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The purpose of this manuscript is to highlight how gamification is transforming recruitment, retention and training to resolve employee engagement challenges in the ever-changing workplace. In collaborating with game industry experts and designers, the authors taught students team leadership skills by demonstrating how to design and play their own original cooperative strategy games. In doing so, students learn what gamification is and how it can be used to train our multigenerational workforce; how designing board games teaches team leadership skills (e.g. communication, conflict management, power, decision-making); and how to develop cooperative strategy game elements (player characters, roles and actions) that motivate engaging gameplay with successful learning outcomes.

In this paper, the authors discuss the practical implications of a three-phase semester-long experiential learning experience, where game design demonstrates to students how employees can work collaboratively together in teams. Students’ developed storylines (i.e. strategic objectives) including motivation challenges, social media communication breakdowns, sabotage, global sustainability and other real-world challenges. In Phase 1, students learn about how companies are using gamification in training high-performing teams. In Phase 2, students play a cooperative strategy game Forbidden Island with their student teams. In Phase 3, students design (and play) their original cooperative strategy game, instructions booklet and build a facilitation guide.

Approximately, 400 students developed 48 original cooperative strategy games that can be used to teach team leadership skills. These student teams designed cooperative strategy board games – in which the entire team either wins or loses based on their control of valued resources and player actions as key decision-making points. The data and feedback indicate that the learning experience helped them practically consider team interdependence in making effective decisions, and in creating creative self-efficacy, resilience and self-confidence in their own leadership voice. In this manuscript, the authors focus on providing an overview and implementation plan for our semester-long experiential learning exercise.

This experiential exercise was implemented from 2019 to 2023 in different learning modalities (face-to-face, hybrid, 100% synchronous online learning) and during challenging times (prepandemic, pandemic and postpandemic learning environments). These varying experiences provided them with a challenge to persevere and learn about their own interpersonal skills and resilience in a creative engaging way with limited resources. Students developed 26 original games during 100% synchronous remote learning due to COVID. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no other business school is working with gaming industry experts and game designers to teach team leadership to this degree during pre- and postpandemic environments.

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a puzzle-based video game that allows Leadership educators to facilitate a highly interactive and behaviorally intense experience within a traditional classroom environment. In this manuscript, we discuss appropriate use cases, curricular alignments and provide a sample lesson plan outlining one way of using the game.

The cooperative and team-based nature of this game provides opportunities to create interactive lessons on a variety of topics, such as communication, group dynamics, leadership, conflict strategies and cognitive load.

Our primary reflection is that this game provides a good balance between fun engagement and rigorous learning. While deploying this game in several leadership and psychology courses, students have shown excitement and enthusiasm about playing the game, especially when we have built up some anticipation for it while discussing cognitive load theory (CLT) or other content in the classes leading up to the experience.

The game provides a unique behavioral experience that is useful in several different educational outlets. Fundamentally, the game provides the opportunity for creating three dynamics among small groups of students: cognitive overload, intergroup stress and conflict and communication in stressful environments. Each of these three could be applicable in various courses and curriculum.

This paper aims to investigate the implementation of the traditional Indonesian Dakon game Apps at UNAIR library called Dakon UNAIR Arena (DUNA).

Traditional games are an important part of a nation’s cultural heritage. However, with technological advances in the digital era, traditional games are often marginalized and forgotten because there are many computer and online-based games invented. Observation of the implementation of DUNA game at UNAIR library has been conducted on DUNA users.

DUNA game at UNAIR library gives a positive contribution to reviving the traditional Dakon game from Indonesian. Library users who participated in the DUNA game reported an increase in interest and participation in this game. Apart from that, implementing the DUNA increases a sense of pride in local culture and promotes cooperation and social interaction between library users.

The conclusion was that the DUNA game at UNAIR library can be an effective means of bringing back the traditional Indonesian Dakon game in the digital era. It is hoped that this research can encourage the application of other traditional games at library environments and society in general.

The purpose of this paper reporting an exploratory pilot study is to examine how participant engagement in design thinking varies when playing and fixing (playfixing) three partially complete games (broken games).

The data for this study consist of transcripts of five playfixing sessions with a total of 16 participants. Each session focused on one of three games. The authors used Winn’s (2009) design-play-experience framework to analyze features of each game that might relate to differences in design thinking. Next, the authors coded each playfixing session’s transcript to identify patterns of design thinking. Finally, these findings were used to make conjectures about how design features and flaws might encourage particular forms of design thinking.

The findings indicate how playfixing tabletop games with varied levels of complexity, playability and rule definition lead to different patterns of design thinking.

This is a first step toward understanding how the constraints associated with various elements of broken games might direct participants toward desired modes of design thinking and more broadly, contributes to the literature on the educational uses of game making.