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According to the UK video games trade body UKIE, interactive games were the gift of choice this Christmas – they were certainly popular with the lloydmasters team and their children.

So with more than one in three people considering themselves gamers, video games and interactive entertainment really are part of everyone’s everyday lives and this got us to thinking – can gaming help the business word?

Tom Chatfield, a Gaming Theorist, thinks gaming has potentially huge implications for personal and collective engagement in business, education and government. His talk '7 way games reward the brain'  gives great insights about learning, collaboration, motivation, and rewards and incentives.

Key messages:

• Experience bars measuring progress – don’t grade performance incrementally, count and recognise all the small increments on the way
• Multiple long and short-term aims – set up many calibrated complimentary targets that can be done in parallel, instead of one endless boring slog
• Rewards for effort – give credit for trying and reward failure, using small reinforcing rewards keeps people engaged and willing to keep trying
• Rapid, frequent, clear feedback – it’s hard to learn if you can’t link outcomes to actions
• An element of uncertainly – a neurological goldmine, transforming engagement when you’re guaranteed some kind reward and know it might be a big one!
• Windows of enhanced attention – memorable moments, ‘nuggets’ that build memory and confidence
• Other people – how people motivate each other to achieve bigger collaborative objectives – it takes a lot of people to kill a dragon

Does Santa exist?

So this is lloydmasters' first blog and appropriately enough it’s about Christmas. 

We wanted to tackle a challenging and seasonal question... does Santa exist?  
So lets take a look at the intelligent and scientific approach:

• There is no known species of reindeer that can fly. But with 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, this does not completely rule out flying reindeer (which only Santa has ever seen)

• There are 2 billion children in the world. But since Santa doesn't (appear to) handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total – 378 million. At an average rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes, assuming there's at least one good child in each
  Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth. This works out at 822.6 visits per second for each household. Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth, we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household, a total trip of 75.5 million miles. This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound
• The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set, the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, plus Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. So, rather than eight, or nine, we need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload to 353,430 tons
• 353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. An 18-stone Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force

But then, what do scientists know about the magic of Christmas?!

For more astounding information, follow our blog in 2011...