Gamestorming 2.0

Preface

In 1807, the Grimm brothers began collecting folk tales that, up until that point, had never been written down. In 1812, they published a collection of 86 tales under the title Children’s and Household Tales. By the seventh edition, the last published in their lifetime, the collection had grown to 211 tales. If not for the work of the Brothers Grimm, we might never have heard such stories as “Rumpelstiltskin,” “Snow White,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Rapunzel,” “Cinderella,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” and “The Frog Prince.”

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were motivated by a few things: as philologists, they wanted to understand the linguistic elements of the stories and their sources; as historians, they wanted to record the stories as they were told in households; as storytellers, they wanted to entertain, and as Germans (although there was no single German state at the time), they were interested in understanding and developing a sense of common identity among German-speaking people.

More than 15 years ago, the coauthors of Gamestorming embarked on a similar project: our goal was to identify a set of emerging methods and approaches to work that had been germinating since the 1970s and are deeply entwined with patterns emerging in the way we work with information.

In an industrial society, the focus is on working with things: workers are expected to fit standardized job descriptions and perform their duties according to clear policies, procedures, and prescriptions. ...