Two Games to Play Online

Buy-A-Feature

Make a list and price each item. Your list can be about anything.

Give your players some money and invite them to the game.

Players then collaboratively purchase the items they think are most important.

You can review the player’s purchases. Learn how they prioritized your list and why.

Buy a Feature is the seriously fun way to prioritize serious stuff. By including others, you’ll make faster and better decisions in all areas of your life. Professionally, you’ll save time and money. Personally, you’ll improve your relationships with your friends, families, and loved ones.

Despite all of the time we spend prioritizing, we (often) don’t do it very well. Let’s face it: prioritizing a list can be hard work. And since it is hard, we do it infrequently (some might say we avoid this kind of work). Sometimes that’s OK – when you’re picking the name of your dog, you only have to prioritize your list of names one time, and, not matter you call him or her, your dog will still love you. But most of the time our lists don’t end. They change, with items being continuously completed, added, removed. When we fail to reprioritize our list it means that we’re not really working on the most important stuff. And, unlike our dog, if you’re not working on the most important stuff, some pretty important people are likely to get upset. People like your customers, your boss, your co-workers, and your business partners.

We avoid including others in the process because it is just too hard, or too costly, or too awkward. Unfortunately, this means that our carefully prioritized lists are rejected, ignored, or otherwise changed by those who are affected by our choices. Forcing the rest of the family to agree to your choice for the family reunion might work, but you’ll have a lot more enjoyable family reunion if you can get everyone to help you pick it. Ditto for your project portfolio or strategic customer accounts.

And let’s face it: most approaches to prioritizing lists just aren’t that much fun. Using Buy-a-Feature, everyone will have fun…Serious Fun.

Prune the Product Tree

Prune the Product Tree leverages the tree metaphors of both growth and structure to give players the opportunity to prune and shape a tree to build a one that yields high quality fruit. This provides a richa and exciting way to leverage various shapes, images, icons and flexible game spaces to explore many different aspects of the problem at hand. By having an open and collaborative system where all players can add, remove, change or move each other’s inputs, we capture a rich insights and discoveries simply by giving them the opportunity to interact.

Three Ways to Play Online

Just as we do in for our in person consulting and facilitation services, the basic steps of planning, playing, and post-processing results applies to the online experience as well. Games are played in three styles — a “party” a “gala” or a “tournament”.

There are, however, some important terms that you need to know about and process steps you will need to take before playing online. You will of course first need to create an account and plan your goals and objectives. Once you have a clear idea for how to execute you create a project. A project is essentially a collection of games that are played to achieve your goals. You can have many plays of the same or different combinations of games within a given project. However, before playing any one game via the party, gala or tournament style, each game must then be defined player invited to play.

Parties

Think of a party as a “dinner party” — you’re going to be inviting a specific number of people to play the game, and you know each person. You’re the host, and you’ll likely facilitate the interactions among the players. Parties enable to you create games in which you can observe the interactions between carefully chosen groups of people.

Galas

A gala is a way to invite a lot of people to play your game. So many, in fact, that you won’t be able to facilitate the interactions among the players. To play a gala, you’ll invite players to play your game by providing them with a URL. Once they click on the URL, they’ll be taken to a lobby where they’ll wait until enough other players join the lobby to play the game. When enough players are present in the lobby, the system will automatically start the game. Although we’ve found that players can usually “figure out” how to play the game, we encourage you to send instructions ahead of time.

Tournaments

A tournament is an approach that can be applied to Buy-a-Feature games that scales not in the people sense like galas but rather it scales in the number of items being played against AND by the number of people playing. Tournaments are just BIG in every way. However, you will need to call us to get help in making this work online.

Many Reasons to Play Online

With online, social research methods, we can take advantage of the inherent scale and speed of the internet in terms of the number of people that can be engaged and how quickly and easily they can be engaged.

Online tools also eliminate certain time & location constraints by structuring projects that can take advantage of asynchronous, automatic and continuous conversations and interactions.

The richness and volume of data and in turn information that can be gathered via online systems is really impressive. As technologies evolve and mature new and creative ways to engage people will continue to open up new possibilities.

Finally a real driver for using such systems will be to lower the total costs associated with collaboratively engaging communities to help professionals accomplish their business goals.

Different Subscriptions for Different Needs

Our online service conveniently offers different subscription levels for different needs. You can find all of the details of our subscription services on our sign up page.