"I found a solution in video games – I call it the Put The Player First Framework."

There was a season when my to-do list looked like procedurally generated despair. Endless tasks, half of them icky, most of them designed to make me feel productive while moving nothing that mattered. I had been building workshops the way corporate L and D taught me to build workshops – neat slides, tidy objectives, zero impact. Then I remembered how actual games work. They do not ask for attention, they earn it by making every action feel like it matters.

I Stopped Building Courses And Started Forging Weapons

In my world, the customer is the hero and I am the guide. The hero is stuck in a broken world full of monsters – real problems with dented budgets, frayed nerves, and stalled momentum. My job is not to be the star of the story but to hand them a plan and the tools to win. So I prescribe quests, each aimed at one monster, and I forge a weapon precisely for that fight. One monster, one weapon, one step that moves the story forward.

Weapons are not just products. They are services, experiences, mindsets, and networks engineered to defeat a specific problem. When the hero uses a weapon well, two things happen at once. They get loot – external rewards like revenue, leads, access, or time back – and they level up – internal gains like confidence, calm, and clarity. That pairing is what makes the grind feel like growth instead of bureaucracy.

Stop Treating Learners Like NPCs

Most training pretends the audience is background scenery. It shovels content at people and congratulates itself for participation metrics while the monsters roam free. When I put the player first, the content is shaped by the fight the hero is in, not by the slide template I am fond of. The sequence is a campaign, not a curriculum, and every quest has a visible boss to beat. You can feel momentum because each victory unlocks the next decision, not the next worksheet.

Differentiation becomes your superpower, not your tagline. The guide in any good game brings a unique edge and a story that earns trust inside a commoditized market. I anchor my work in that edge, then translate it into quests the customer can actually complete this week, not someday. The result is agency, not dependency. People stop asking for more information and start asking for the next quest.

This Is Where Most Workshops Go To Die

Ignore this and your learning stays beige. You will confuse activity with progress, confuse content with capability, and confuse applause with adoption. You will arm your hero with generic weapons that bounce off real monsters, and then blame attention spans when nothing changes. You will add more slides to fix the problem slides created. Meanwhile, your learners will quietly grind their own side quests without you.

Apply it and your pipeline starts to look like a game log. Clear bosses beaten, clear loot collected, clear level ups earned. You will ship smaller, sharper weapons and retire the ones that do not pierce anything. You will narrate progress in plain language that even the CFO can love. Most importantly, your hero will want to keep playing because winning feels better than being managed.

TLDR – Before You Overthink It

• You are the guide, not the hero – hand them the quest, not the lecture.
• Design weapons, not worksheets – one monster, one tool, one win.
• Make loot explicit and level ups inevitable – reward the fight.
• If it is not a step, it is a stall – cut everything that does not move the story.
• Stop chasing engagement – engineer victory and engagement follows.

Watch It Play Out, No Grinding Required

If you prefer to see the framework in motion, watch the breakdown here.