bookreview - Gamestorming by Gray, Brown, Macanufo

Gamestorming, A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, James Macanufo

Gamestorming is all about using games to bring up ideas and solutions in your team. The games are used to give a creativity boost. The book starts out with an explanation of the different concepts that are used in gamestorming. The essentials are explained to give a better understanding of using games in business. A game is split up in three parts: an opening, an exploration and a closing phase. During the exploration phase the team should produce nodes. This can be done by sketching and modeling. Important things during this phase are allowing randomness and improvisation. In the closing phase it is important that an artifact is produced. Through selection the best results can be taken out of the game. The book also points out some important skills; for example asking questions, visual language and improvisation. After the more theoretical part the authors give a list of games that can be used in gamestorming. These games can be used as a reference list that can be used to guide a team in producing new ideas and solutions.

The book is a fun read. The authors are clearly speaking from a lot of experience. The theoretical part gives a solid understanding of the different parts and gives body to the book. The larger part of the book is a list of games that can be used. This is somewhat disappointing, because it makes it more of a reference book. After the first part I was tempted to put the book away and leave it there until I could use the games. That is a shame, because there is a lot to learn from those games. The authors could have taken more information from the game-descriptions to make the theoretical part larger. I cannot wait to try these new ideas in real life.

Find the book at http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596804183/

Disclaimer: I have joined the O’Reilly Blogger Review Program (http://oreilly.com/bloggers/). It means that I receive free books that I review. I am not forced to write nice things, so this review is an honest one.