Far-Plane: Beyond Boundaries, Series 1: Managing Boundaries

Organization:

Triad Interactive Media, Inc.

Dev Category:

Business

Release Year:

2014

Far-Plane is a unique role-playing game that teaches essential leadership skills through exciting challenges and quests. Set on a resource-starved planet torn among warring factions, players navigate complex political environments, unite diverse peoples and build strategic alliances to save the world. Far-Plane empowers players to evaluate situations and make decisions using critical thinking, build alliances, analyze character and motivation, and form lasting relationships with diverse individuals. These important skills in Boundary-Spanning Leadership enhance real-world leadership and relationship-building skills, making smarter, more thoughtful individuals who are better equipped for success in a rapidly changing global society.

Game Overview

Players learn to harness their innate critical thinking skills and enhance them by evaluating individual characters and building strategies to successfully complete missions within the game. By identifying core leadership characteristics, assessing discrete character objectives and determining where goal-alignment can exist, players learn how to identify, develop and sustain strong working relationships with diverse groups, and how to build and foster their own inherent leadership skills. These leadership and team-building skills have a direct application within the game quest itself, and a much wider application in the students’ real-world experiences.

The core challenge of Far-Plane is to develop an alliance among disparate characters with conflicting motivations and objectives and foster collaboration to successfully complete a series of quests and ultimately save the world from ecological disaster. Players must assess individual characters’ core interests on both macro (near-term interests) and micro (long-term goals) levels, evaluate whether these interests align with their own, and decide if an alliance can help achieve the ultimate objective: a successful mission to save the planet. The goal of the game is to develop leadership and critical thinking skills in accordance with the Center for Creative Leadership’s Boundary-Spanning Leadership model.

Far-Plane is designed for individuals and groups from corporate, government, military, and non-profit agencies. It is also appropriate for leadership training with upper high school and college age youth.

Within Far-Plane, all player decisions are captured in a database that sits securely behind the product, with scoring tied to optimal choices as defined by the Center for Creative Leadership’s rubric/algorithm for best in- game decisions. Learners can see a log of their performance results and in-game decisions along side the results of their peers via a robust performance dashboard. This information can be used for learners to gauge their choices against their peers’ choices and see where their decisions lie within the optimal spectrum. For cohorts of learners using Far-Plane, a facilitator-led debrief is recommended to encourage discussion around all in-game tasks and outcomes. For individual users, the debrief materials are provided electronically so that users can reflect on their experience within the game.

Game Specs

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Game Video

Play the video below to learn more about Far-Plane: Beyond Boundaries, Series 1: Managing Boundaries