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Fun in fun out is a very simply idea that I like to work by. It simply means that if you enjoy what you are doing, the result is going to be better and more enjoyable. I’ve always believed that it is important for people to do what they enjoy. It’s a lesson I learned the hard-way, but now I’m privileged that I’m doing work what I really like. But still I’m always on the look-out for possibilities to make my work more enjoyable.

But since my employment at Playlogic I’ve been working on ways to translate this personal working method to a work philosophy for everybody at our company, as I strongly believe that fun in fun out works. But in a daily reality filled with many deadlines and stress, how can there be room for fun? Projects need to be finished on time, there’s no room for playing around in the boss’s time, is there?

There should be! I believe that a company -especially a company in the creative industries- should invest in facilitating fun for its employees, wherever possible. Facilitating fun at work is a powerful tool and depending on the way it is facilitated can have enormous benefits for the company.

Fun in fun out is a way for a company to harvest the enormous creative potential that its employees possess. In our industry it is not uncommon for projects to last a year or several years, that is several years that very creative people work on a single project. The people working on these projects have brilliant ideas -almost every single day- and most of these ideas can not find a home in the current project, but could benefit the company if they were given the room to develop those ideas.

If a company could sponsor this creativity - these dreams - then it would not be lost, but would be fed back into the company. Employees would appreciate that they are allowed to chase their own dreams, which is the very reason they started working at this company in the first place! All employees have opinions, ideas that this or that could be done in a better way, in a more efficient way, in a more fun way. Fun in fun out gives them the chance to proof it.

But the fun in fun out work methodology should be introduced sensibly as there are risks if implementation is handled carelessly. Facilitating just any unregulated fun puts an enormous responsibility on the shoulders of the employees, more than they can probably handle. Therefore the fun should be regulated and correlate to the core business of the company.

So what would be ways to implement fun in fun out in sensible ways? At Playlogic we try to provide as many opportunities to let people chase their own dreams, to create the games they would like to make. Giving people the chance to influence the project is ways that are not available to them on ‘regular’ projects. Since the introduction of the fun in fun out philosophy Playlogic provides opportunities for people to create their own concepts, to develop own technologies and to do research in subjects that will benefit themselves as well as Playlogic.

One of the things a company can do is to provide time for its employees. Time they usually don’t have while working on regular projects. This is exactly what we have done at Playlogic.

A forerunner of the fun in fun out philosophy is a concept I introduced at the beginning of 2007. It’s called PlayDays which is inspired by the experimental gameplay project and can be seen as a game prototyping mid-week.

Personnel that wanted to join the PlayDays had three days -during normal working hours- to use our prototyping tool to create new games. The ideas were only limited to a theme, such as “create a game especially for a female audience”. The games had to be as much finished as possible, including graphic and audio design. At the end of the PlayDays, all projects were presented to all the Playlogic personnel, which was a great laugh. But more important is that the impact of this creative freedom was enormous, which is why we are developing two of these PlayDays projects to full fledged products as we speak!

After analyzing the PlayDays we can conclude the following:

• Fun motivates people
• Fun encourages corporation
• Fun stimulates creativity
• Fun leads to new projects
• Fun ultimately creates more profits

This is an impressive list of benefits from ‘just having fun’, I think. To continue this success I’ve looked at another way of introducing fun at Playlogic, which led to the introduction of PlayTime last month.

In short, PlayTime allows personnel to work on their own projects during working hours. Because it has only just been introduced I can not say how successful it will be, but similar practices are already common at big international corporations like Google and Philips Royal Electronics, which are quite successful.

To sell fun, you should have it.