Author Archives: finnspin

Greetings from The Go Game!

Last week, our San Francisco office filled with the smell of smoke as cities just north of us burned in the worst fire in recent California history. We’ve followed stories of our friends and neighbors in Houston, Puerto Rico and more cities affected by some of the worst storms in US history. Many people around the country need help, and we need a spirit of togetherness more than ever. Our staff at The Go Game has been talking about how we can help, and we have some ideas that we want to invite you to participate in with tips on how to engage your employees in Giving Back/CSR/Charity programs.

How You Can Participate

The Go Game will donate a portion of our October sales to people displaced by the fires. So just by booking an event with us, you will be helping disaster victims. In addition, here are several charity event ideas that we can set up for you to help disaster victims:

Games that can benefit a Disaster Region

1) Collect donatable items for victims in our Giving Back with Backpacks Game

During this event, your participants will fill backpacks with supplies for any disaster region, with items such as bed time supplies for kids or toiletries for a shelter, while enjoying the playful spirit of our bestselling Classic Game. We’ll help you research what items will be most helpful for the regions you want to benefit and get them to people who need them most.

2) Play our Benefit Game Show Our Game Show is humor with heart

We will theme our Game Show around any region or demographic you want to benefit, and points translate to a donation for the organization of your choice. Play dress-up for the cause with our costumes (examples: wear animal costumes for animal shelters, pink for breast cancer, or superhero costumes for any cause because you are being someone’s hero.)

3) Get Prepared with our Disaster Preparedness Game Practice

CPR to the beat of Stayin Alive and learn other important safety protocols for how to handle disasters at home and at work in a fun, competitive game. This event can also be set up to educate participants about recent and historic disasters and benefit victims of a disaster region by translating points to dollars.

4) Drum-a-thon for a Cause

When the going gets tough, the tough start drumming! We’ll bring the drums and the band leader, and your team can drum it out while learning about the cause or disaster region of your choice.

Other CSR Charity Games

5) Build Bikes and Bring Smiles for Kids

This fun event culminates in a feel-good donation for kids in your neighborhood. Each team builds and decorates a boy and a girl bike. Test the bikes and your agility in our obstacle course!

6) Be Referees in our Color Wars for Kids

Who will be victorious? The Red, Green, Blue or Yellow Team!? We’ll set up an event where your participants are the “referees” and the teams playing are children that you want to delight. We can suggest a non-profit partner if you don’t have one.

7) Plant a Fruit Tree Orchard

Get out your shovels and roll up your sleeves! A fruit tree orchard provides shade, nutritious fruit, and an outdoor classroom for generations to come. We’ll teach your team how to plant a fruit tree orchard at a community or school site. (California groups only)

Tips for Increasing Employee Participation in Charity/CSR Programs

1) Match Employee Donations

Your employees are more likely to give if they know they can make an even bigger impact with a matched donation from your company. Put employees into fundraising teams and make it a game! The team that raises the most funds for their cause can have their donation matched 3-fold by the company, while all other groups get a 2x match, up to a comfortable cap for your budget. Find out what causes employees value and choose the right recipient that aligns with your brand values by vetting NGOs with CharityNavigator.org.

2) Reward Teams’ Positive Performance with Giving Back Days

61% of millennials prefer to work somewhere that offers volunteer days. Show your employees that your organization shares their values by finding out what kinds of giving back opportunities they are interested in and setting up events for them to give back.

3) Set up a Long-Term NGO Partnership

One-off volunteer days are great, and you can make an even bigger difference for your community when your organization has a multi-year relationship with a non-profit partner. Not only does this provide a stronger impact for the recipient organization, but it is less work for you to organize efforts from event to event. Be sure to only promise support you can deliver on, whether your company has a great year or a terrible one.

4) Track Your Impact

Nothing creates momentum like the feeling of racing towards a goal — together. Go artistic and analog with a drawing of a thermometer on prominent wall of your office to show funds raised. Go digital with fundraising tracking tools like GivingTrax. Publish these philanthropic efforts in an annual sustainability report to build your brand among employees and the public.

5) Recognize Contributors

Encourage friendly competition by recognizing outstanding efforts on giving back campaigns or other corporate sustainability programs that support making the world a better place. Give awards employees will be excited to receive. These can be as simple as a wall plaque or an extra day off work.

6) Set up a Lunch and Learn or Happy Hour

Employees are more likely to show up to learn about a cause if you feed them! Set up a lunch & learn or a happy hour and invite a speaker from a local organization to educate your team about how you can make a difference in your community. Don’t have a speaker connection locally? Post on your social media pages asking friends to introduce you to someone in their network.

It seems like just yesterday you were grilling hot dogs at your Summer BBQ Kick Off and now you’re already scrambling to deck the halls for your company holiday party. Wondering how to keep the bah-humbug out of your holiday festivities this year? We guarantee you can’t find a grinch in sight at any of these holiday shindigs. Fa la-la la-la!

12 Teams A-Running

Explore your city as you scurry around on our Classic Holiday Scavenger Hunts. How tall is the tallest Christmas tree? How many candles are on a menorah? What is Umoja? Find out the answers to these questions and more in our best-selling holiday game.

11 Tricky Puzzles

Put on those thinking caps (or Santa hats) and figure out how the CEO stole Christmas. We’ve got a set of brain-busting puzzles that will require not only your team’s sharp investigative skills, but also their wit and creativity. A great time for the most analytical members of your team.

10 Smiling Children

Spread your holiday cheer by having fun and giving back this year. From building bikes to gathering school supplies for kids, your team will look back on their contributions and smile.

Also, with recent natural disasters in Texas, Asia and Africa, we can partner with you to set up a give back event to support victims of any of these regions.  Learn how to be prepared yourself with our Disaster Preparedness experience.

9 Lip Syncing Santas

Does your team have what it takes to rock around the Christmas tree? Pick your favorite song to lip sync to, our choreographers will give you some moves, and we’ll create an unforgettable music video holiday card that the rest of the company will surely love.

8 Michael Jacksons

Have you dreamt of flash mobbing your coworkers with Michael Jackson’s Thriller? Or what about Beyonce’s End of Time? We are ready to make your dreams come true! Turn your and your coworkers into your favorite pop star in an impressive flash mob. 

7 Bars To Crawl To

Prance to your city’s watering holes with fun missions at every stop along the way. Whisper the secret password to the bartender to get today’s special! Find the best eggnog in town, dust off your karaoke caroling, and compete in some classic head to head challenges. A rowdy good time in any town!

6 Mannequins Frozen

Is your team ready for the Mannequin Challenge? Our choreographers and videographers will help your team get poised and ready for the ultimate game of freeze! This video becomes a once in a lifetime holiday card for colleagues, friends and loved ones when you unfreeze, jump up and shout “Happy Holidays” at the end!

5 Different Decades

Is Bob from Accounting a jazzercise junkie? Is Sandra in Marketing obsessed with The Beatles? Let us throw you the ultimate decade party!  So whether you want to polish those disco shoes or your unpack treasured AC/DC tour shirt, we’ll bring the costumes,  trivia, music, and some fun challenges to get you mingling and laughing with your coworkers like never before. 

4 Shiny Colors

Embrace your inner red, green, blue and yellow for a holiday competition of Color Wars! Compete in a series of absurd challenges that will have you laughing all the way into the new year.

3 Rounds of Trivia

How many sides are on a dreidel? Which country claims Christmas Island as its territory? You’re the next contestant in our hilarious holiday game show, complete with custom questions about your co-workers and boss.

2 Groups of Drummers

We’ll bring the band leader, drums and piles of percussion instruments to prove that your coworkers have more rhythm than a shaking Santa. Pa rum pum pum pum!

1 Planted Orchard

Instead of decorating a tree that only lasts until January, why not plant a tree or rather an orchard that will last for years to come? The Go Game has partnered up with our fruit tree planting friends to teach you how to plant an orchard that will feed a village.  (California groups only)

Submit an inquiry for your team’s holiday party today.

From August 1 – 14th, we are inviting families across Amador and Calaveras County to participate in a fun interactive Wildfire Preparedness Game. This game is free, open to the public, and designed for all ages! Winners will be eligible for awesome local prizes. 

In this game, families will complete creative challenges related to:

1. Home & Property Fire-Proofing
2. Family Communication Plans
3. Evacuation Strategies
4. Go Bags & Emergency Kits

The game can be played anywhere, at any time!. You can play the game on a desktop computer, a tablet, or a smartphone (all you need is cellphone reception or wifi). You can play for as long or as short as you like, you can start and stop whenever you like, but keep in mind it may take a few hours to complete the entire game. Points will be awarded based on number of missions completed, humor, brilliance, and creativity! 

Winners will be announced via email, so if you would like to be eligible to win prizes, please submit your email address when prompted in the game. 

How to play?

If you have an iPhone or Android, go to the app store and search for an free app called: thegogame (no spaces). Look for the orange logo. Found it? Great! Download it. The password is tio.

If you want to play on your Desktop, go to play.thegogame.com/play. The password is tio.

Feel free to log in now if you like, but the game won’t be live until August 1st!

We also recommend you download the CAL FIRE Ready For Wildfire app. It is not required to play the game, but it might help you win! It’s also a great resource for people who don’t want to play the game but want to receive tips, alerts and resources for local wildfires.

Why are we doing this?

This is a free community game organized by Jenny Gottstein. The goal of this game is to share local preparedness resources and build community resilience in a way that is engaging, memorable and fun! Wildfires are terrifying, but preparing for them doesn’t have to be…

A few years ago we produced a Wildfire Preparedness Game in Volcano and it was a huge success. You can see photos from that event here. But this year, we wanted to design a game that could be played by families throughout the two counties. Because after all, resilience is a team effort.

What is The Go Game? 

The Go Game designs high-tech adventure games around the world. Since 2001, we’ve produced over 16,000 games for over 1.5 million players in 25 countries. Our games are used for training, tourism, marketing, team-building, education and just pure fun. Learn more about our play here: www.thegogame.com

In 2010, we organized the first Earthquake Preparedness Game in San Francisco, and since then have brought interactive Disaster Preparedness Games to communities, organizations and companies around the country. With the extreme drought conditions and alarming wildfires in California, we are hoping to support resilience and preparedness efforts in rural communities through play.

Want to get involved? 

It takes ALL HANDS ON DECK to prepare for a wildfire, and we are actively looking for individuals / organizations that would like to offer their feedback and resources to make this community game a success. If you have tips, resources, suggestions or questions please reach out to jenny@thegogame.com 

We are also looking for people to help us spread the word to families in Amador and Calaveras, and for local prize sponsors. If you can help in either capacity, be in touch!

Sometimes playing in the sun is not always that fun. It can be a lot of work to convince your team to PLAY in the heat. Don’t worry, you don’t have to push your team event off until winter.  We’ve got a handful of games that are a guaranteed good time, regardless of the summer weather outside.

Game Show

Step right up and get those buzzers ready for our Go Game Show! This blend of Family Feud meets Minute to Win it meets Not So Newlyweds will have your team floored with laughter from the get-go. Our witty Go Game hosts will test your team’s knowledge on pop culture, random facts and even company-centric trivia.

Mystery Puzzle Game

Who done it? We don’t know! Grab your notebook and magnifying glasses to help us crack one of America’s most unsolvable mystery puzzles of who killed Zachary Taylor. As leading cryptologists, your team will work through a series of artifact puzzles to figure out one of America’s greatest mysteries.

Indoor Lawn Games

They say the grass is always greener in an air-conditioned space. Bring the fun of our outdoor lawn games inside! All you need is a large indoor space and a minimum of 50 people and you’ll be playing favorites like Tug of War and Giant Jenga in no time.

Leave the sunscreen at home and take a look at our favorite indoor games. Email our sales team to book your summer team building event today.

It’s Wednesday at 2pm and you are bored. You glance at the rows of desks where your co-workers sit quietly transfixed on their glowing monitors, as if they are all being beckoned to “go to the light”. A spreadsheet gleams back at you from your own screen, the sexy allure of its many complex calculations has faded long ago. You start to shake with Facebook withdrawal, as it has been 40 minutes since you checked your last pithy post that has received only one like…from your mom.

You think back to the days when you interviewed for this job. You were asked something like, why do you want to work for this company? Your answer was inspired by genuine enthusiasm, but now you consider any option to shake things up, even writing a Jerry McGuire style mission statement to rile up the masses. You reconsider, but realize that it’s up to you to keep up your enthusiasm. Below are some great ideas for doing just that.

The first thing you need to do is stand up. Your body was not designed to be slumped in a chair, shoulders hunched over, while you type incessantly. Standing and moving around a bit reminds you that you are indeed a living organism. This also gets the lymphatic system moving, which keeps you healthier as well.

While you’re up there, try putting on some music and starting a brief impromptu dance party, like they do at Haberman, a Minnesota based marketing agency. (This may seem odd and even bothersome for some folks. Depending on your culture, you may want to check with management first and schedule the dance in advance). Otherwise, you can put your headphones on and have your own dance party. Your gyrations are sure to entertain those around you who may also be bored.

Now that your body is moving and you have gotten your dose of play for the day, it’s time to get creative! There are probably people on your team or on different teams, who are going to brainstorm in the next few days. Request to sit in on those meetings and contribute to the brainstorm session, whether it be a new marketing strategy or product changes. You will feel more fulfilled in your role because you will gain a greater sense of how your efforts fit with those of your co-workers on other teams.

You can also change things up during time away from your desk. Try a new local coffee shop in the morning or a restaurant for lunch. Or start a lunch and learn program, where different team members can share their expertise. Meals are a great opportunity to meet new people or strengthen existing relationships with coworkers. More meaningful relationships at work can improve your satisfaction and productivity.

Part of the rejuvenating power of a vacation comes from simply disrupting the patterns that lull you into complacency. Breaking your routine on a more consistent basis will break through the boredom so that you feel happier and more fulfilled at work.

Have you ever been to a conference where your CEO serenades you from a rolling disco ball? Or staged an epic team music video to some top trendy hits? We’re sure you’ve at least created a 2,000 person art project by throwing paint-filled objects at a projectile art wall.

No?

We know what you’re thinking — there’s no way a conference could be this imaginative and, lest we say — fun? It’s hard to imagine your company’s annual conference as the highlight of your year, let alone your month. Well we heard one company’s cry for fun and brought our Go Game expertise to Sin City to make sure 2,000 employees experienced their best conference yet. Safe to say it was a success.

Our Go Game team stopped at nothing to make sure these attendees were having a good time during their two days in Las Vegas. From the moment they got their conference badges in hand, the fun was in constant motion…literally. We were dropping people off at their breakout sessions all day as they belted out their classic Karaoke tunes in the Karaoke Rickshaw. When they weren’t singing their favorite Cher song, these attendees were using their talents to make their very own custom music videos with full props and costumes. Once their taste of stardom was satiated, they moved on over to the Projectile Art Wall. Here they launched paint-filled eggs at a series of rotating canvases. We had to give these folks a rest from their stressful days of creating art and music, so we planted magicians, stilt walkers, poi spinners, and dancers throughout the conference. And of course it wouldn’t have been a Go Game extravaganza without a Classic Go Game scavenger hunt.

Our team had SO much fun helping this company get reignited about breakouts and conference sessions. Let us make your next conference something memorable too.

“Click here to read our white paper, “Play: The New Secret Weapon for Healthy Workplaces”

At the Go Game, we dedicate our days to very important matters.  We ask questions, significant questions. We delve into research about cutting-edge advances in business, science and technology.  We strive to understand and overcome the great challenges of our time and bring you the answers.  Time after time, our research comes back to one thing – the pure potential power of one team coming together for the common purpose of building the highest spaghetti tower in the world. Simply put, play changes everything.

 If you read our most recent blog post, it is already old news to you that many companies are facing abysmally low employee satisfaction. On average, only 32-33% of employees feel engaged at work, and according to the Harvard Business Review, in 2016, “21% of Millennial workers had left their job in the last year to do something else.”

So what’s going on?  With numbers like these, employers are seeking to understand what motivates workers and are exploring new solutions to keep them around.

Top researchers have found that in the end, it all comes down to workplace culture.  The Society for Human Resource Management’s latest Employee Job Satisfaction and Engagement Report ranks “respectful treatment of all employees at all levels” as more important than compensation. Company culture can determine an employee’s motivation and retention above his or her actual paycheck!

Harvard Business School Management Professor Amy Edmondson agrees. She asserts that when a lack of Psychological Safety leads to poor communication and disengagement, productivity and innovation suffer. These negative norms make workers less likely to take potentially beneficial risks or participate actively in meetings and collaborative projects.

Modern employees genuinely want to be engaged at work. So how can employers create motivating, inclusive environments? The results are remarkable, and the answer is simple: PLAY!

Want us to prove it? Sure thing.

Jane McGonigal is a game designer and author of The New York Times bestseller, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World.  She set out to discover WHY interactive games make people feel like they can participate and achieve in ways they may feel otherwise limited.

McGonigal outlined these four qualities that games bring out in us:

Urgent optimism. This is the immediate need to take on a challenge, coupled with belief in success.

Weaving a tight social fabric. We trust and even bond with people better after we’ve played a game with them.

Blissful productivity.  Doing something complex and meaningful is more fulfilling than relaxation.

Epic meaning. People love to make a difference on a global scale. 

It is easy to see how these four pillars translate to a work environment. When employees play team-oriented games, they are working together to problem solve, overcome obstacles, and creatively collaborate in a fun, lighthearted atmosphere. This creates trust, openness, and optimism, which are proven to improve employee engagement, productivity, revenue, and retention.

As Mihaly Csikszentmihaly writes in his bestselling book, Flow, “The more a job resembles a game – with variety, appropriate and flexible challenges, clear goals and immediate feedback — the more enjoyable it will be regardless of the worker’s level of development.”  See? Work should feel like play!

Play builds community, accountability, and psychological safety. Employees who feel supported are more likely to take risks and openly express their ideas and opinions. In an economy in which creativity can determine whether a company succeeds or fails, play just might be the newest pillar of the workplace (built upon the strong foundations of spaghetti.)

According to Gallup, the average full-time worker spends 47 hours a week on the clock. So ponder this for a minute: If work isn’t a fun environment, that’s an awful lot of drudgery. Perhaps the grind explains the miserly 32.6 percent of employees who are engaged in their work.

The concept of play at work isn’t new. The now-outdated company softball team used to  be a way for employees to get to know one another outside of work, which translated back into the office with better communication and collaboration. Fun also spawns creative energy and increases employee retention rates. These days, more and more companies—from Google to MasterCard—are recognizing the importance of integrating play into the workday and have taken the concept much further than softball, encouraging staff to play in a multitude of ways.

But what’s the best way to create a play ethic in the office, especially if you don’t have a Google budget or the square footage for ping-pong and foosball tables? Don’t worry. Creating a playful workplace and building camaraderie needn’t require extravagance. (And if your workforce is made up of millennials, they aren’t interested in playing ping-pong at work anyway.)

First, The Rules

1. Play is an invitation, never an obligation: It’s no fun being told to play. (If you were ever told to “go outside and play” as a kid, you know how those words can dampen the fun—at least momentarily.)

2. If you want to establish a play ethic, senior-level staff should lead by example—as they would with any other company value. Otherwise, it will be tough for employees to adopt.

Let the Games Begin
With that foundation in mind, here are a few starter ideas to bring a more playful vibe to the workplace:

Keywords
Before a meeting begins, identify three or so keywords that will likely be used a few times throughout the session. (Select words appropriate to the meeting’s subject.) Then identify an action for each keyword. For example, if “fiduciary” is established as a keyword, ask everyone to laugh maniacally when it’s mentioned (i.e. muahahahah!). Or if the keyword is “team,” tell the group to high-five one another, switch seats or get up and jump. These absurd responses will bring actions to meetings, as well as ramp up the engagement level as people listen closely for the keywords.   

Collaborative Etch A Sketch
When was the last time you held an Etch A Sketch? And have you ever done a collaborative Etch A Sketch, where two people draw something in tandem, each controlling only one knob? Acquire some classic Etch A Sketches and hold a collaborative Etch A Sketch tournament: Pair people into teams and provide them with a simple drawing to mimic. Set a timer for 5 to 20 minutes, depending on complexity of the drawing, and then hold a judging round to decide on the winning team.

Fantasy Sports Leagues
New research conducted by Penisula—an HR, employment law, and health and safety consultancy in the UK—suggests that fantasy football leagues create an opportunity for employees to connect. Of 800 workers surveyed, 62 percent said that a fantasy football league boosted their morale, and 49 percent found it helped build relationships with colleagues. Fantasy sports leagues can be created for most any sport (baseball, football, basketball, hockey, etc.) and the “team owners” can be made up of actual company work teams who choose the athletes together and compete against other departments or teams.

Office Hide N Seek
Without telling your employees or colleagues, gather some random objects that aren’t normally found in the office (rubber chickens, bags of candy, stuffed animals, small gift certificates for coffee or books, etc.) and hide them around the office. Wait and see what happens as people discover the hidden surprises one by one.

Incorporating moments of playfulness won’t undermine the seriousness of an organization’s mission, but it can change the pace of things and encourage employees to interact in new ways.

In elementary school, we probably all had few teachers who said, “There’s no such thing as a dumb question.” And, as kids, every time we heard that line, there was a collective eye roll. But in spite of the inherent snarkiness of adolescence, the point was made: No one deserves to be ridiculed for being curious. It’s a good rule. And it’s one way that teachers create what’s known as psychological safety in their classrooms. The intent is to foster a space where students can feel confident that no one will embarrass, reject or punish them for speaking up.

As adults, psychological safety is equally important, especially in the workplace. No one should be ridiculed for thinking, even if the logic is faulty. Bad ideas, like dumb questions, are part of the creative process. Without bad ideas, good ideas would be scarce. As the great American scientist Linus Pauling once said, “The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.”

Google’s Research
Google, in a quest to build the perfect team,
studied the dynamics of various groups and found that psychological safety is actual critical to a team’s productivity and success. Unfortunately, they also discovered that there’s no simple recipe for nurturing psychological safety within a team. Unlike grade school, it’s not as easy as authoritatively announcing “There’s no such thing as a dumb idea” to generate an accepting atmosphere.

But Google found that honest personal interactions—ones that go beyond small talk, work and the not-always-100-percent-authentic professional persona—help create stronger bonds within working teams. Like any personal relationship, sharing real-life concerns builds trust. And if we trust the people around us, we aren’t as afraid to take risks in front of them.

Herein lies the core of what we do at The Go Game. We strive to design activities that move people beyond office conversation and work personalities. We’ve noticed that if we edge individuals a little beyond their comfort zones, especially while working together, they’ll see a new side of their fellow team members, one that’s more personal and real, one they’re able to more genuinely trust and respect—two key components in any healthy relationship.

How to Help Build Psychological Safety at Work
Of course it’s not every day that an organization can commit the time needed for an off-site team-building experience, so what can be done routinely in the workplace to foster psychological safety?

Bucket Lists
One way to gain new insight into someone is to learn about his or her personal life goals. Encourage people to post (either on an intranet or a bulletin board in the office, something everyone can access) a short list of five things they hope to do someday. These goals might range from visiting a castle in Scotland or reading The Brothers Karamazov to sky diving or learning how to bake bread. Discovering the dreams of others, encouraging our colleagues to pursue them and watching as things get ticked off the list can create ongoing conversations that delve into the personal without being awkward.

The Family Style Meal
Researchers have found that sharing a meal can create a special kind of camaraderie. A recent study focused on firefighters who prepare and share meals together at work. The firefighters reported that this tradition helps their teams operate together effectively and that sharing food makes them feel like a family. This research could translate easily into any office environment by implementing a shared lunch periodically. Ideally, it’s a meal prepared on site together, served family style and eaten together. But, if the office lacks a kitchen, try starting a lunch club—where members take turns selecting where to go—or hosting a potluck lunch at the office, where each person contributes a dish that would, hopefully, stretch people beyond their normal eating habits and generate an atmosphere similar to what the firefighters experience for a new kind of camaraderie.

The better we understand and know someone, the more likely we are to find common ground and be able to trust him or her, be supportive and enjoy working together in a collaborative way.

The internet changed everything. The world gained global access to ever-growing sources of information (both real and false), commerce (both legit and scammy), platforms for socializing and endless entertainment. At The Go Game, what we’ve appreciated most—well, aside from hundreds of hours of delightful cat videos and dazzling memes—is seeing that play is truly universal.

Play is the undisputed universal language of childhood. (If you’re unfamiliar with this phenomenon, grab a nearby toddler and take him or her to a playground anywhere on the planet. It won’t take long before the tots are all playing together.) But, sadly, as adults we play less often. That’s not to say that our natural inclination to connect through play ends
at an arbitrary age; we retain an inclination and ability to play at any age, regardless of nationality. We work all over the world and can testify that play is as far-reaching as the internet.

Cosmina Pacurar, our game producer in Romania, is involved with our team-building efforts in Europe, Eurasia and South Asia. She recently worked with a group of upper-level management mostly in their 50s at a telecommunications company who wanted to play The Classic Go Game, a scavenger hunt that combines creativity with spy-style missions, in a remote mountainous region in Pakistan.

Unlike most Americans, who clamor for selfies and video shenanigans, this group was a little camera shy. They requested missions that wouldn’t make them look too silly, objectives that would reinforce their company values and simple instructions because not everyone was fluent in English. Fair enough. We customized the game, tailoring the language, promoting specific values and making the missions more serious (while still including The Go Game’s notorious humor and playfulness).

Wherever we go, it usually takes 10 or 15 minutes before people relax and start enjoying the fun—much like new kids on a playground—and this group was no different. Shortly after the game began, the participants’ innate instincts to play kicked in. With missions based on iconic landmarks, artworks and historical events (familiar to most everyone, thanks to the internet), The Classic Go Game is inclusive for everyone, regardless of culture, age or religion. Of course new interpretations of the challenges sometimes emerge in international locations, but if there’s an ostrich or horse nearby, who wouldn’t use it as a prop?