What role does gender play in game and gamification design? Are your designs enabling inclusion, creativity or innovation, or are you reproducing the problems that you are trying to solve through design? This is a talk I gave at SXSW 2017.

1. Rethink the Pink
Gamification design & gender
SXSW 2017
Marigo Raftopoulos PhD
Strategic Innovation Lab
@marigo
#rethinkpink

2. Rethink the Pink
 Unconscious bias in design
(lazy stereotypes)
 Negative impact on
workplace performance:
• Job satisfaction
• Work tensions
• Mistrust
• Morale
• Turnover

3. How well is this
working for you?
Engaged
Disengaged
Enrolled
20%
40%
40%
Towers Perrin 2011; Gallup 2013; CEO Institute 2013

4. Not all game worlds
are equal
 Learn from MMOGs for the
future of work – BUT
 They are also microcosms of
“reality” (unconscious design)
 Often perpetuate stereotypes &
biased models of participation

5. Motivation is universal
 Performance differences are associated with
gender, but not caused by gender itself
 Cultural and contextual obstacles and
expectations; not capability related
 Gendered behavioural patterns contribute to
a self fulfilling cycle
 Sex ≠ Gender (Biology Vs Sociology)

6. Being Human
Agency, Action, Social, Mastery, Achievement,
Immersion, Creativity, Escapism

7. Who are you designing for?
 Tactical and
short term
 Play to the
stereotype
 Design for
conditioned
response
 Improvement
 Strategic and
long term
 Play to the
potential
 Rethink and
redesign for
agency
 Innovation

8. Meet Audrey (aka “Zelli”)
“The only thing that matters in the game is your skill. I can be anyone
I want to be and do anything I want to do, and no one is going to use
my age or gender against me.”

9. Lessons for the future of work
(1)
• In the future of work, capability and innovation will
require a synthesis of multiple intelligence
• Are we inadvertently creating ‘biased’ AI?

10. Lessons for the future of work
(2)
How do we rethink models of participation, reward and
recognition through experience design for innovation?

11. Lessons for the future of work
(3)
How do we use new media culture to tap into our different
personal identities of our inner worlds? i.e. Second Self,
Gender Bending, etc. for deep insight & creativity

12. Thank you!
www.strategicinnovationlab.com
@marigo #rethinkpink