Jane had a revelation recently: that the games she develops are “Experience Grenades”

From her blog entry

“Experience grenades: You play them, and that’s like pulling the pin on the grenade. Nothing has to happen right away. Nothing has to change or be solved right away. Then, you wait. It’s later—an hour later, a day later, a week later, a month later… it goes off in your head, like the delayed explosion of a grenade.

You realize: You’ve learned something. Your cognitive patterns are different. Your view of the possibilities in the world around you has changed. Your sense of your own potential is changed. You’re ready for something you didn’t even know was coming. You understand something intuitively that seems alien or confusing to others”

This was particularly interesting for me, as it reinforces the requirement for Meaningful Play experiences to be immediately engaging and fun, because she’s completely right in that a lot of the time you’re not going to see or feel the benefit that the experience is having on you right away.

Lucky for us then that the medium we wield has a tendency to be quite a lot of fun.

Very excited that Jane will be coming to New Zealand for Webstock in February