How an interactive audio adventure created awareness of what it is like to become blind

In Series 2 Episode 7 of the Health Points podcast Ben and Pete welcome Michiel van Eunen to the show. Michiel talks about his background as a teacher and how he realized that traditional training methods were not effective. He shares an anecdote about discovering the power of gamification when he found his trainees playing Nintendo instead of listening to him, which led him to create game-based learning experiences like “The Hunt.” The Hunt was an alternate reality game played by retail employees, where they had to discover mystery visitors using specific code words. Michiel explains how the game increased engagement and sales among participants. 

He also discusses another project called “The Vanishing of Iris,” which is an audio adventure created for the Dutch Eye association, an interest group for visually impaired people. The aim of the project was to raise awareness about visual impairments and the challenges faced by visually impaired individuals in their daily lives. They developed an ipodcast app specifically for this purpose since traditional podcast platforms were not suitable due to the interactive nature of the content. 

The story follows a character named Phil who has 72 hours to find his missing aunt while experiencing a gradual loss of vision. The game received positive feedback from both visually impaired and sighted users, and there is potential for similar projects to create awareness about other health conditions or impairments through game-based learning. Another example mentioned is a board game called “100 Ways to Die at Work,” which educates workers about safety hazards in different work environments.

You can listen to this episode below:

Outline:

Chapter 1: Introduction to Gamification and Health (00:06-01:10)Discussion about the guest’s extensive experience in gamification (00:30-01:10)Chapter 2: Early Experiences with Game-Based Learning (02:22-06:12)Guest’s background as a primary school teacher (02:22-02:30)Desire to make learning engaging and fun (05:41-06:12)Chapter 3: The Hunt – A Game-Based Learning Project (06:12-11:28)Overview of the Hunt project (06:12-06:33)Engaging participants in a sales conversation (07:03-07:06)Measuring the impact of the project (07:54-08:40)Training participants to actively engage with people (10:01-11:28)Chapter 4: Escape Rooms and the Vanishing of Iris (12:45-19:41)Designing an escape room for gamification Europe conference (12:45-13:02)Introduction to the Vanishing of Iris project (13:24-13:34)Description of the interactive audio adventure (14:03-14:30)Challenges in placing the project on familiar podcast platforms (14:26-15:56)Exploring the idea of using audio for a high-traffic area (16:08-16:27)Development of the story and involvement of writers and actors (17:09-18:14)Overview of the story and gameplay (18:14-19:01)Aim of empowering participants through the experience (19:01-20:08)Measuring the impact and return on investment (20:08-20:32)Chapter 5: Collaborative Board Games (27:38-32:43)Introduction to collaborative board games (27:38-28:05)Using blueprints and storytelling in board games (28:29-30:59)Example of an emergency response game (28:56-29:07)Importance of shared experiences and storytelling (30:45-31:56)Chapter 6: Gamification in Different Contexts (31:56-36:51)Example of using gamification in a workshop in Cairo (31:56-32:43)Discussing the use of gamification in healthcare (36:18-36:49)Recap of the episode’s topics (36:51-37:17)Chapter 7: Closing Remarks (37:17-37:28)Wrap-up and conclusion of the episode (37:17-37:28)

Episode Transcript:

Ben
Hi everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Health Points where we talk about everything and anything, gamification and health. I’m Ben and we have my co host, Pete.

Pete
Hi everyone.

Ben
And joining us today we have Michiel, who is a seasoned player in the field of gamification and game based learning.

Ben
Since running his first project, the Hunt in 2003, he made and played over 70 different formats with thousands of people, groups, teams and companies worldwide, ranging from serious games to escape rooms. Michiel lives to design games and use the immense power of play in the real world. He is a world Experience Organization founding member, was in the rise global top 25 gamification guru list and has spoken many times at the Gamification Europe conference. It’s great to have you on the show today.

Michiel
Yeah, good day. Glad to be here.

Ben
Brilliant. Let’s get going then. I mean, your cv is mixed and varied, but also really deep into gamification. What was your background to get to where you are now?

Michiel
Yeah, quite interesting. So I’ll sit on my talking chair and just go with it. I started out a primary school teacher, as educated to become a primary school teacher. So I had a mild interest in learning. I also had an interest in theater and an interest in tech. So like 2025 years ago. Oh my God, I feel old. I was working in the early days of telecom and mobile phones, so my first career move was being a trainer in retail. So my job was developing and giving training for retail. And while I did this, I quite broadened that definition because I thought my work should not be giving training, it should be making sure that people in my groups actually learn something. And to me, that’s quite a difference, because I see you laughing, Pete, we can see each other. You can agree, right?

Pete
I agree.

Michiel
Yeah. It’s like a teacher is a teach or labels are important. If you call someone a waiter, what is he going to do? Wait, so training is not about giving training. You have a responsibility to have these people learn something. So I became very much interested in how people learn, and I’m not totally convinced that the way I did that was either the best one or the most fun one or the most efficient one. So I’ll tell you this anecdote, because I had been working for a company called retail result. And I was training, and I did a lot of training with young salespeople who actually worked in retails and shops all throughout the country. So what I did quite often was a two day training.

Michiel
And, well, it was 20 years ago, so I was younger, but really, because I had this educational background. I tried very hard, did my best to make this training as interesting and engaging as possible. But I would always see that at the end of day one, these young people would doze off. And I thought I was doing so well. I used humor in my training. I tried it to make it a bit interactive, but they would doze off. So at the night of the first day, I always would meet them after dinner in the bar over at around 09:00 in the evening. So at one point, I was sitting in the bar, 930 in the evening, and there was no one of my group was there. And I thought, where are these people? So I went up into a hotel room, second floor.

Michiel
And I heard this rumbling, and it became louder and louder. So I kicked in a door, and there they were, all my twelve people, that group, and they hooked up their Nintendo 64 to the tv in the hotel room. And there were two or three people playing, and everyone was. The rest was sitting around taking turns. And the group that a few hours before were totally dull and sleeping now were totally thrilled into the moment, having a great time improving themselves. And I thought, are these the same people? And then the next day, I returned to my program, my same tool program. But something changed in my mind there, and this happened. I saw this more and more, and I think a few months later, I went up to my boss and I told him, I’m not giving training anymore. I quit.

Michiel
I’m not quitting the job, but I quit doing this. I think learning can be more efficient, more fun, and we should stop doing putting people in a stuffy room, under fluorescent lighting, in cardboard tables, listening to a dude like me. So luckily I could found another project for the company, for the same company I used to train, in which we played an immense alternate reality game called the Hunt. And that’s launched in 2003 and still played today. And for me, that was my first game based learning project, our gamification project, although the word didn’t exist at the time.

Michiel
And I thought, this is what I want to do with the rest of my life, make learning so interesting, so engaging that it would play and feel like a game that people would enjoy, have a lot of fun, and in the meanwhile would learn a lot, kicking.

Ben
In a hotel door room to find everyone playing Nintendo. And that was a flashbulb moment, making you realize the importance of gamification. It would be great to go a bit deeper into the hunt then, and to tell listeners about kind of the experience of the hunt and what it looks like and how it plays then. And even today.

Michiel
Yeah, actually. So you told in the intro, I did quite some talks about games and gamification. I think the hunt was, and it still is my favorite example. I think you can check it out. Thehunt.com. When I worked for this company, there was a training company, and we also worked with like 100 mystery visitors. And they would go into a shop, let’s say telephone shop, where you could buy phones in the time. And their objective was to measure how salespeople were doing. So are they actively greeted? Did they engage in sales conversation? And afterwards they would write a report and all the reports will come back to the company and every manager of the company would read the report. Then there were always two possibilities. Either they scored great, which was never a reason to improve, said, hey, we had it. A mystery visitor.

Michiel
We did great, so we don’t have to improve, or they would have a shitty score, and then they would have all kinds of excuses. Yeah, there was just that moment, and it was a busy Saturday afternoon, so there was never an incentive to change. So it was a one moment feedback, so that wasn’t really working. And on the other hand, I already told you, I didn’t have the impression that my training was working. So we had no really way of measuring one. Did they learn something and how can we measure the impact? So I went up to my boss at the moment that I told him, I don’t want to train anymore. But I had this idea for a game called the hunt. I want to use the complete sales force of this company. It was like 100 shops of about ten employees.

Michiel
So total force of thousand people scattered throughout the land, the Netherlands. And I went to play a game with this, with them on top of the real world. So I want to play this game during, just during their daytime job, and it’s called the hunt. So at one time I did a kickoff with these people and it would only be with their managers. So I had 100 managers together in one location in the center of the country. I showed them a three minute introduction video telling them this. In the next five weeks, you will be visited by the mystery visitor. It can be anyone entering your shop. Large, tall, small, fat girl. It can be anyone entering your shop. You have one objective, discover the mystery man for a number of times.

Michiel
And you can do this by actively approach them, engage in a conversation and using a specific code word. So for four or five weeks, we would send in a shitload of mystery shoppers and we built a back end. You have to imagine this is 2003, 2004. So they would only have one pc, back of the house. But we would have made them, like, chat and a forum and a leaderboard with how many mystery men you would have discovered, and people would play against each other and they would share hints. For example, if I was visited by an attractive young blonde, then I would write on the message board, oh, you were just visited by a mystery man. And it was this dark, red headed fat man. Let’s say there would be co creation.

Michiel
What happened during those four or five weeks is engagement went up hugely among people working in the stores. There was really this thrill and this excitement of anyone walking into those doors. You could feel there’s something happening in this store. They became more creative, they became more interactive with the customers and also people that were just visiting that store that were not part of the game, they experienced that there was something. So in the end, they also sold more. And they trained themselves, because this was four or five weeks in a row, they trained themselves to actively engage with people, to trigger certain words. It was amazing. So the thing that I tried to train them within two days. Now, I did that for five weeks in a row on the floor, meanwhile, having great fun and boosting results in the moment.

Ben
So what I really like about that is that even though the people who knew they were past the hunt, they were having a great time in playing. But ultimately, anyone in the venue became part of that game because all the actual players became engaged with non players to identify different code words that were out there. Brilliant.

Michiel
It is. And it was amazing that someone would enter the store and you would make eye contact with your colleagues saying, oh, could this be him? Okay, you better. Okay, you get that one. And meanwhile, someone else would approach a store. Okay, you cover that one, you cover this one. And we could actually measure that. Just saying hello to a customer before the hunt was like 64%, because we measured that in regular reports, and it went up to 89%. So that was just one metric. But also the sales were obvious. The extra sales were obvious. It was amazing that this could be done not by training, but live playing a game. So it was my favorite example then, and it still is. That’s why it’s been running for 20 years.

Michiel
And because of its success, at that moment, I knew this is what I want to do. And soon after, I quit that job and I found a living story in my company to dedicate my life to doing this.

Pete
Now, I know you’ve done a lot of different games since then, particularly you’ve become famous for escape rooms as well, escape room design. You’ve designed a great escape room for our own conference at gamification Europe, before which everyone loved. And what I loved about that is you were able to design one for a really big audience. So for like, I think it was 80 to 100 people to take part at once.

Michiel
Yeah, it was the first time we did that.

Pete
But I want to zoom past that and if we got time, we’ll come back to escape rooms, because actually, what I was really keen to invite you here to talk about today was your more recent project, the vanishing of Iris. And I like this because, a, it’s obviously health related, obviously to us, health related, but also because it was podcast related. And here we are on a podcast. Oh, yeah. Could you tell us a bit about vanishing of Iris, the vanishing virus, who it’s aimed at helping, and maybe describe how people play?

Michiel
Yeah, well, first of all, I have to explain what it is. It is like an interactive audio adventure. So it’s basically an app much like Spotify, where you listen to audio, preferably using your headset. But it’s also like watching a Netflix series with your eyes closed, or like playing an adventure game with your eyes closed. So it’s a dedicated app. And the great thing about it is you are the main character and you get to make decisions within that game. So it’s a branching storyline. You can at any point, choose to go by, let’s say, go by train or go by boat, take a left turn, take a right turn, talk to person a, talk to person b, and then your story would change and adapt. So, technical sense, that’s what audio podcast is. So it was very hard to label it.

Michiel
Is it a podcast? It’s an audio adventure. It wasn’t made before. And because of the branching audio and the ability to make decisions in real time, we could not place it in any of the familiar podcast forms, so we couldn’t put it on Spotify or anywhere else. So we made a dedicated app and we called it the ipodcast. And why we call it the ipodcast, as in I, because we did this for the Dutch Eye association. So they are an interest group for visually impaired people. So just in the Netherlands, there are like 300,000 people with a visual impairment. In the UK, it’s three and a half. And I think in USA, it’s like 11 million people not being entirely blind, but within every aspect. So they could be partially blind or only see black and white.

Michiel
So the eye association is there to create awareness that there are so many people having these conditions and that, for instance, public spaces are not enough adapted to this and to give you a feel of what these people encounter on a daily basis, that was actually what they wanted to achieve in an experience or a game. So how can we have ordinary people? It was quite broad. Target group experience, what it is to become blind. That was actually the first idea. So we actually started talking about doing an escape room on a high traffic area. Let’s say we do an escape room in Piccadilly Circus or in Amsterdam Central Station, but then it would only be, like, four or five people at a time, and they probably had to be somewhere.

Michiel
So that’s when we came to think of, can we do something with audio? Because you can also experience that when you are blind. And why not? Audio is a great medium, and you can create very rich environments. So that’s where the idea came from, to make an audio adventure. So were inspired by podcasts. We were inspired by Netflix, like, doing something which is a series with an overarching storyline. So what we did is actually develop a story with six episodes, and you can play. And they would come out in six weeks. So you would start in one week, and every week there would be a new episode, and there would. Yeah, no, we. Yes, we did. Well, and that’s with a lot of. We always say yes. Whenever we start with something, we say yes.

Michiel
But our company is called living story, and that’s for a reason. We’re really fond of story and storytelling. We’re very big on that. So, yeah, we had a house, and we have three writers working on that. And I think it’s fun to explain a bit about the story itself. So this story is about Phil. You play Phil. He’s a 30 year old character, and his aunt has gone missing, his aunt called Iris, and he has 72 hours to find her. So you are playing this character, and you find yourself in a number of situations and in an adventure, chasing. It’s like a Dan Brown like experience. If you have read the thrillers of Dan Brown or maybe seen the movies from location to location, all over the country, meeting people, and during that time, his own eyesight gets worse and worse.

Michiel
And because you play that character, you will encounter that. Your vision gets narrower and narrower, and at a certain point, you don’t see anything anymore. And that’s what we build into the game, to find yourself in situations. And what does it do with you and with your freedom and your possibilities, and what can you rely on? So I can go about this for hours, but do you get an idea?

Ben
I was going to say, you said, it’s visually impaired people. What was the aim? What was the results you’ve seen by delivering the program as well?

Michiel
Well, it’s very hard to measure awareness because that’s what quite often games are used for. Hey, I didn’t know that before. Now I did this experience, and now I know. Oh, may, I’m not the only one. And I’ve got these people in my family, or that I know of. Oh, this is what I come across to. The idea behind is that by experiencing it yourself, you have a say. Maybe in politics or in policy, when you make decisions about, for instance, public space that can impact people with visual impairment or in education or health. So it’s very hard to measure awareness. That’s immediately answer to, can you somehow see the return on investment on this project? No, it’s very hard.

Pete
Well, I guess what you can tell is how many people have listened, how many people have made choices because you’ve got choices in the branching choice thing, how many people have made it through to the end. These are the things I’m interested in as well.

Michiel
Yes. And I don’t have the numbers now because the measuring is done with another company. Most of the time with these projects, we are on the front side. We are on the design part. So I do know that it was well received, but on a quantitative level, I’m not sure. Well, I am sure that it would be great if we had more marketing so that we would have more reactions.

Pete
Now, I’m aware. One of the things I think had impact, too, from having listened to you talk about this a little bit before is my understanding of who you got involved to be the actors.

Michiel
Yeah. There’s actually a site, ipodcast NL. And to make this project, we really work with the eye association. So when making the script, we used people from within the organization and their clients to help us out. So one of the first things we did in our research is they came over blindfolded us, giving us sticks, and we got to experience ourselves what it was to walk around in a location relying on sound and other. We went to a museum, which was called the museum, which was pitch dark, which was led by blind people to give us. It was an awesome experience. Imagine being in a pitch dark room and encountering everyday situation objects. So that was very interesting. With the script, it was read by people who were blind so they could give us valuable information.

Michiel
And then we used 40 actors to do all the audio and all the voices, all the roles. I think 70% to 80% of those people were blind or visually impaired. That was awesome. And also the site and the app that we made, even though that the target group was people like you and me, with 100% eyesight, we also made the app available for people that were completely blind. So, for instance, the choices that you made are audio driven. So someone would ask you, okay, shall we take the train left or the train at your right? Or shall we go with. And then you have to say to the app, left, right, car, boat, opera, leave, stay. We got very good reactions from the community of blind people, people with an eyesight that this was a kind of.

Michiel
That that they really would love to see more of, use this technology, this level of.

Pete
Just. I had this vision then of wandering around a city in the Netherlands, and there’s people randomly saying opera and things as you walk past them because they’re listening to this.

Michiel
It is. You can listen to this anywhere, just on your own couch or in the train, wherever you are on the moment that you like.

Pete
What would you do differently next time? Would you do an audio story game again? What do you think would best? What could you have the most effect using it for? You had some thoughts about that?

Michiel
Well, I’ve thought about it, but to be honest, from my side, I wouldn’t change that much, because the whole process of making it was awesome, and because it was inspired by and led by people who really were experts in the field. I think what we’ve done is delivering the first real interactive podcast in the world. In that sense, if something was new, working with so many actors was great. So as a maker, and that’s with a lot of products that we make, is that we love to see it being used to the max, impacting a lot of people. But I don’t always have a say in that as a developer or a maker.

Michiel
So I wouldn’t have done much different, but I would hope for more of our projects, that they would have a higher impact, which has more to do with marketing and other stuff than with the design itself.

Ben
What I love is about awareness raising, because greater empathy and understanding of people living with health conditions or people having impairments is so important societally for people to be more caring and understanding, but also within healthcare as well, for people to have a better understanding, what it’s like to support or treat people living of certain conditions. Now, I guess what’s really interesting, why the podcast works, is because it is an entirely audio based adventure. But do you think it can be applied to different health conditions or impairments to give people that insight and understanding? And what it might be like, well.

Michiel
I think that any impairment or health challenge, you can think of something that is game inspired to create awareness. And there are great examples of that. I think game based learning and gamification can be a big benefit. I don’t. Not necessarily in this format, but this worked because it really works with visual impairment. But, of course, I’m a big fan of game based learning. So. Yeah. Yes. I have one fabulous project that is called 100 Ways to die at work.

Ben
That is a fantastic title for a game.

Pete
Okay.

Michiel
Yeah. Actually, one of the things we do is we are giving a training about game based learning. We’ve done a lot of those series. In one of the series, there was this great woman, and it is her job to. I don’t know what’s the word in English, but she goes about health conditions and especially dangers on the work floor. And she already wrote a book about it. And she’s really an expert in her field. And she really would love to make a game about the many ways you could actually die in your work situation. So together with her, we developed a game. It’s a board game using a very large blueprint you can put on a table at the start of your shift. Wherever you’re working, maybe in construction or wherever you’re working. It’s a 20 to 30 minutes game.

Michiel
And the outlet, there’s always. There’s a situation. And if you don’t do something, someone will die within next 20 or 30 minutes. And with you as your team, you have to take a number of decision. Walk across the blueprint. Whether it’s a garage or a studio or there’s a scenario called Victor’s fish factory. It can be anywhere. But you come across all kinds of dangerous situations. And it can be about smoke development or emergency calling or icons with dangerous goods. It can be about diesel motor emission. It can be about anything that’s relevant for that episode.

Pete
Basically, you’ve got a board game that there’s 100 different ways to play. You could replay it 100 times.

Michiel
No, the format is like 100 ways to die at work. So one board game would be for a specific type of situation. So we did one about diesel motor emission, and it’s playing in a parking garage. We did one about called emergency response. And it plays in a recording studio.

Pete
Great. So it’s a series.

Michiel
It’s a series. And the idea behind is that whenever we encounter a new company or a new stakeholder who says, hey, I’d like to do a game within my company which is very relevant. Is this safety aspect or this health aspect at work, and then we make 100 ways to die version for that specific one. She said, yeah, there’s easy 100 ways to die at work. So we are momentarily, we are number three of 100, and in the coming years we will sure we can make hundred of these games. And the response is awesome, because blokes that have gone up very early to work all the day in harsh conditions, now we see them with their lunchbox and their coffee and their tattooed arm, playing this game, and they really love it. And that’s very rewarding to see.

Michiel
And also that’s what gaming always does. It has a certain frame of reference whenever you experience that game together. It’s food to talk afterwards and refer to in a situation, and that’s what gaming can do.

Pete
Also, I feel like there’s a lot of storytelling potential in this, isn’t there? Because it’s a shared life experience. A lot of people have had some sort of risk at work type experience. I know I was working with a company in Cairo a while back, and I was trying to find something in the workshop for everyone in the room that would draw them out with a life experience that they could build on in whatever gamification it was. And I said, has anyone had a near death experience? Every single person in the room had a work related one. And their stories were epic because they were worried about different things. It was like one guy had fallen through the floor, like a slight underwater, a gap hole in the floor in a factory, and he wasn’t actually worried about the fact he nearly died.

Pete
He was really embarrassed and didn’t want anyone who worked there to know. And so bringing out the different ramifications made it a much more richer experience. And I can see one thing games sometimes struggle to do is find the thing that people can relate to. But with ways to die at work, I think you’ve got a rich seam to mine there.

Ben
I think you’ve got number four to 100 there as well, in terms of the next ways of diet, work by a flight to Cairo and just speaking to some local people.

Michiel
And it’s interesting because conditions and norms here in the west are different, because that’s why what I encountered a few times that things that work in the Netherlands or in the UK do not necessarily work in, let’s say, the Middle east or South Africa or Asia. Also, when it comes to health, I have this insane example of where I was in Bahrain, it’s an oil state in the Middle east, and I was there to do a session on gamification and on the second day people said this afternoon we can’t come to your session. I say, why not? Well, the minister of health will stop by to celebrate that here it was an oil company, of course, said that we are already having 100,000 men day without any accident. And you would think that’s a good thing.

Michiel
But at the moment that they told this to me, they already told me how they came to that number of hundred thousand. So people, whenever there was something missing, something went wrong during the, let’s say they got their hand in a machine, they were immediately removed from the scene and if they did so within five minutes, it was not on work whenever. So there were a very sketchy, dangerous situation only to come up with that number of 100,000 hours. So that afternoon they had champagne. And it was such a horrible example of if you make the numbers so important, one and two, you can claim you’re very healthy and you’re very safe. But it’s really the wrong way of gamification, right?

Pete
I guess it’s probably a term for it like health and safety washing, green washing, that sort of thing. Obviously we’re doing everything we can, but we’re not.

Michiel
Of course.

Pete
I’m going to add, because you’ve got such a wide experience, so many games you’ve created, what have you seen recently that you really like or didn’t like anything that you’re inspired by to work with in future or to avoid?

Michiel
Well, I think gamification, understanding that we use it for the last ten, 1112 years, I’m constantly evaluating what’s the value in the fact that we use game mechanics and elements from game in another context. And more and more I’m starting to believe that game mechanics and aspects should belong in games. That’s why I’m a big fan of game based learning, because those make sense within the context of a game. So I think what gamification has brought us is sort of normalizing of the use of games and game based elements in a professional workplace, but maybe more because people and organizations are hesitant to actually play. And then we say, oh, we just call it gamification, but we’re still doing serious stuff, right? So more and more I’m thinking gamification, I’m not sure if I’m or I’m still in with that.

Michiel
Plucking some game elements and using them in another context is the best way to go. So I think that’s what I’ve learned over the last twelve years when it comes to game, to gamification.

Pete
So to paraphrase you, I think you’re saying games are great. Gamification. Maybe not so much, but then my definition of gamification is more making activities more gamelike or playlike.

Michiel
Yeah, we can always have a great discussion about that, and there are a lot of people within the community who will do that. But I think the more important group to convince is, of course, people who don’t have any idea what you’re talking about and make sense to them. Yeah.

Ben
In that case, we’ll round off the episode. It’s been fantastic today to talk about how kicking in a hotel door to find your students play Nintendo can be the spark to inspire a career in gamification, the role of creating awareness of understanding or using audio adventures for people living with visual impairment, and also the ability for games to raise awareness of the dangers in the workplace to minimize occupational mortality. Mikhail, it’s been great having on the show today.

Michiel
You. Thank you. It was a pleasure talking with you.

Pete
It’s been brilliant to catch up and hear a bit more about all the projects you’ve been working on. Close. 

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