GameChangers: Bernardo Letayf

Speaker A: Foreign

Speaker B: M welcome to the Gamification Quest podcast series where we showcase the voices behind our new collection on gamification and game based learning, the Sententia Anthology. I'm your host Monica Cornetti and in each episode I sit down with one of our authors to explore the ideas and stories that you they've brought to life in their chapter. Together. These conversations reveal how creative, passionate professionals are transforming the way adults learn. Let's dive in. Hi, my name is Monica Cornetti. Welcome to this special episode of the Gamification Quest podcast. I have a really special guest today. We joke about whether he's old enough to be my son or my brother. So we just call each other he's like my brother's son. But Bernardo has been with us since the very beginning helping us to design and deliver gamified learning programs. He has always been so willing to share whatever he knows and help us in any way that he can. And so my interviewee today is Bernardo Latif and he is actually the only author who got two chapters in our brand new anthology which is we did get a galley copy of uh, so here's our new Game Changers book. It's just way too big right now, so let you in on a little secret. It costs more to print than what we can sell it for. So we gotta get the, we have to make it into less, not less pages, less content, just paper's uh, way too heavy, heavy fonts, way too big. But we'll get that all taken care of and if you've done a pre order we should be able to start shipping those books the first of November. So uh, Bernardo has two chapters in here and they're different. So his first is Problems, Users and Actions Creating the Learner Journey. And then the second one takes a completely different spin and it's called Love, Happiness and Engagement and it goes deeper, challenging us to think about what truly drives learning and connection. So a little bit about Bernardo. He's the founder of uh, I call it an app. It's an application. It's a platform that we use for our events to gamify our events. We've also used it to gamify some of our certifications, especially our level one. And we're looking at how we can expand that into our level two and three. So it's a complete self study on a gamified platform. And that platform is called Blue Rabbit. One word, Blue Rabbit. And in this platform he has, is a pioneer in designing experiences that make learning measurable, meaningful and fun and not like Haha. Fun. But delight. Fun. Challenge fun. I gotta figure out this answer. Fun. And he's worked with educators and organizations around the world to help them, um, build game based learning ecosystems that sustain motivation and growth. So Bernardo, thank you so much for being here with me today. I know after Game of Con in New Orleans, you've got a million things to catch up on. And so thank you for being flexible and taking the time to be with me.

Speaker A: Well, thank you for having me. I'm um, super happy as usual. I love working with you and the entire Sententia community has been incredible for our growth and the development of both things. Our tools, our theory, our content, everything is just an incredible experience all over. So thank you for having me here and I'm also very happy that we are able to have this book coming up. I'm really, really thrilled about it.

Speaker B: I know, it was so much fun. We got one case of these, which was only six books because you can see how big they are. But, uh, we got the one case, it was waiting for us in New Orleans. And I think There are about 10 authors who were at Enola and Gamicon in New Orleans and everyone was so excited. And I snuck one copy back and hid it away because I knew the rest would be gone. I just want to make sure we had a copy to bring home. But you've got two chapters in there.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So what inspired you to write on those two different themes? One is focused on structure and one is focused on philosophy.

Speaker A: So the idea, the thing about the philosophy chapter is for quite some time I have tried to connect the emotional part of the design process with the success of the player journey that I have designed. In the past I have been listening to lots of podcasts and uh, a lot of information about emotional intelligence and connection and how to build actual networking. And uh, the one word that actually repeats a lot is care. So when we actually care for the people who are going to be going through our journeys or going through our experiences, we take it. We take a completely different approach. We're not just doing it so, oh, we have to do it because it's our job or because we're getting paid, but we, because we really care about what the learners or the users that are going to go through that experience actually get from it. It's not a matter of just artificially trying to make something engaging, but truthfully. So that's why we have this love, happiness and engagement. Because as I learned about those three concepts, love, both love and happiness do not have exclusive definition I have to dive into a, uh, Buddhist philosophy, which I think it's the one that has the oldest study and approach to it. But what I like the most is that they explain it simply. So love is wishing for someone else's happiness, and happiness is your ability to enjoy the moment. Once we understand those two things. Another thing that came up to me a lot is studying about addiction and understanding how and why people get addicted. And it's a difference between understanding what's pleasure and what's happiness. People tend to misinterpret those two things. If you're feeling pleasure, then you should be happy. But that's not what happens. People who are addicted to substances enjoy pleasure, but they are not happy. They're actually depressed, which is the opposite feeling of that. And you're using pleasure to mask that. And that's exactly what happens when you have people creating, uh, experiences that only give rewards, and I'm going to throw money to them, and you're trying to give them this approach. And engagement comes from progression and from happiness, not from pleasure. Pleasure will give you a little bit of, oh, thank you so much. But then everything comes out of it. And then this realization and this philosophy, philosophical view has been very well supported by many, uh, other friends. I would say that I have been talking with Roman Rackwith for the past three years, developing another software that we were working on, now merged into Blue Rabbit. And that philosophy is one of the things that, that's connected us very strongly. And then the other part of the other chapter, where we talk about problems, users in actions, comes from understanding something from my early beginnings in the design, which is these three elements actually create, uh, true engagement. And then little by little, you start weaving all those little concepts together and it creates what I call like a triangle, like the fire triangle. So if you take out either users, either problems or actions, then there's no engagement. But if you put those three together, it actually works. And both things, even though they're different chapters, and again, one is based on, um, structure and the other one is based on philosophy. They work together to create the. To try to translate what I have been doing for the past several years

Speaker B: now, it's really good. And I want to just touch on something right there because Jonathan, our chief motivation officer, always says to me, what's Bernardo's line? What's Bernardo's line? And it's not good grammar, but it's like, no one deserves nothing is, uh, the philosophy. So you challenge us to. I know you've challenged me. You've challenged Sententia and our designs and many others about the the need to stop relying on rewards and instead focus on resources that help to sustain the journey. So what's the difference between rewards and resources?

Speaker A: So rewards are something you get after you do something and resources are something you get before you do something. So when you have resources, you get autonomy, you get the freedom to decide what you do with them. And at the same time, if you earn the resources, not just be given them, then you add the value of the work that you have. Add to it if you only received rewards. Again, we go into this pleasure versus happiness kind of thing. We can track this down to many different environments. When you earn your money and you're able to use that money to purchase the goods and the things that you want, that's the definition of your resources. Or if we take it all the way down and you were mining something and then when you mine you find the right resource, you become really happy because it comes from hard work. So resources are earned while rewards are gifted rewards. Very, very few times the value of the reward is perceived by the user. Most of the time what's perceived is like, oh, we got just a gift. And then you get it and then you say like, oh look, it's uh, this shiny stuff. And then you throw it away because you don't recognize the amount of work that was put behind it. When you receive an award, for example, the award itself, the piece of glass or the piece of gold or the metal is not actually the value. The value comes from all the work that you did and the award, uh, is the process of receiving it. In, in gaming just now I remember Sherry Prindle say, the win is a reward. Whatever the prize is not the reward. The win is the reward. And that's what also drive drove us to, to believing this. Resources will never run out of engagement, but rewards will. So when people feel like they are progressing and they are making, building up resources, like building wealth, coming, paying for your house and that you feel like you're one step closer to getting to a goal, that's what gets people happy because you're making them experience little happiness moments throughout the entire journey rather than just nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, uh, nothing, nothing, nothing. Uh, and that is very disengaging because you cannot maintain those levels of, of pleasure. Or we. I don't like to simplify neuroscience to dopamine rushes, but it could pretty much explain like that the dopamine rushes that you get it from one reward, like, oh, I got something, uh, it doesn't stay. It doesn't last long, but little moments of happiness. It's like I liked being there because I experienced this. And uh, that's also comes from the study that happiness is the frequency, not intensity from positive versus negative effect. And that's why I believe that the more we create our journeys for resources, like for them earning resources rather than getting rewards, then that's how this comes from. And that's why nobody deserves nothing. Because you don't start. And I know that those are not the exact words that I used the first time I said it, but my, my principle goes that if you're building a gamified environment or player journey for the users to, to experience, the ground is leveled. So everybody starts at the same point. There's an advantages. You may have different skills than others and you might be able to progress faster than others a it but the design has to make sure that everybody feels they can get there and it allows them to go. And I've seen a lot of people that may have been perceived that in the outer world they did not have the same chances. And throughout these experiences they are all leveled. And it's an incredible competition and people are happy going through it because they feel that the, the plane the field is fair and what they do matters and get gives them something back.

Speaker B: And that sense of fairness is so strong in us. I often use it's a theory in psychology called the Adam's equity theory, which has to do with getting hired at work where I give you a good. I work hard, I do what I was asked to do, and in return you give me the salary and benefits you promised me. So there's that fairness. You know, this is what we agree to whenever that gets off kilter. That sense of being unfair is so strong in us and, and leaders do that all the time by rewarding people for doing nothing and they reward by even them keeping their job. So that's a whole nother conversation. But as we think about simple little just recognition that helped to build the community, I think about this silly little string bracelet that I have hanging on my arm and when will I stop wearing it? But it was a reward for being part of the community, for making the effort to, to show up, to be engaged. And it's. I don't know what is this worth a penny? At the most, maybe two.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: But I was thinking today like maybe I should cut some of these strings up a little bit so I can continue to wear this because it's, you know, it's. Yeah, it's too long. But it's. It's the simplicity of what it recognizes. And I, I feel so much a part of the community and reminded of the fun and engagement that we had. And so, uh, like, I'm not taking it off, I'm wearing it. And, and that, like, if we would. I call these things inconsequential. Has to be inconsequential. Can't be a new computer. I mean, really. Yeah, it really is something that if I. I could go buy a whole scat of these for nothing and. But it does. That's not the meaning that's behind it. So let's go back to that triangle you were talking about.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: You're talking about this balancing act between the user, the problem and the actions.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: That's your framework in its simplest form. When did this first come to you?

Speaker A: So I'm gonna, uh, time travel to probably 2002. That's 23 years ago when I started with 20. 20. Oh, wait, 2001, when I first started playing Dungeons and Dragons. And the first dungeon master that I had after a couple of years of playing with them, he told me this theory that cool monsters, friends and punches make an exciting combination. Doesn't matter what you do. And it has always been in the back of my head. I have always used it, but I had never put it down into words or kind of like design a, uh, framework that you could build upon it. However, it's very clear if you think about Dungeons and Dragons, you have cool monsters. You have dragons, and you have orcs, and you have magical monsters, and then you have your friends, and then you have punches, and you make that mix and it works. It's a very successful game. If you go to, uh, Final Fantasy, it's a video game, an RPG game, but you have the same thing. If you go to something like, uh, I'm thinking about a movie. If you bring up, I don't know, for example, Pokemon. I love using the Pokemon sample. It has cool monsters, friends, and punches, because you have. You and your friends are using the monsters to fight each other, and there's punches in. And any mix that you do that, it has this appeal to it in terms of entertainment, in terms of engaging people. We have many examples that you can learn. All the Pokemons, their evolutions, their colors, their attacks, all of their powers, absolutely everything about it. But you cannot remember the periodic table of elements. And trust me when I tell you that there's far much more information in the Pokemon world. They have far many more things to do that you have to remember for many more elements than each element in the periodic table with their atomic weight, with their composition, with their number, with all of those little things, it's insane. But you remember those because they're connected to this exciting adventure. And you use that constantly because it gives you happiness, because you're going through the journey with a sketch. And then you learn how the Pokemon evolves. And so that's where it comes from. So as we developed it, I decided to change the name School Monsters, Friends and Punches into something that could apply to a little bit more of, uh, a little bit broader audience. Not necessarily making it too gameful, but making it more structured. And when we think about the workplace, we, our job with our, with the people we work with, we all have. I always say, what's the difference between having a problem and a puzzle? So problems are something, sorry, puzzle. You have all your pieces and you just have to put them around in the right order. A problem is a puzzle that's missing a piece. So when we actually have a problem, you have to reach out to your manager and say, hey, I have a problem, because I cannot finish this until I have that. And then the manager's job is tell is either to solve that problem and give you the piece that you're missing, or oh, we have a bigger problem, let's go figure out. And they go to higher management. And that if you approach your problems that way, then it becomes a very engaging environment because your end users, which is the operation employee, has the ability to solve the problem. They has an action, goes to the manager, gets the front, and then comes back and finishes the puzzle. Your job as a manager is to create that environment where you have your people getting puzzles, not problems. You don't give problems to people, you give them puzzles. Help me solve this, Help me solve this. Help me solve this. Then I go back and I finish up finding the missing pieces. I keep going on through all of these little elements. Those three things are always around. In the work environment or in the learning environment, you either, uh, have a problem or a puzzle that has to be solved. There has to be an action that you have to be able to execute, and then you have someone who has to execute those two things. If I don't have an action to do, which is one of the reasons a lot of people feel their, their job is meaningless, right? And that's part of the disengagement, because they don't think that whatever they do matters, and it's very hurtful. So if we have an action Tied to a problem. Whenever they do that, it's going to solve something. And it gives you this spacing and, um, okay, I have skill, I use it. I have skill, I use it. And by the beautiful nature of our incredible brains, every time you do that, your brain learns a little bit more, gets a little bit better, gets flooded with neurotransmitters, neuromodulators. It's not just about four things. It's about 100 things. You get excited, you get a noradrenaline going on. You get. And you get the most important feeling for engagement, which is, I can do this. And, uh, when you feel like you can do it, you keep on doing it. And that's also tied to a psychological concept called self efficacy. The fact that I believe that I'm able to complete it, that's how I tie these three concepts together. I didn't know that my former dungeon master telling me cool monsters, friends and punches was in subconsciously so connected to so much analysis and neuroscience from around the world. It is incredibly well. It fits incredibly well. When you go into all these psychological models and you start understanding neuroscience a little bit further, it's incredible.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's really good. Now, thinking about your cool monsters, friends and punches, you also talk about in your journey, you talk about minions, you talk about bosses, big bosses. So how is all that tied together as we think about progression, moving towards mastery? Are you still keeping the minions? Are you still keeping that terminology so

Speaker A: that, uh, I think that it's a very good way. It's very easy to explain it that way because we all know the big boss. There's always, uh, an easy connection to it. So I think I will keep the terminology, but the reality is that I want. When you approach your design, think about a huge problem that will not be solved with one action. Build it in a way that the user so that the user will need several skills to develop or several actions to solve that. So you have a big problem, then strip that problem into little pieces and try to organize it in a way that you. And, uh, this is very important. I always say you will arbitrarily decide how you would break that problem into pieces. Some other people might say, oh, I wouldn't do it like that. I would organize it like this. And this is where the expertise of whoever's designing it will come around in different ways and different results. So you start building what not are the minutes, but they're mini bosses, right? And then you split those up, uh, in even smaller pieces and in smaller pieces and that's where you get to a point where you have little puzzles that can be solved with one action. And that's how you make this as granular as it makes sense. So you have problem one, like, we learned how to do math. Two plus two is four, one plus one is two, etc. You start with smaller tasks instead of throwing calculus into a little kid. I'm not saying there's not. There are not, uh, many people out there who couldn't do it. But you want to start with some simple processes, especially when you're trying to onboard people into a company. There are a lot of things, and that's how you do it. So you start with the minion of the big boss problem. And that's a very good way uh, of connecting it. This is just a little guy, and it's preparing me to know that the job of this minion is to train me into being able to defeat the big monster. Which is one thing I tell people when we play video games is like, this part where you have to level up and to, uh, get your character to level 75 so you're able to actually finish the game the entire time. All you're doing is train. Because when you face the last monster, you need to know how to defeat all these hundreds of different skills and abilities they're going to throw at you so you can avoid them. And video games do an incredible job at that. They trained you like that? Little by little. I have an anecdote I used in the. In our last session. What is the last level that was designed in Super Mario Bros. And it's a trick question, but the last level they designed was the first one, because what they needed to do, they build entire game. And in the first level, they train the player on everything you need to know. And I remember, uh, watching this tweet from video game expert that, uh, said the hardest monster ever designed in a video game is not one of these guys from one of these very hard games that are out there. It's the very first goomba you face in Super Mario, because people would come in to play and they had no idea what this was.

Speaker B: Right? Yeah. What is this even? Yes. What do you mean? You just get in there and you're like, yeah.

Speaker A: You're like, yeah. I don't know what this. Look at that. It's coming at me. Boom. M. Oh, I died. Right? And it's insane how you design the first level at last. And in my experience, that's the way to do it. And that's the way we have done it for quite some time.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's how it's really good. I mean, it just makes the most sense. It's just like in writing a, uh, a big. You write your abstract last. You're not writing that first. You're taking everything and then breaking it down into what's its lowest common denominator here. That makes sense. That's very good. Really good. All right, if we. Let's break the chapters down a bit. If we take the readers to problems, users, and actions, what is a story or insight you would want the readers to take from that chapter? I know it's hard to differentiate, but this is actually on this. The system, the process. What would be one? Maybe that's what we did. The story you just told is that. Yeah, go ahead.

Speaker A: I think that I like people connecting those dots. A little bit of how I got into it from the cool monsters, friends and punches. But I also like them to be. To understand the difference between problems and puzzles, clearly, because it simplifies the entire design for them. And when you figure. So one of the concepts that we use in the software in Blue Rabbit is you have key items, right? And the key items allow you to unlock doors or unlock parts. If you have an escape room, you know all those elements. If you are working at Monopoly, you actually have far many more problems than you think, because you cannot complete certain things until you have the other parts. So when you get to that point is, how do I design the task the users have to complete? Am I making a puzzle or m. Am I making a. Am I giving them a problem? If you're giving them a problem, then as you build it, you realize, oh, I have to do something. They will have to do something before. And it connects very well with the resources philosophy where, oh, so if I want them to go through this problem, they need to know how to solve these kinds of problems. So I need to give them tools so they get to this point. And then they have to find those tools by solving puzzles or solving. So you automatically start breaking out in little parts and making this granular growth for the user. And the journey becomes naturally engaging. And the beauty of our creative minds and, um, human experience design is incredible because you. Sorry, learning experience design is you realize that you're giving them formulas. You're teaching your users formulas, not solutions. And then they have five tools. And little by little, hey, maybe they can combine these five tools and then you start creating new mini bosses. Or maybe after they complete the last boss, you realize, maybe I can make something even harder because they went through the journey so quickly that now I can create something harder. And I can use these five tools. I remember in the Art of War that says that you have. There's only five sounds. And with those five sounds, we do everything. And I think that we have seven notes or something, or maybe it's 11. I don't know. I don't do music. But it's how we combine those tools that gets it there. So if we understand these two things a lot, many more concepts will just follow immediately.

Speaker B: That's really good. Very good. All right, let's go the other direction then. Ah. In your love and engagement chapter, you define love as wishing for another's happiness.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: But what does that mindset mean for a learning designer?

Speaker A: So this means. This is just kind of like giving, um, some preamble to what drives engagement. In long term, happiness is about frequency, not intensity. Be vers between positive versus negative effect. So, uh, according to Sabik, uh, at, uh, diner and I can remember the third author in their. In their study about happiness, they figure out that people who report smaller bits of happiness so like, answer that they have smaller bits of happiness throughout their lives report happier lives than people who just have, like, huge spikes. So for example, someone who said, I was the prom queen in my high school, and they want to. They think that that's the highlight of their life. They do not live happier lives than people who were just getting smaller achievements throughout the entire time. So even if you never were the number one sportsman or popular person on the planet, or you are not the top of your field, the fact that you're getting progress and achievements little by little, little by little throughout your life and gives you much leads to a happier life. Now, that translated into the play journey. What m I wanted to be able to explain to people is if you want players to engage for long term, they need to feel happy, not pleasure, because pleasure is that spike. So an example is the prom queen. And I was a prom queen of my high school. And then you compare your life to that point, and then there's never another highlight, right? You're like, why can't I ever feel that high again? And it leads to these addiction behaviors where everything's about pleasure, and I have to feel like that. I have to feel like that. And then you're trying to force yourself into an experience that did not depend on your skills or your ability to learn or in your ability to grow. It depends on how popular you were at that moment. And you no longer have the same tribe, right? You're no longer in the same environment and you're now facing much more lonely, uh, lonelier environments, right? Because you know our dear job, nobody knows you there. You're at your college and you have to meet new people. And it becomes another competition because there's other people who want to be popular. So that's uh, an example I like to use about it. So when I learned that the definition of love is wishing for somebody else's happiness and that applies to ourselves. If we love ourselves, we wish for happiness. And then I learned about what happiness is, which is enjoying the moment. If you are able to enjoy the present. This moment when I'm sitting down and going through a learning because, oh, this is fun, this is nice. I like this. And I get my resources. I do not get just gifts and rewards. I'm getting my resources. And I see can, oh, now I can this, now I can unlock this. And one of the most engaging components we have is knowledge. You now know how to open the door. You now know how to solve this problem. You now know how to talk to your managers. You now know how to go and present to upper management. And those elements drive engagement widely. Those things get people nervous because they're like, I'm going to be testing my own skills at presenting data, uh, at presenting this. And that's what makes people happy. They are engaged. They're uh, according to we like Nicolas for kiss to fun. And the more serious fun you have and the hard, the more hard fun you have in your life, the closer you get to fear experiences. And those little happy moments happen more consistently. So that's why this approach is so important when you design your journey. Because if you wish for your users happiness, you're going to get them engaged. But if you're not coming from a position of love with this philosophy in mind, I'm not saying that you have to have an emotional relationship with them. I am saying you have to make sure that you want them to go through the experience because they're going to come out with something valuable and they're going to enjoy the entire thing, not just the laptop that they going to get at the end. Because when something like that happens, and Roman has that incredible, if something like that comes up, uh, the people's brains just go through, try to find the quickest way to do it the most efficient way. And efficiency and engagement are actually opposite to each other. You cannot have efficiency and engagement because efficiency will reduce the amount of time to get to a reward as quickly as possible. While engagement is, how do you say, like you, you're making the reward later, you're leaving the reward for later, you're not trying to get it right now. You have to say, I'm waiting on that. Don't worry, I have. I want to enjoy the ride. I want to enjoy this part.

Speaker B: It's really good. There's so much there to unpack. So as we think about even just in learning, the desire to make everything into these little uh, snackable micro. Micro that that's going to somehow actually be sustainable or create change if I just create these little snackable lessons. And we know that that's not. And the other part of that that I find so interesting is again, I'll go back to our desire to just spoon feed information to our learners. It's actually creating a disengagement by doing that rather than putting them at risk to. Yeah, it's really good. All right. So as we think about learning experience design, game based learning, gamification, where do you see this going as a field, as a. Has a design tool? I know, I just saw a recent poll that was done at Dev Learn and they were like, would you rather have gamification or scenario based? And it was just like people were voting, it was pretty equal, like, no, I want things, I want my lessons to be gamified. Or. And it's kind of could be an overlap actually. So. Yeah, where do you see it going?

Speaker A: I think that it's going to go in absorbing everything at the same time because we can say, oh, it's going to be a scenario based thing. One of the ways I approach gamification as it is where you can connect multiple experiences, one to each other and you create a framework that tracks the progress between all of them. The best example I always give is you can gamify the training of chess, but you cannot gamify a uh, game of chess because that's a game, that's a thing. That's your tool. So you can use a simulation, you can use scenario based learning, you can use game based learning, you can use whatever you want. And the gamification, it's kind of like the umbrella that connects them all and it's nothing else but a framework that will be connecting. Oh, you finish this, you get this amount of energy, this amount of points, this amount of measurable metric. Right? Measurable metric, look at my English. But you get that and with those points you can compare from where you were before and where you're going. And then you have this thread that's connecting everything. I do not like when people say, ah, uh, what do you like more? Do you like this or that? How about we like everything more? Our brains have the capacity to be, oh, I like red and I like green equally the same and I don't have a specific preference. Oh, but you have to choose. Why do I have to choose? I can. We are in. Fortunately, uh, we're in 2025 and we can choose many things and we can be happy with all of it. So we can have a scenario based learning that's also gamified or a gamified module within an entire scenario. So it does not mean that we have to choose one of each other. And as you said, the polls are pretty clear that we can choose both of them. People are close to each other. Well, choose both. Uh, we all get down to. It all boils down to the amount of time you have to produce your content. So if you have enough time to produce both of them and you think that the user journey is going to be engaging enough and your users are going to benefit from both of those things together, definitely do it. But if not, there is no way we can say, oh, scenario based is better than gamification or game based learning is better than scenario based or than simulations. There's absolutely no way you can say that because what makes them, what actually makes the measurement matter is whether the user learns or not. And the user is able to apply those learnings later down the road and whatever you use is going to be successful. But we love to get into this absurd competition and I think that should not be the case. I think that the industry is evolving into absorbing everything under user experience design and we need to stop thinking that user experience is something that software developers do on their applications. User experience design is that people are users and we use tools and we use things. And you can have a user experience design in a conference, going through all the vendors within the booths and everything and you can have a uh, user experience design in a completely virtual environment where they are going through something similar and it has nothing to do with the interface. User experience design, learning experience design. That is what we want to do. We want them to experience and learn through it. That's how I see the field evolving, where we are going to be able to use all these incredible tools we have to improve our users experience and take humanity further. That's what's going to happen.

Speaker B: Uh, yeah, that's really good. I often think about the workplace as many workplaces still have some kind of like a Certification that people have to take after they've taken a learning program, and they have to get X percentage on that in order to keep their job. And I think, well, if you only have to get 70%, what was the 30% that wasn't important? And why did we waste our time teaching it to that? Ah, but there's just. I see that we have so many good ways to help our learners learn. And I'll go back to. In the corporate world, if they need to learn something to do their job, then we. It's our responsibility to make sure that they are learning it and they understand it and they can apply it.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And they understand why it's important and why we're doing it this way. Not that nothing ever changes because things work till they don't work anymore. But for right now, this is the company's culture. This is, uh, our philosophy. This is what we're doing. And we as learning designers, need to help them to be successful in doing that. And rather than treating any kind of training, learning experience is just another L and D initiative. I don't even know why we're wasting our time on this, that this is something important for the success of, um, our employees. And I always go back to when we think about happiness. Our employees are happy when they have meaningful work, when they, um, they have good relationships at work. They don't have to be best friends, but there has to be a sense of camaraderie when they believe their manager cares about them and their success and how they fit in. And all these things can be accomplished in how we design and deliver our learning programs. We can help our managers to be successful. We can help our employees to be successful. And there's so many tools out there. And if you've never experienced Bernardo's Blue Rabbit, it's bluerabbit IO. I would suggest you take a look, but it'll be different next week than it looks this week, because what you see in Bernardo is what you see. He's always learning and he's always thinking, how can this be more engaging? What can I. What's one little tweak I can make? And so I don't mean literally week to week, but you will learn and grow in the Blue Rabbit platform, just like Bernardo does, because it just, um, he just keeps making it better and better. Bernardo, thank you so much for spending time with me today. Both your chapters, they're different, and they're both hugely relevant to what we're doing in learning design. And I appreciate both your heart for our learners and experienced designers as well as your framework which really brings that balance into good design. And so you think about empathy and even logic and the soul of a person in love. So you bring all of that into what you're designing. So thank you for spending your time with us. Don't forget Bernardo's has two chapters, Problems, Users and Actions and also Love, Happiness and Engagement. So very different but both really huge in design. So we're still doing pre sales. Pre sales will continue to about the first member whenever we can open that up and make sales available. You also can be international because there is a place because where we print they have print. How do you ever you call it? They're distributed across the globe so you don't have to be just in the US to do a pre sale or the order of the book. It will print most likely very local to where you are. So we'll be able to get those printed and shipped to you. So uh, again Bernardo, thank you for joining me on the Gamification Quest podcast. Always a delight to be spending time with you and I look forward to uh, seeing and exploring more and more of what Blue Rabbit brings to the table along with you as far as learning experience design. Thank you again.

Speaker A: Thank you Monica. I look forward to enjoying the ride a little longer with you as well.

Speaker B: Thanks. Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Gamification Quest Podcast series. If you'd like to go deeper, you can get your own copy of the Sententia Anthology where you'll find all of our authors chapters collected in one place. Simply go to www.sententiagamification.com anthology and if you're ready to take the next step in your own practice, visit our homepage at www.sententiagamification.com to explore our certification programs and our community of practice. Until next time, keep designing. Learning that engages and transforms.