← Professor Game Podcast
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- [00:01]
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From unsolved mysteries to unexplained phenomena, from comedy gold to relationship fails, Amazon Music's got the most ad free top podcasts included with prime. Because the only thing that should interrupt your listening is, well, nothing. Download the Amazon Music app today.
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Hi, this is Joe from Vanta. In today's digital world, compliance regulations are changing constantly and earning customer trust has never mattered more. Digital Vanta helps companies get compliant fast and stay secure with the most advanced AI, automation and continuous monitoring out there. So whether you're a startup going for your first SoC2 or ISO 27001 or a growing enterprise managing vendor risk, Vanta makes it quick, easy and scalable. And I'm not just saying that because I work here. Get started@vanta.com I never said lead author.
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Second author, third author. Instead of lead author, I say the tag. The moment I say tank. Everybody knows what I'm talking about. I said the second author. You're the healer. Everybody knew what I was talking about.
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Welcome to Professor Game, the number one podcast in gamification, where we explore how games, gamification and game thinking help us boost engagement, multiplier attention and build stronger products.
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I'm Rob. I'm Rob Alvarez.
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D
I'm the founder and coach of Professor Game. I'm also the head of engagement strategy at the Optalysis Group, which is the leading gamification consultancy. I'm also a professor of gamification game based solutions at global institutions such as IE Business School, efmd, EBS University and.
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Others around the world.
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And before we dive into today's super interesting conversation with Raul, if you're struggling with retention, if you're struggling with churn.
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With engagement in your product or service.
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Want to turn that around? We got you covered. Let's have a chat right away. Just go ahead and find the link in the description.
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E
So engagers.
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D
Welcome back to another episode of the Professor Game podcast.
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E
And we have Raul with us today. So, Raul, we need to know, are you prepared to engage Game on?
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C
Let's do this.
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E
Yes, let's go. Because we have Raul, who is Raul Mora, who is a professor at Universidad Pontificia Bolivarana in Medellin, Colombia. Now also from Trondheim, Norway. He's been in education for over 30 years, including time as a school, an English teacher and as a college professor. And his research explores second language literacy practices in the city, digital spaces and schools. Raul, is there anything that we're missing that we should know before we go in?
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I think that's a pretty good start. About my Educational career that I'm a college professor living in Norway. Also very proud. I have two dogs that are kind of at the center of a lot of the things I do and I keep them always. They always make my life a lot better and made my and my spouse's life a lot better. I always like to give Conor and Duncan Aid a shout out because they're awesome.
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E
Sounds very, very good. Raul, if we were to follow you around for a day, other than your spouse and your dogs. And your dogs. Yeah. What will we see? Like, what does a typical day or week look like for you?
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C
Oh, that is, I mean, a very, very simple life. Because I usually get up early to take my dogs to daycare, really early. That's kind of the agreement we have. Since my partner works on campus and I teach remotely, I got the mornings off for me. So take the dogs, then hit the gym. Because I think at this point in my life, now that I'm in my 50s, I really need to take extra care of my body. So I always spend small amount of time at the gym, then do a little bit of work before I pick up the dogs. And then I spend the rest of my afternoon focused on university stuff. So I spent a lot of time sitting here in what I like to call my mobile command center because here's where I coordinate stuff with my classes at university and everything I do with my research lab via Discord. And then somewhere between there is always time for food, always time for movies, time for walks or. But like these days, I would say it's a very simple life, but not because it's simple. It doesn't mean it's not meaningful or it's not interesting. Just a simple life.
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E
Love it. Love it. So let's dive into sort of content, deep questions now because we know you've been working at the intersection of games and education for a while and you've been doing stuff in this space.
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C
So.
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So we would like to know of a time when things did not go well in this intersection of games, education and whatnot. Can you guide us, walk us through that experience?
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C
Yeah, I would say probably one of the biggest challenges as we were developing the research came through the pandemic. The pandemic really brought really. I think it threw a monkey wrench on everybody else's life. But if you are someone who does research, it really threw everything upside down in terms of communication, in terms of doing the field work. At the time when the pandemic hit us, we were in the process of working on the book proposal. Just kind of working on the initial details to submit to the publisher. And that of course, that required a lot of recalibration in our life. And I'm going to say that's where my gaming team were team at Avoidance, which one of the teams in the literacy and second language project lab came in incredibly handy. They were the ones who suggested that we should move to Discord. They were the ones who brought up Raul. Let's do Discord. Discord is a platform for gamers and it has bandwidth. We can create a server, we can create channels. It gives us what we need to continue working remotely without the gamers. I don't know what I would have done. Probably would have done what a lot of people did, which was kind of hybridize a little bit of a WhatsApp channel with Zoom and maybe teams Google Meet. I mean it would have been, it wouldn't have been the experience that it was and that was possible or been overcoming the challenge, the technical challenges and the digital challenges of the pandemic, which then was coupled with my move, my relocation to Norway without that gamer perspective and what my team of gamers brought to the table in terms of helping me, I want to say the word gamify. Everything we did, it would have been more difficult and even in the sense of working on the book, the gaming mindset was the key to how we put the entire project together.
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E
What do you mean by that? Because you're talking about Discord. I am on Discord as well. I'm sure some of the audience is as well. What were the things that, like, what were the challenges that Discord was helping with? And as well that gaming mindset that you're referring to.
- [07:17]
C
So I would say first of all, Discord, it was the fact that as Discord is a sale, it's a more self contained platform in terms of communication in the sense that you can have conference calls, that you can have back channels for text communication and have, for example, different teams split within the server, but then have communal spaces where every part, every member of the lab can communicate and talk to each other. And then the fact that if I need to be with my team, I don't have to, I don't have to start. Yeah, here's a Zoom link. Like, because kind of like we always do, here's a, here's a zoom link, here's a teams link. I simply say, look, I need everybody on this particular and this video channel in half an hour and everybody comes there. So having that and then having everybody in one space where we can continue building the community. Because let's be honest, some of these other platforms, they're not very community friendly. I would say, like, yeah, I don't think you can build a community on Zoom and you can build a group on WhatsApp, but building a community in the sense you could on Discord, it's not going to happen on WhatsApp. And Teams is not the place for that either. So as I have a lab that's also a community of learners, a community of teachers, that place afforded us a possibility to continue communication, to continue building the projects, to continue building what we did. And when I think about the gamer mentality, the gaming mindset, specifically in the case of the gaming research that we.
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Do.
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C
It was the idea that if we are doing research on gaming, we cannot think of doing research in the traditional metrics that we would do research. Otherwise, it means no. Let's get into this gaming mindset and start asking questions like the questions I started asking my team, how do gaming teams operate? So I have in my team, and I have my team, some semi professional and professional gamers. I want to get into that mindset to help to introduce them and mentor them better into what it means to do research in digital spaces. I want to start with what they know, tell me how teams operate, walk me through the process, and then I can start creating parallels between what gaming teams do and what research teams do. And from that parallel, they know what we're talking about. So as we start gamifying everything, we start thinking of the language. So when we were writing the chapters, and this is an example, I never said lead author, second author, third author, if I start with that, my teams are going to be like, you have no idea what you're talking about. But I started using gaming terminology that you would find in dual MMORPGs or MOBAs. And I said instead of lead author, I say the tank. The moment I say tank, everybody knows what I'm talking about. I said, the second author, you're the healer. Everybody knew what I was talking about and they knew the functions they had to perform in the process of writing. So tank, healer, dps. And that gave them a better outlook on what they were supposed to do in the process. If I start with the traditional language of okay, this is what the lead author does, this is what the second author. It should not take me twice as long as. And they might still have questions. But when I go with the gaming lingo, with the gaming mindset into the research endeavor, they knew exactly what to do. That saved me time, especially in a project where we had a lot of turnaround over the past three or four years. Some people came into the project. People left, but the people who left because we already had the language and this culture integrated into the project, easing into the project was easier because, oh, they might not know a lot about research, they might not know a lot about writing, but they know a lot about gaming. We start from there and we build the rest.
- [11:48]
E
Sounds amazing. Sounds amazing. And, Raul, how about you guide us through some of the victories as well? Because that was one of the challenges that you faced, Right. The pandemic hit. We don't know what to do with this. What about some of the victories? Can you guide us through that?
- [12:03]
C
Oh, that's a beautiful question. I think probably the biggest victory so far. And I'm going to return to the book because seeing this book see the light of day, that embodied even how we define victory. So in that work, we define victory not simply as winning, but as staying committed and engaged. So it says victory, there's an element is, yeah, the actual winning that happens in the games, but also how even when you don't win, you still remain committed, how you still continue coming back to those games. And seeing this project coming to fruition for everybody was the ultimate victory because you could see that there was this quest, there were a series of quests, there was this journey, there was the whole story mode that was building the proposal, going through the review, working on the chapters, putting all the final touches until we have. Now everybody is getting their free copies in the mail, and I see them on social media, unboxing this book and holding it in their hands and saying, it finally happened after all these years. One of my students posted on social media after all these years, and I'm like, yes, after all these years. So that for us was the sense of victory in the sense of we had doubts in the process. We had questions whether we. I mean, there were moments we were wondering, are we ever going to finish this? But we always went back to the gamer ethos, we always returned to that ethos, and we continued, we persevered, and that brought us to this victory. So the idea, the notion, the fact that we know people are recognizing the existence of this book, that people are already talking about this book, especially a book that comes from Latin America, that comes from a group of writers who are writing in English as their second language. So it means throw an extra hurdle into the process that is not simply writing an academic book, but in a language you're still learning that all of us, to a higher or less degree, are still learning or still navigating or still trying to master. That brings a sense of victory. And that, I think, is what's propelling us to think about, yeah, where can we go with this? Where can we go further with how we understand gamification? Well, we go further into exploring other areas of video games we haven't explored as of yet.
- [14:54]
E
Amazing. And you know, with all the work you've done, I'm guessing that you've come up with some sort of process that you've observed, that you tested. If you were to use games for any of your project, your future projects or past projects, how do you do it? What happens? You know, what happens. How does it start? What are the steps? If there are any. How does it work?
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C
Essentially, how it usually starts is. And that's why it's important to bring the gamers as designers of the entire enterprise, because they are the ones who give me the perspective of what games are worth exploring. If I come to this from that language perspective, that linguistic perspective, it's possible that I'm going to go into the usual games or since I don't have the extended background, I'm going to start just going to the usual games. So League of Legends, World of Warcraft, Minecraft, and stay there. I may overlook other games, I may overlook the history of the games. So I think one of the things I like to analyze is the evolution of games and how that evolution of games also reflects the way people engage with them and communicate and use language in those games. So if I really want to understand how we play with language in games today, I first need to go back and see what happened in the 80s with Atari. I mean, if I start in 2026 with the latest iteration of Red Dead Redemption or the latest iteration of Geographic Auto or the latest version of Call of Duty, yeah, it's okay. But I also need to look at what happened in the 80s when people were exploring the classics. Space Invaders, Missile Commander Superman. ET Was one of my favorite games. And I'm not embarrassed. I'm not embarrassed to say that one of my favorite Atari games is ET I know it has a bad rep, but it's still one I hold near and dear to my heart. Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm just saying it's because I have a. Have a special place in my heart. I know the game is not top notch, it's not Pele Soccer by any means, but still hold it in my heart. Or you can go all the Way back to Pong and Pong and activation. So this historical. And I like to. There are a couple of games that I like to always, I've been following historically for over 30 some years. Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. And I like to really analyze the evolution of these games because as I look at the evolution of the games, I can also see what needs to be done. Let's say, for example, in terms of education, which is my primary area, or in terms of language instruction or in terms of helping teachers think differently about what it means to gamify a classroom. Like think about what perspectives are missing when I'm talking about gamification. What am I putting too much focus on and what am I overlooking? Which is one of the central points of our expanded research, this idea of how we are thinking gamification and who is, who is left out of the current conversations.
- [18:19]
E
Amazing. Amazing. If somebody were to, you know, work, you know, you were maybe to advise somebody on a, on a project and gamification, but just very briefly, right? You could only tell them a thing, what would that best practice or that thing, small thing be? Something that makes their project at least a little bit better.
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Listen to the gainers.
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Listen.
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C
Sometimes a lot of people talk about gamification by looking at the games and then looking at the games and looking at some of what people say we should be looking at the games. When we started doing gamification, the first thing I said was I want to listen to the gamers. And when I say listen to the gamers is ask them what they do when they play. So don't worry so much about the game itself. Go and talk to and find out those gamers who are already in your schools, in your classrooms, in your offices, in your laboratories and pick their brain, pick their brain and find out what is it that gamers do when they play. And once you start realizing what they do, that is going to give you some very valuable clues about how to rethink the way you gamify things because then that input gets them more involved and they can become, let's say, the focal point of that gamification mindset.
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E
Sounds amazing. Sounds amazing. Thanks for those recommendations, for sure. And keeping up with the recommendations, is there a book that you would recommend the Engagers? And which one would it be and why?
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C
Well, if you can indulge me, of.
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Course, to sit right next to your book in the library.
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C
Yeah, of course I would say, well, first of all, looking at understanding second language, using a gamer's language as victory, and I Say that one not just because it's the book I edited with my team, but because it's one of the very few books where you're going to have gamers telling you the whole story. So it's not simply the traditional route of I go and observe gamers or I look at the game and I start theorizing. No, these are gamers theorizing the gaming. These are gamers telling you the stories from the experience they had as gamers and how that helped them choose the games we analyzed. And they help them think about how they're bringing this to their classrooms and the new questions we can ask. So I would say that's one book that I have found that I would use in our inquiries. One of the first books we read was How Videographers Can Teach Us by Jim G. Is one of those foundational books. I would say, depending on what area, there are some of the classics, like McGonagall's book on gamification, if you're looking want to go even deeper into the language learning side. There is one book on foreign language learning, Gaming, by John Reinhart, professor at the University of Arizona, that can be quite helpful in that regard. Those are some of the key books I have around and some of the key authors I've consulted with over the years as I was developing the project.
- [21:49]
E
Sounds amazing. And you've recommended a few. You started with James Paul G. I think you mentioned the one of what video games have to teach us. Right? That's the one you talk about, that book. Is there somebody that you would like to hear answering the same questions as you're answering today? A future guest for the Professor Game podcast, essentially.
- [22:09]
C
That's a really good question. Well, just give me one second to think about it. I can think of a couple of colleagues who have done some really interesting work in the area of video games. One I would like to recommend is Antero Garcia. He's a professor at Stanford University who's done a lot of work with gaming, but also analog games. There is also a group of friends. It's the Critical Games Study Group. They had a group of colleagues from Rhode island and Baylor University who are looking at really interesting ways to problematize gaming and give it a critical touch on how to rethink how we bring video games into the classroom in education.
- [22:58]
E
Sound like amazing recommendations? For sure. And in this space, as you've been talking about gamification and gamers and especially understanding their logic. Right. What would you say is your superpower? What's that thing that you do at least better than most other people.
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C
I would say the ability to mentor these young scholars, Putting together a project like this, when you have very talented gamers who still are still learning the ropes of the academic process, requires you to have an overly heightened sense of what it means to mentor people. And in the sense that it means how to challenge them without breaking them, but also how to offer them support when it's needed. It's learning how to time yourself, learning to know when you have to take over versus when you have to step back and trust the process. So I think for me that would be. Yeah, that would made it possible that I. I mentor them in the process and less as I'm the professor and they're the student and more like I'm someone who has more experience in certain arenas and I bring that expertise to the game. But at the same time, in this process of mentoring, you also have to let yourself be taught. You have to let yourself be mentored. Because that's just also important. Sometimes people who are in this position of supervising or mentoring. If you come to the mindset of this perception that you have all the answers and you got nothing left to learn and your students have nothing left to teach you, that's going to be your Kryptonite right there. Not letting the student knowledge permeate you. That's Kryptonite. In a process like this, that is. That will be your Kryptonite. That will be your color yellow to your green lantern, that's going to be fatal to the whole process.
- [25:02]
E
Amazing. Amazing. And now we get to the difficult question. Raul, it's time for the tough spot Dark Souls level kind of thing. What is your favorite game?
- [25:13]
C
Oh, that goes without saying. It's Mortal Kombat. I've been a huge fan of Mortal Kombat since I saw the first the OG Mortal Kombat at an arcade in 1992. These days I play a lot of Mortal Kombat 11. I'm not the most proficient, but I like to play for fun. I still haven't moved to Mortal Kombat 1, so I like Mortal Kombat 11. I have been bringing a lot of this Mortal Kombat lore into my. That's one of the reasons in my team they call me the Commander with a K. That K is the Mortal Kombat nod. So that's probably my favorite game and always have fond memories of all the Atari games I used to play when I was a child.
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E
Sounds amazing for sure. So, Raul, is there any final piece of advice, anything else you'd like to say, anything you'd like to mention before we take off? And of course, let us know where we can find more about your book, about your work, whatever it is that you want to go for.
- [26:14]
C
I. Well, I would say first of all for people who are involved in doing this kind of work on gamification in education or otherwise is it's a line of inquiry that's absolutely worth it. Gamers, and we talked about this in a book, often gamers are not that traditional. I mean, have moved away from the traditional stereotype of the little kid who's hiding in the basement. It's crossed all kinds of boundaries. You have gamers who are five, you have gamers who are 50, and you have gamers who are 90. And they're all involved and they cop there in different walks of life. If you have the possibility to find them in your spaces, work with them, learn from them so you can understand this gaming world better. You can understand, you can move away from the traditional stereo, from the stereotypes or the misconceptions about gaming games. Gamers, give yourself the chance to learn about it, even if you're not going to play the game. There are things that gamers do in their everyday life that if you translate them to your work environment, you translate them to your research labs, you turn into your classrooms, they're going to create new experiences, they're going to create new environments. And when it comes to following our work, of course I have to give a nice shout out to my research lab, the Literacy and Psychoanalysis project. You can follow our works, you can follow our work on our website lslp.org you can also follow us on Instagram and TikTok with our handle and slplegion, one word lslplegion. That's the same handle for both outlets. And you can learn more about bok, you can learn more about research, you can find ways to network with us. We're always looking for collaborators far and wide.
- [28:18]
E
Sounds amazing. Thank you very much, Raul, for investing this time with us today, for taking a few minutes off your schedule to interact with us and to spread your knowledge in this audience of the engagers. However, Raul and Engagers, as you know, at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it's game over. Hey engagers, and thank you for listening.
- [28:41]
D
To the Professor Game podcast. And since you're interested in this world of creating motivation, engagement, loyalty using game inspired solutions, how about you join us on our free online community at Professor Game on school. You can find the link right below in the description, but the main thing is to click there. Join Us It's a platform called Skool. It's for free and you'll find plenty of resources there. We'll be up to date with everything that we're doing, any opportunities that we might have for you, and of course, before you go on to your next mission, before you click Continue, please remember to subscribe using your favorite podcast app and listen to the next episode of Professor Game. See you there.
- [29:24]
A
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