SVENJA SCHMITT | GAME designer and co-founder of Teamera, a company for serious games
Svenja, what do you love about your job?
The freedom to realise my creative ideas and watch them in action. I like it when people have an inspiring gaming experience through my work and take away concrete impulses for their everyday lives from our games.
Why serious games?
Ultimately, play is a serious subject. We learn and understand through play and thus explore topics or issues as children that we will need later in everyday life: How do you plan and construct buildings? How do you add up the dice you win at Yahtzee? How do you deal with losing in a game?
Serious games do nothing different and pick up on something that we adults also like to do. Play. I always like to say: we don't stop playing because we get old, we get old because we stop playing.
With our serious games, we at teamera would like to encourage adults to play more in their everyday working lives. Playing is far more than just a pastime and entertainment. Playing is togetherness, communication, experimentation, questioning, leaving the comfort zone. And all this in a relaxed, joyful and motivating atmosphere.
Our serious game provides teams with concrete ideas for collaboration, team organisation and communication, leadership and project management.
Playing - a passion turned into a profession
You're not born a game developer. How did you get to where you are now?
I grew up with 3 siblings and have always enjoyed playing a lot: Board games, card games, video games. And by the end of my school years, it was clear that I wanted to go in this direction. After graduating from high school, I trained in game design at the design college in Schwerin. There and during several internships, I familiarised myself with the various stages of video game development. Following this, I completed a degree in Japanese Studies and worked in a Japanese video game company, where I helped develop an "Educational Game Based Learning" game for schoolchildren. The game was designed to help these children learn English.
As part of this game development, I was able to combine my experience of learning a foreign language with my expertise in game design. I was so fascinated by this that I dedicated my bachelor's thesis to the topic of "Language acquisition through video games".
I then wanted to continue with this professionally. That's why I started to study ludology, i.e. the science of games, more intensively and to look at people as playful beings.
We are now addressing this question in our start-up "teamera": How can we playfully empower teams to work better together?
TEAM DEVELOPMENT IN THE ANTARCTIC ICE
Your game "Eternal Ice" is set in the eternal ice of Antarctica. Why eternal ice? Why Antarctica?
We wanted to offer all participants the same starting opportunities and looked for an environment in which nobody had ever been before. This could have been on a Mars station, in an ant hill or in Antarctica. We opted for Antarctica because it is not quite as abstract as the other options and every player can certainly imagine what it is like to be in the freezing cold, surrounded by icebergs, far away from civilisation.
Working in the flow
How many hours a day do you spend at the computer as a game designer?
About 50% of my working time - but not all of it is filled with game design, but also with entrepreneurial activities: Customer consulting, accounting, business meetings, answering emails.
The other 50% I'm on the move, either in my second job at the gym or wakeboarding on the water.
What does it mean for you to be in the flow?
I love this state. I wrote parts of my bachelor's thesis in the flow. Back then, I put 20 pages on paper in one weekend and it was like being in a tunnel. The ideas just flowed. This state is extremely important for creative people, as we can't produce ideas at the push of a button.
I would like to see flow become even more prevalent in the world of work and for productive phases to alternate with relaxation and for people to stop trying to kill time at their desks.
S.W.: This also requires that you are in good contact with yourself and recognise the initial spark that precedes the flow.
That's right.
How do you get into the flow?
With good music. When I have the right soundtrack on, I can forget the time.
How often do you stand on the wakeboard and think: "If I had my notepad with me, now the ideas are just flowing"?
Not that often. But fortunately, there's also the note function on your mobile phone to capture spontaneous ideas. I often have one or two ideas that come to mind in the evening before I go to sleep. I then have to write them down, otherwise I can't get any rest.
LEARNING in the year 2050
Let's take a look into the future: How do you think our way of learning will change in the next 20 - 30 years?
When I look at school as a space for learning, I realise that nothing has really changed in the way we learn or impart knowledge in the last 30 years. Frontal teaching still determines the daily routine.
However, I am optimistic that this will change. More and more alternative schools or school concepts are being implemented that utilise both findings from learning psychology and, of course, media and channels other than the blackboard, overhead projector or PowerPoint to impart knowledge interactively.
My wish would be for learning to happen "on the side" and for participation to play a major role in learning concepts. Game-based learning should be given more space so that children have experiences that inspire them and they absorb information and knowledge from this enthusiasm.
When I think about how I learnt English or Japanese, for example, video games played a big part in this. Being confronted with a foreign language in an immersive world allows you to pick up a lot of things unconsciously. I was so enthusiastic about the game back then that I didn't even realise I was learning a second language at the same time.
Learning without directly realising it or learning by osmosis - in other words, absorbing knowledge without consciously cramming - that would be my dream.
Svenja Schmitt is co-founder of the start-up teamera. The Jena-based company develops serious games for companies. Their game "Eternal Ice" enables teams to work better together in a playful way and to further develop their communication and organisation in terms of trusting and productive cooperation.
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