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Category Archives: Talks

Shifting from Gamification to Playful Design

This is a light­ly edit­ed tran­script of a short lec­ture I deliv­ered some time ago at an off-site gath­er­ing orga­nized by one of NL’s largest con­struc­­tion-ser­vices busi­ness­es. The event explored the poten­tial of games, game design and gam­i­fi­ca­tion for prop­er­ty devel­op­ment and con­struc­tion. This talk cre­ates a com­mon frame of under­stand­ing about gam­i­fi­ca­tion and why […]

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‘Playful Design for Activism’ at E‑Motive Day 2015

At the start of this year I was invit­ed to demo Stand­ing and to speak at E‑Motive Day, a join­ing of inno­v­a­tive civ­il soci­ety organ­i­sa­tions inter­est­ed in (as they put it) North-South exchanges. In my lec­ture I talked about how Stand­ing works and why it is inter­est­ing for civ­il soci­ety organ­i­sa­tions (or NGOs). I also […]

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New Planning Methods

This is a write­up of my talk at the event ‘Nieuwe Plan­ningsmeth­o­d­en’ (‘New Plan­ning Meth­ods’) in Pakhuis de Zwi­jger, Ams­ter­dam on Octo­ber 8, 2015. Hel­lo. My name is Kars Alfrink. I am a design­er and part­ner at Hub­bub, a small play­ful design agency, based in Utrecht and Berlin. Hub­bub helps organ­i­sa­tions do things with games, play […]

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Three Perspectives on Serious Games

At the end of last year I was invit­ed to give a talk at Cre­ative Morn­ings Utrecht on the theme “edu­ca­tion”. I fig­ured it would be a nice oppor­tu­ni­ty to share the things I’ve learned over the past 5+ years of prac­tic­ing applied game design. I tried to con­nect a wide range of sources with […]

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Five Behaviour Design Principles You Never Suspected Would Work

A while ago, I was invit­ed by friend-of-the-stu­­dio Iskan­der Smit to speak at a Behav­ior Design Ams­ter­dam meet­up. Much of our work is relat­ed to behav­iour change, but we try to steer clear of the reduc­tion­ist think­ing that is quite preva­lent in the field. So I decid­ed to use the oppor­tu­ni­ty of pre­sent­ing to a […]

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The Quantified Good Life at MLOVE ConFestival Europe 2013

A while back I ven­tured out to the MLOVE Con­Fes­ti­val at a cas­tle some­where in Sax­ony-Anhalt to join my fel­low Dutch­men Maarten den Braber and Yuri van Geest to present about the quan­ti­fied self and our per­spec­tive on data and its social con­se­quences as game design­ers. Any time you use tech­nol­o­gy to try to influence […]

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Ignite Berlin on New Games and Wild Play

Before I went on my trip to Chi­na and Aus­tralia I had an Ignite to give here in Berlin. To do that I threw all of our think­ing of the past cou­ple of years on the floor (lit­er­al­ly because my post-its would­n’t stick to the wall behind me) and syn­the­sized it into some­thing that reflects […]

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‘New Games for a Resilient Society’ at TEDxUtrecht 2012

A few weeks ago I pre­sent­ed at TEDx­Utrecht. I talked about crises, unknown-unknowns and the notion of anti-fragility—how we might be bet­ter able to deal with the unpre­dictable if we were to hone our impro­vi­sa­tion skills. To this end, I sug­gest a spe­cif­ic class of games as train­ing grounds, for which I bor­row the term […]

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‘The Strange Things People Play’ at the Hide&Seek Weekender Conference

Here’s the blog post ver­sion of what I talked about at Play­ing in Pub­lic, the Hide&Seek Week­ender Con­fer­ence. It’s titled The Strange Things Peo­ple Play, which was an oblique ref­er­ence to this pas­sage from The Hitch­hik­er’s Guide to the Galaxy: “I know that astrol­o­gy isn’t a sci­ence,” said Gail. “Of course it isn’t. It’s just […]

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‘Love in Times of Gamification’ at NEXT Berlin

This talk orig­i­nat­ed from a top­ic that had occu­pied me for a while. It seems I’m not the only one if I have to judge from sto­ries told to me by friends. Love and dat­ing online has grown to be a very large mar­ket with cut­throat com­pe­ti­tion and a lot of pres­sure to try out […]

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