Gamestorming – for playful creativity

dmcgroup at the Gamestorming Retreat Vienna

It all revolves around a few key questions – especially for the creative industry:
How can innovative thinking and the generation of ideas be encouraged and cultivated?
What methods are there to help teams find answers to crucial, project-related questions in a short space of time? How can these teams work productively on common ground and have a lot of fun at the same time? And what techniques can be used to achieve all this easily and at any time?
In the everyday life of a creative agency like the dmcgroup, these are crucial questions.
The ability to develop innovative concepts in a short space of time and to activate creative potential regardless of schedules and tight deadlines are crucial to success in the industry.

Between 2006 and 2010, two books were published that attempted to approach the above questions in a new way and thereby revolutionize innovative processes in the business world.

“Innovation Games” by Luke Hohmann proposes 12 games to help uncover hidden customer needs and requirements.
The book “Game Storming” by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo, collects over 80 well-known game ideas and also takes up the idea of using these games specifically as a technique for team brainstorming sessions.
Play is a method of exploring the world that people train and master from an early age. There is a natural learning process in structured play, which makes it possible to develop ideas almost incidentally – in the process of playing – or to create a better understanding of joint teamwork.

A new approach to complex projects for the dmcgroup

dmcgroup has been exploring these new, innovative brainstorming techniques for some time. Several customer projects have already been launched with inception workshops that used gamestorming techniques to generate ideas and establish a common understanding of the project.
What all these projects have in common is that both customers and the dmcgroup team were amazed at how effective and informative the compact gamestorming sessions were for the launch.
In this way, gamestorming techniques have now become an integral part of the dmcgroup’s daily working methods.
In this sense, to speak with “Innovative Games”:
„Playing Games is Serious Work!“

From noodles, marshmallows and soup circles

Since the retreat was under the overarching theme of “team building”, we dealt with games that put creative collaboration as a team at the center.
For the open phase was the one, by team setup loosened round of introductions.
The main part, the Explore game, challenged the teams with the spaghetti / marshmallow challenge to unprecedented excellence in constructing noodle towers.
The Close phase was played with the game “Circles & Soup”– an exercise to retrospectively experience and formulate goals and their feasibility for the team.