly and your brain figures out, oh, that’s that thing. And you draw conclusions, but you don’t really get to see it. In the case of medicine, they don’t see like, oh, you have a headache and it’s because you have the flu, right? They don’t usually. Most of the times they don’t see the flu. I’m not sure if this is medically accurate, by the way, have no medical training, but there’s many situations in which they don’t see the disease itself. They can see that the liver is failing, and they can see that the stomach has an ulcer, but they don’t know why there’s an ulcer in the stomach. They don’t know why the liver is failing. What happened to lead there? Right? So they are just looking at these things and looking at symptoms to figure out what possible solutions could be. Because if it is this disease, they know that they treat it with this, it will solve the stuff. Right? So with that in mind, they use the scientific mind because doctors are scientists, right? And they do a series of things that I love to do as well in my case, and I’ve seen people do it as well, very successful. The first one is, and that, I think is interesting for them to be able to solve the cases like they do. As I mentioned before, these are not the regular doctors. They have a clear understanding that what they’re doing is what other doctors are not doing. There are a small fraction of patients are arriving at them. It’s not like these hospitals or any doctor usually, who gets tens or sometimes even hundreds of patients a day or a week. These people sometimes have a full week just for one patient, right? Because 99.99% of the patients can be healed by everything else they are taking care of that 0.001%, where it’s not that you cannot solve the illness that they have, it’s that you don’t know what it is that they have. Right. What they do. And they have this very, very clear. They have to come up with the things that other people don’t do in gamification. We do the same thing, right? We have to really understand the objectives of the project. We really have to dive deep to understand what is going on. We really have to understand why we are there. And we need to understand the context. We really need to understand what is going on. What is it that we are actually solving for? Because otherwise we don’t know if we came up with a good solution or not, because we don’t know what we are solving. You come up with something and we don’t have the indicators, we’re not looking at the right indicators and so on. We don’t know if something is changing. I have to say, in the case of gamification, it’s harder than house to figure this out because they know that they, for them, it’s sort of always, they are treating these long shot patients in gamification. You come in and you don’t really know what is going on. That’s super, super important. And the way that they treat the patients and the way that they actually make the choices, the decisions as a team, is because they know that the regular stuff that other people would have figured out are not the answer because they already tried that probably before. So they really hone down and understand what their objective as a team is. And when eventually in the series, you can see that there is newcomers to the team. Initially they struggle with this concept of this is not what you normally would do. Right. You don’t do what you normally do. And that gives them a few sort of creative licenses in the series for them to do things that, again, normal doctors would not do, among other things, because they don’t have the time to dedicate. They cannot dedicate a full week to researching the case, or a couple of days, even a full day, to a single patient. They really dive deep inside with these patients. Another thing that I think is interesting is they do the best research on the patient that they actually can. Again, they have creative licenses here. I’m not suggesting that you do things like what they do. They break into the patient’s home to figure out if there’s something that they didn’t tell them. I’m not suggesting that in any way, but it’s a good example of how far they go. Usually they do these things as a common procedure. They break into the patient’s home almost every single time. Again, I’m not suggesting doing exactly that. What I’m saying is for us to see that and to think, well, they are really willing to go the extra mile to understand what is going on with the patient. Again, the other doctors will never, not only break into the house, but they won’t go the extra mile in that sense. They have the available information and that is good enough. 99.9999% of the time, it’s about those long shot, different cases that these guys are treating that needs extra information. And usually, as a gamification designer, if they are looking at you as an external consultant or even within the company, they probably already tried out different things and were not able to solve the problem with the usual business as usual solutions that they would get. So when they get to you, I’m not saying break into anybody’s home or do anything illegal. Please don’t do anything of that ever. Right. At least if you can avoid it, never do that, right? Never. I’m not, I would never suggest something like that. But go that extra mile, really understand who you are going to be creating a solution, because oftentimes that makes a difference in the kind of solution that youre looking after. In the case of the series, they made a life and death decision, literally, because if they figured out something that the patient didnt say, they could actually solve the problem in the actual manner that needs to be solved. And when they broke into their homes, they usually found something, a toxin or an environmental thing, or they figured out something that they didnt say for whatever reason. Right. Another thing that is very, very interesting in the series is if you think about it and you analyze it from not just watching it as an entertaining series, you start analyzing what are some of the things that are going on. You realize that these doctors are, and I think most doctors in general, they were very action orientated. Right. They don’t wait to make sure that they knew exactly what is going on, amongst other things, because they can’t. Right. As I was saying before, they see symptoms and if they match, maybe is this or that other thing, but there’s maybe an underlying symptom that is going to show up later or never shows up or it’s showing up, they’re not saying there’s many things that could be happening. They grab all the information that they can, again, going that extra mile. And with that, the best information that they can get at the time, they say, well, you know, it’s time to do something, they do something about it. Sometimes it doesn’t exactly fit. Sometimes they have two or three different theories, and since theres no way for them to know which one of them is the best one, or sometimes, oh, you can do an extra test, but it takes a week and the patient is going to die before a week, then they have to do something. Right. Again, most of our decisions are not life and death, and thats a good thing, at least in my case. I like to not be making life and death decisions in my job every day. Thats one of the reasons I never became a doctor. But having that action orientation. Right. They come up with a what we could call, in our world, a prototype of a solution. They take it to their users, in this case, the user, the patient, and see if they work with that solution. If it works well, they keep them. In their case, it’s a patient. So they observe what are the reactions of the patient in our case, right. We bring it up to users, this prototype, and we look at what is going on, and we do these play testings to figure out if the solution is good enough. And in our case, especially, where is it failing, right. They usually, these doctors are a lot more confident that they’re expecting it to work when it doesn’t, and it often does. Again, for probably for dramatic purposes. More than anything else, they are there to figure out, oh, they had, there’s this new symptom, they figure something else out and they iterate. They change the prototype, right? Probably radically. They take off this treatment and put on this new treatment. In our case, it doesn’t have to be swap a for b entirely, but it can be, these iterations can be, oh, change these things and put these other things. Or sometimes it might even be this completely doesn’t work. Let’s start over. But it’s about going in as fast as you can with the information that you can gather in the shortest amount of time. As if, though it’s not as if it’s a life and death situation. And orientate yourself towards action. They have to. They need that. And I mentioned it before, the long shots, they are, they’re open to going for long shots. Sometimes it’s, well, you know, it’s. The chances that actually happens are very, very slim and says, well, yeah, but it’s what we got. And this goes to the previous point. They’re action oriented and they do something to see if it’s actually working. And of course, for drama purposes, every now and then it’s like, oh, we do a or b, and if we do a and it doesn’t work, patient dies. If we do b and it doesn’t work, patient dies as well. And we cannot do both. It’s like we do one and then the other. We have to choose. And for drama purposes, they always, often choose the right one, and patient survives where they had done the other thing. Da da da da da. In our cases, again, it’s not usually life and death. We just make a choice, even if it’s a long shot. And it doesn’t really matter, because what we’re doing is we’re testing it again to iterate and to come up with something better if we got it right. We can iterate something else, or we can just finalize and say, let’s go ahead with this. This is working. Something else that is interesting. And they actually explicitly say this, they do not believe in coincidence as well. In particular, Doctor House does not believe in coincidences. In maybe 99, 98% of the episodes. Right. There’s two, maybe three times where this does happen, that there is a coincidence of two diseases, rare diseases, happening at the same time. And the solution was to actually tackle both. But usually what they say is if there is something very rare going on, there’s only one of them, it’s not a coincidence. It’s too hard to have a coincidence of them having to. And what I draw from this is when you see the reaction of several users and it’s negative or it’s super positive, or something is happening and you see it among several users, it’s usually not a coincidence. Right. If that is happening and there are the right users, the right play testers, you want to look into it, you want to see what is going on, you want to dive deeper. If a lot of people are having trouble with x, it’s not a coincidence that a lot of people are having trouble with this. Let’s dive deeper. You’re trying to figure out what is going on. That’s one of the questions you want to make. If this is happening many times, why is it happening? What is really going on? And that, again, goes into really diving deep of what are the possibilities. There’s something that is a phrase that I’m sure there are t shirts from the series that say everybody lies, as in, they say lies. I always talk about this in a different way when we’re talking about playtesting. I’m not saying people like in the series, like the series, the house always says that people have an ulterior motive to lie. They want to hide something. They want to change some reality that whatever it is, they do it intentionally and on purpose. I’m not saying that our playtesters do that. Maybe they do. I’m not sure. Well, there is a case in which they do that when they want to. We, as people like to be liked, right? So if somebody is wanting to be liked, they might say something nicer to you than the reality because they want to be nice. Right? But in general, sometimes they even don’t realize that they’re lying. And what I mean in lying in this case is that they’re saying one thing, that they really, they’re convinced of this whatever thing that they’re saying. However, their actions prove otherwise. And that’s part of human nature. We are full of contradictions. That’s not just our users, it’s ourselves. Right. I’m sure that if we could be able to do a very objective examination, we would find areas in which we are contradictory. Right. We say one thing, we do another. Our brain is justified in different ways because we want to be, you know, we want to have a solid image of ourselves. But in reality, if you see it in an objective way, we have contradictions and we’re full of them. So in playtesting, that’s something that I bring up a lot. We have contradictions. So what do you go for? What people say when the best of their intentions or what they do? And of course, you probably know the answer already. And if not, send me an email and ask me and I will tell you the answer. There is actually, you know, I like to talk about the good examples, usually in gamification stuff that people do well, there is a segment of the series that is actually a pretty bad example of gamification. They do this recruiting game for the team. Everybody in the team leaves or is fired by house. So he runs out of the team and they tell him, oh, you’re, you know, you think you’re a lonely lone wolf and so on, but you need a team. You need a team. You need a team. So you have to hire again. And for dramatical reasons, he doesn’t want to. He’s bored. He doesn’t want to waste his time. And then he comes up with the recruitment game again as a gamification example is terrible for drama purposes and for following the character through. It is absolutely fantastic. Don’t get me wrong, I loved it when watching the series. I laughed a ton and it was very cohesive and coherent within the series. However, if you take it as an example of a game, beware, right. The game is all about picking a new team through some sort of competition. It is an attempt at doing all right at gamification. But, you know, certainly it’s filled with flaws, right? There’s, again, they fit the character very, very well. Right? He says everybody lies. And he does this intentionally often, right. The first thing is that the rules of this game are absolutely unclear. And he not only has unclear rules, but the ones does have clear, he just breaks them whenever he likes. Because I’m the boss, and that’s the most important rule is I am the boss and I get to decide, you know, that’s fun for a tv series, but if you’re creating a game in which even more, if there’s the stakes, are so high as getting hired or not getting hired for a super top team with this genius guy that they had dreamt of working for, a good thing to do is have explicit rules as much as you can, and if you have them, don’t break them unless you have a solid reason for that. He just was just doing these things on a whim. In the end, he probably had everything on the back of his mind. It was, well, sort of quote unquote justified. And they were decisions that helped him make his choice in the best way possible. But for the experience of the user, which is something where it’s important for us, something you don’t want to do. He has many, many ethical issues. Of course, he does things for the weirdest of reasons or reasons that are actually pretty bad. Again, there’s a part of the season where he almost goes to jail, and then there’s another part of the season where he actually goes to jail. So you can imagine this character is actually usually floating along the line of what’s illegal, legal and illegal. Ethical, unethical in theory. You always think that he’s trying to do it for the best of the patient or whatever, but these are things that we don’t want to play around. Right? We are living in the real world. It’s not a tv series. You don’t want to be playing around, whether it’s ethical or not, be in that sort of borderline or where that lies. And especially not even more so on the legal versus illegal stuff. You don’t want to go to jail for working and doing a good job. And there’s many other things that are wrong with that game. Right. If you’re a fan of the series, I’d love to hear any other bad things that you saw happening from a gamification standpoint during the recruitment game. All right. And something very important that I would like to highlight. And with this, I’ll give this episode a bit of closure. I can see that we are getting to our 30 minutes mark, which lately has been a bit of the place we’re aiming for with our episodes. We can’t forget. Right. Have you seen the series at least? Hopefully put a smile on your face. They have continued. And this, again, is a series. I think it’s 2008 or something, maybe 2004 even. And in 2012, I think those are the kind of the right numbers. Back then, it was not so normalized or it was not so openly normalized. Adults playing games and video games. So the fact that these very serious and smart doctors are also playing video games. Oftentimes, like in the series, you see them playing games. There’s even an episode about a video game that they play is something that gives me a little bit of a relief. And again, there’s many other series that have done this as well, but it’s another drop on that barrel and hopefully is pretty full of water at this point where knowing that playing games and video games can go, as we already know, right, where we’re in the gamification game inspired solutions space, right. We already know that playing games can be inspiring, it can be useful. There’s research about the good things that can happen from playing games, video games, sports and so on. But sports is almost easy to justify, right? Usually you say, oh, it’s physical activity. Everybody knows physical activity is good for your body. So sports, it’s relatively easy. But you bring that to the hobbies, like board games, rpg’s, you know, people say, ah, yeah, well, it’s physically, it’s not great. Mentally, these are just a bunch of geeks, and they sit around, and the classic image at least used to be of the typical basement geek who, you know, was overweight and had all these health issues and was very antisocial. And that’s not the reality. It hasn’t been for a very long while. I’m not even sure it ever was in any case. But it’s come to normalize that these are also mind exercises. There’s many puzzles that we’re solving, and then there’s many benefits of actually playing video games and call it as you may, whatever moderate might mean in a moderate manner. Right? So that’s something I had tip to the series house, MD, for also doing something like that for them. And engagers, thank you again for paying attention to this, listening to some of the inspiration that we’ve had from house and your medical doctor in this case, or Doctor House Doctor Gregory House, hopefully you’ll realize and you start seeing things around you, and this is something that’s been happening to me for years. You observe something in real life, and your brain, in the back of your brain is maybe analyzing, oh, why did this happen? Why did people actually get to do that? What was their motivation behind this? And so on? Because, or you’re seeing, oh, how did they achieve this? What was their process? How could I do this myself? Or could my gamification practice benefit from doing something like this thing that they did? It doesn’t spoil my games. It doesn’t spoil my entertainment. As you can see, I saw all the episodes through through a streaming service. But in any case, I hope this was useful for you. Some of this inspiration, some of these things that they do hopefully can trickle on into your practice as well. However, engagers, as you know, at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over. Hey engagers, and thank you for listening to the professor game podcast. And since you are into gamification and game inspired solutions, how about you go into the free gamification course that we have for you? Just go to professorgame.com freegamification course, all one word, professorgame.com/freegamificationcourse and get started today for free. After that we will also be in contact and you will be the first to know of any opportunities that professor game might have for you. And remember, before you go on to your next mission, before you click continue, please remember to subscribe using your favorite podcast app and listen to the next episode of Professor Game. See you there.

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