"Hold your breath!"

Currently, we are focusing on cooperative games in our game analysis. We want to understand how cooperative games succeed in fostering cooperation and a sense of community between players. In our game analysis we dive deep into the rules of the games and look for the game design elements that are used for this purpose. Again and again, we come across extremely innovative and creative implementations of individual game elements. E.g. for the game element Time Limit. In the 2015 game Bermuda by HUCH! & friends, author Carlo Emanuele Lanzavecchia uses our human body and our breath as a Time Limit instead of simply relying on the tried-and-true hourglass or an external timer:

On “3,” all take a deep breath and simultaneously Start to lay out cards. You may keep doing this as long as you - all of you, together - hold your breath. As soon as one of you takes a breath, he falls into the siren’s dutches. The round ends immediately.

And the fact that the card game Bermuda is also thematically about diving for treasures is a particularly immersive implementation of the game element, which just fits the diving theme brilliantly. Thus, we can easily use time limits as a possible solution for the misfit of too little immersion:

In this way, the game Bermuda shows how you can use the potential that already lies within the topic in a playful way. In my view, nothing else distinguishes good gamification solutions: They use what is already laid out in the non-game context and integrate it into their game design. This is what we can learn from games like Bermuda for gamification of non-game contexts. For a concrete suggestion on how to use Bermuda's time limit implementation to capture frequent speakers in workshops, click here.

By the way, here's another game with a similarly innovative implementation of Time Limit I had discovered at the Nuremberg Toy Fair in 2018: Cool Runnings by Ravensburger. In the game, ice cubes are used to indicate the time remaining until the end of the game.