By Giuseppe Liquori
Burlington, VT– A few weeks ago, on a snowy Monday, Champlain’s Emergent Media and Cooperrider Center for Appreciative Inquiry brought together business leaders, management professors, and students to collaborate with the objective to play with game design principles and co-create an online platform for the world’s first “Nobel-level” prizes for businesses who are doing good in and for our world.
Luckily, I have no classes on Mondays and was able to attend the full brainstorming session, something few students were able to. I’m quite glad I was able to attend the entire session. Throughout the day I was able to learn from and teach experienced industry leaders about how the world interacts using online platforms and how these might be applied to our objective.
What I brought to the table, as part of the younger generation present, was an in depth knowledge of today’s video games and how their systems may inspire the final product. Before brainstorming, I never would have guessed my past experiences with Call of Duty and Fallout would prove to be useful in such a manner. Both games provide different reward systems for continued effort and succeeding, via the prestige and karma systems, respectively.
Throughout the day, I worked with leaders from within companies both large and small. From them, I learned more about the good already happening in the world, stuff you don’t always see on the news. I learned about the potential crowdsourcing to do more than make a card game about exploding kittens and current online collaboration tools such as Front Porch Forum, a tool designed for neighbors to communicate more easily as a community in a neighborhood.
But the biggest takeaway for me was the importance of collaboration. Through collaboration, the potential to do good in the world seems near limitless. All it takes is someone with a good idea and a system of support to carry it out. Martin Luther King, Jr was the voice of Civil Rights, but he had the support he needed to be heard and bring real change.