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Design Your Own Games and Activities: Thiagi's Templates for Performance Improvement

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Long one of my favourite training game designers, Thiagi has given up all his very best secrets about interactive training in his book "Design Your Own Games and Activities."

Here you will find dozens of brief activity descriptions, 32 chapters, and 30 fully described training activities neatly compiled in one book. Need a better justification for this treasure chest? Fine--Thiagi describes 10 workplace trends that demand interactive strategies, including teamwork, learning organizations, and the changing characteristics of learners. The appendices include a glossary of 62 interactive strategies, indices of the activities in the book, and dozens of resources on everything from the design of interactive strategies to theory to workplace applications to websites on interactive strategies. Plus, a CD with the instructions and handouts for each of those 30 fully described games, ready for you to print off and use.

Each chapter covers a specific type of interactive strategy, and starts with an example. Thiagi then outlines the benefits, uses, and limitations of the strategy. Finally, one of those fleshed out examples is provided. Although the game can be played in a training session as is, you have enough information to adjust it to your own audience's needs. Plus the debriefing questions provided for each activity are extremely helpful.

I've used most of these activities, and found that this gem of a book has paid for itself many times over. TOP TIPS is an excellent game for sharing best practices. THIRTY-FIVE makes a great session review. TRIPLE-JOLT's Team Poker I is one of my favourite team-building exercises. QUICK DRAW illustrates cooperative creativity very well. This one volume alone can create the core for scores of training sessions--at a fraction of the price of many training activity sets available through other sources.

This one comes highly recommended.

As a university lecturer, I have often thought how much of teaching is actually game design. A lot of what I do is design activities to provide certain kinds of experience for my students. And while fun is not the primary goal of these activities, every teacher knows the importance of making exercises engaging and entertaining.

With this in mind, I went looking for books which addressed the design of such activities. If teachers have been doing it for generations, surely someone has stopped and asked how to do it well? There seem to be endless books cataloguing class exercises others have designed for one purpose or another, but I have found very little work that analyses why these exercises work and how new exercises might be designed.

In my search, this book caught my eye. Both the title and the publisher's blurb ("The most highly acclaimed authority on games for performance improvement shares his game-building secrets.") promise to teach you how to design your own games, and maybe let you in on some of the ideas behind their function.

Sadly, it is not so. What you get is 30 or so briefly-described `template' games. which you can fill out with your own material. There is no discussion of learning theory or design principles. There is just "add your topic material here". Thiagi's secrets are still his own.