List of passionate Agilists who intended to come, but unfortunately will not be able to make it. Maybe see you the next time

(Yves Hanoulle)—sadly can't come

I work as a external Agile coach helping people, teams and companies in EMEA. I have been hooked on Agile games ever since I played the XP Game (http://www.xpgame.be)  (somewhere around 2003/2004)

I created a few games my self. (the leadership game being the most popular one)

on June 17 I started the Agile Games google group (http://www.agileGames.org) . (If you are interested in the topic please join the 188 people already on this group)

Together with some other coaches I twitter one question every day since 1 January: http://www.twitter.com/retroflection

I started to gather Agile Quiz questions to ask during a training: http://twitter.com/#!/YvesHanoulle/statuses/28003648719

My website with blog, slides, pictures, books, calendar etc is http://www.hanoulle.be 
You can find me on Social Media as YvesHanoulle

If you want to know more about me, google me

(David Harvey)—sadly can't come

Why play?

For many of us in the agile community, games have become a key part of our personal and professional toolkit. Why should this be? What is it about playing games that we find so powerful? Why do we persist, in a world in which, as grown-ups, we're expected to behave in a grown-up way?

Games are disinhibiting. In play we give others and ourselves permission to act out of our normal selves. Often this leads to moments of personal discovery: these discoveries are all the more powerful for having been played out in real time within our group.

Whether we're playing a board game, a team game, playing online or in an improv group, games give us the experience of adopting a different set of rules. This is important: once we’re aware of the rules, we can, if we choose, play by a different set of rules, and change them if we want. We increase our sensitivity to the unwritten rules – organizational, social and cultural – that condition our behaviours. Too often we don't bring this insight back to our 'real' lives (read Luke Reinhart’s The Dice Man for an account of what might happen if we do).

Playing with others unlocks the joy of collaboration. Even in fiercely competitive sports, the opponents need each other and rely on each other, no matter how much they want to beat each other. Two or more individuals come together to create something that otherwise couldn't exist (coincidentally, this is why golf, fishing, or playing against a computer are such impoverished experiences). The creative aspect of play is often overlooked, particularly by those who see them either as opportunities for victory, or as nothing more than exercises in socialization or team-building.

When we’re paying well, we experience group flow at its purest. Focus, fluency and absorption are all things we need to cherish.

Games provide us with a personal and team laboratory for double-loop learning. In a world of work that – for better or worse – is becoming increasingly pressured and focussed on delivery, this is hugely valuable.

At Play4agile I’m looking forward to meeting and playing with others in exploring how play can energise our lives. I’m particularly interested in the use of play to unlock collaboration and innovation, and would very much like to develop these ideas with participants by developing games that use music to spark creativity.

David Harvey

www.teamsandtechnology.com

david@teamsandtechnology.com

@david_harvey

(Anders Ramsay)—sadly can't come

Hi Everyone!

For the last 15 years, I've been making products easier to use and providing clients with the solutions they wanted but did not know how to ask for. I am currently an Experience Designer and Product Strategist at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with a deep Agile tradition.  Serious games play a central in my work, as coach and org. transformer.

What's your experience using Games in coaching teams toward being Agile / Lean?

Games are an essential part of our highly workshop-oriented Inception phases, in which I run everything from Product Box to Design Studio (an Agile form of Charrette) to any number of ad-hoc games.  We use games to help customers make very tough business decisions, to uncover information they did know that they know (as I think Luke Hohmann would have put it) and help teams with highly divergents opinions find consensus.  Games are basically part of the ThoughtWorks DNA.

What do you plan to learn / explore / play at this conference?

I want to learn about new games, new methods, new approaches to designing, facilitating and learning from games.  I am especially interested in how games are applied outside of the software domain.

How do you plan to contribute? 

I would like to facilitate one or more of the games we do at ThoughtWorks, or pair with another attendee so that we can cross-pollinate our thinking.  One pattern in particular that I would like to share is how to integrate Design Studio and Product Mapping (aka Story Mapping)

Please feel free to get in touch by email at andersr at gmail dot com or Twitter at @andersramsay or stop by my blog at andersramsay.com 

(Portia Tung)—sadly can't come

I'm Portia Tung and have a number of roles including Agile Coach, consultant, storyteller and games maker. I'm driven by two goals when working with others: 1) to release human potential; 2) to help people do more of what they love. Games are a great way of achieving these two goals.

I've been playing Agile games since 2005, my first game being The XP Game, invented by Pascal Van Cauwenberghe and Vera Peeters. Since then, I've been working with Pascal and Vera to improve and create more learning games (such as "The Bottleneck Game" based on Goldratt's Theory of Constraints) which you can download to play, for free, from www.agilecoach.net.

I'm the creator of Agile Fairytales (www.agilefairytales.com), games and interactive sessions that reconnect people through their common childhood experience of storytelling. Each Agile Fairytale is carefully selected to address problems we may encounter as we strive to improve as a member of a team.

Agile Fairytales you might recognise include "The Yellow Brick Road - Agile Adoption Through Peer Coaching" at XPDay London 2007 and "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall... Why Me?" at Agile 2008 (featuring Snow White and the Seven Dwarves).

I want to learn:
-> new games to play with my teams so we can become better than we were yesterday every day
-> about games facilitation (and share what I've learned about it)
-> how to design short, effective games (less than 30 minutes)

I want to also:
-> meet others who want to create a game together!
-> share a game or two (and apply what I've learned from the conference to improve them lots) so that the games can provide even more value to future gamers!

(Pascal Van Cauwenberghe)—sadly can't come

I'm a consultant who tries to make people's work lives better and more rewarding. Games are one of the many tools I use. I co-founded the Belgian XP User group and XP Days Benelux.

I caught the game creation bug early. I didn't buy a computer to play games like all the other children. I bought a computer to *make games*. That was more fun. I learned that it takes a lot of experimentation, iteration and testing (and a little bit of inspiration) to make something that is fun to play.

In 2000 Vera Peeters accidentally invented the XP Game and I was in the right place to catch all the ideas. Until then we weren't able to explain (let alone convince) anyone outside of our development team to play with our XP team. The XP Game made project managers, product managers and CEOs to play silly games. Afterwards they asked us if they could do XP for real. We continued to improve the game, showed it to other people and presented it at XP conferences in Europe and the US in 2001.

We set the XP Game free and received lots of tales from people who'd played the game, the wonderful reactions they got and their ideas for improvements.
Giving the XP Game away for free was probably the wisest investment I ever made.

Since then I've continued to create games with Vera, Portia Tung and others freely available from http://www.agilecoach.net

I'd like to learn
* to make simpler, smaller, more focused games
* some new games creation techniques
* how to facilitate games and training better
* how to help teams *apply* what they've learned immediately and get results. Reduce the difference between learning and doing
* fresh ideas on learning, games and simulations from outside of IT/Agile

Many years ago, I participated in the creation of a games-creation pattern language for OOPSLA. We extracted the patterns from the games we knew. Unfortunately, the wiki with the patterns has disappeared without a trace. Who wants to help me to create a new one?

Henning Wolf - sadly can't come

I use games and exercise, especially in my agile workshops, but not while coaching. I like playing games, but I would like to do more shorter games in my workshops, so that we can make more different experiences. I am sure, that by playing games it is easier to learn and that is my motivation for playing games in this context.

After having the great opportunity to attend Sharon Bowmans wonderful class Teaching from the back of the room last week at the Scrum Gathering Amsterdam I am planning to change a lot for my workshops, especially chunking my material up in smaller pieces and finding new shorter games. So I hope to be able to share some of the games I use with everybody, play other's games and learn, give and get feedback to improve. I have some ideas for new games I haven't tried at workshops, maybe I take them with me, so we can play them together.

This will be part of my contribution, but I am also willing to give feedback and I am open to share and learn.