The Serious Games Podcast

The Serious Games Podcast is an interview series about play as a working tool in trainings, meetings and workshops. Each episode opens with the same greeting and the same promise of playful methods for interactive trainings and facilitation. Then the host turns to one guest, sometimes two. The format is steady. It starts with two questions the host calls traditional: what listeners should know about the guest, and how the guest would describe their game to someone who has never heard of it. After that comes the detail of how the game runs. The Topaasia® episode, with Yussi and Vero Kupas, explains a card deck in which participants receive a hand, can ask for a new one or keep a couple of cards, and usually find a card that strikes a chord within the first or second hand. Each person's reason for their pick gets written down, so every opinion in the room reaches the table instead of just a tally. The host compares this with sticky notes and dot voting, and the guests explain why that difference matters when a group has to find the one topic worth meeting about. 'Jargon Busting with Poetry for Neanderthals' is livelier. Lucy, whom the host first met at Play 14, describes one-minute turns that rotate from team to team, with a buzzer or an inflatable stick for anyone who fails, and the talk turns to how the words a teacher chooses shape the reactions they get. Other episodes lean toward story and strategy. Imi returns to follow up an earlier conversation about pen-and-paper roleplay, this time looking at the stories teams make together and at bleed in, the term for what each player brings into a play space where the everyday rules no longer apply. Christian, joining from Hamburg, describes Strategy Knotworking as a non-linear process. It starts from a purpose written large for the whole workshop and keeps circling back to ask whether what was said earlier still holds. Till comes back to talk about Moonshot in English, after an earlier German interview that the show notes link to, and says participants often come away saying they never thought they could be so creative. ScrumTale brings in Czemek from northern Poland, an engineer who spent many years at Intel, and the host points out early that this Scrum game involves no LEGO building. The guests are spread across Europe, and the host likes to work out when they first crossed paths, whether at a Play 14 or at a LEGO Serious Play conference years earlier. That habit, along with mentions of the wider serious games community, makes the show sound like colleagues comparing notes. The host is warm and quick to encourage, with plenty of 'wonderful' and 'lovely', but still asks for concrete examples. Links to games and resources go into the show notes, and episodes close with an email address for suggestions and feedback. A good first episode is the Topaasia® one, where the mechanics are laid out step by step. For something more energetic, the Poetry for Neanderthals conversation is the one to try.