About Arvindh Sundar
I design serious games for leadership development — and I run every session myself.
Put The Player First is a one-person operation by design. The games I’ve built, the facilitation method I use, the debrief philosophy behind the work — none of it is licensed out or delivered by associates. When you book a session, you get me.
Background
I’ve been designing learning games since 2019. In that time I’ve worked with teams at Coromandel, Lowe’s, Novo Nordisk, Citrix, Akamai, Walmart, and Bosch — organisations spread across industries, geographies, and leadership maturity levels.
I run workshops at IIM Bangalore and IIM Indore. I teach a course at MakeWhatPeopleWant.com. I coach founders across the US, Canada, Singapore, and India. I make YouTube videos at @ArvindhSundar and host the Hacking Attention podcast.
The common thread: I’m interested in how people actually change — not how they perform change in a workshop, but how behaviour shifts durably, under real conditions.
Why I built this
Traditional training works sometimes. The problem is it works best for people who were already going to change — who just needed the language or the permission. For everyone else, watching slides doesn’t move the needle.
What actually shifts behaviour is consequence. Feedback loops. Seeing your own patterns in real time, in a context where you can’t hide behind politeness or defer to the facilitator for the right answer.
Serious games create that environment. The stakes are low enough that people take risks. The emotions are real enough that insights stick. And the debrief — if it’s run well — connects what just happened in the game to what happens every Monday morning.
That’s the thesis. Everything else follows from it.
The games
I’ve built 6 games, each designed to surface a different dimension of leadership behaviour. They’re not off-the-shelf products — each one took months of design, testing, and iteration to get the game mechanics to reliably produce the right kind of pressure.
Welcome to Zombiepuram — negotiation and influence under uncertainty. Bloom — generosity vs. hoarding over time. Sticky Fingers — collaboration with distributed information. Planetfall — learning agility and ambiguity tolerance. Ripple Effect — cross-functional trust and systems thinking. Chaos on the Tour Bus — strategic decision-making under pressure.
How I work
Sessions run in-person, 90 minutes to half a day, for groups of 12 to 100+. I work directly with L&D heads and HR Business Partners, and through training vendors and consultants who want to bring serious games to their clients.
I don’t lecture. The game generates the data; the debrief is where I earn my fee. Every session ends with participants naming something specific they’ll do differently — not a general intention, but a concrete commitment.
If you want to understand the thinking behind the facilitation approach, read the philosophy behind the work.
Get in touch
The fastest way to reach me is WhatsApp. I respond to messages directly — no intake forms, no sales team.