Put The Player First is a solo practice, and that is on purpose. Every game, every facilitation method, every debrief - mine, delivered by me. No licensing. No associate turning up with a diluted version. You work with me.
Since 2019 I have designed and run serious games for teams at a Fortune 100 company, a leading HR-tech platform, a Fortune 500 technology company, a global retail corporation, a global engineering and technology firm, a global pharmaceutical company, a global life-sciences research firm, and others. Programmes at IIM Bangalore and IIM Indore, in partnership with SHRM India. Recent satisfaction on one of those programmes: 8.82 out of 10 across 113 respondents. And 100% comprehension from that HR-tech platform, with 92.3% saying they would apply it.
Here's what I am actually chasing. Not a good day in a workshop. Behaviour that is still different in March.
"Serious games create that environment. The stakes are low enough that people take risks. The emotions are real enough that insights stick."
Why I Do This At All
Strategy simulations teach frameworks. Digital learning moves information around. I do neither. I show you how your leaders actually behave when the pressure is on, and then I give them the feedback that lets them change it.
Most leadership training works beautifully for the people who were already going to change. The frameworks make sense, and the people teaching them mostly know their stuff. The scores come back lovely. Then I get called back to the same company a year on, and the same three habits are still running the place.
Because behaviour does not respond to information. Behaviour responds to consequence, to feedback, and to the experience of failing at something that matters even slightly. Ordinary workshops remove all three, and mostly for decent reasons - you want people comfortable enough to try something. The comfort just takes the pressure out with it.
Games put them back. Not as a gimmick. When a leader makes a bad call in round one and watches it ruin round four, nobody has to tell them what went wrong. They already know. My job in the debrief is just to help them name it clearly enough to do something about it.
So the design principle is simple. Make behaviour visible. Make consequences immediate. Make reflection unavoidable. Everything else follows from that.
What Comes Out The Other Side
A Fortune 100 company. One programme, six session-days, 113 people who rated it: 8.82 out of 10 average satisfaction, and Day 2 outscored Day 1 in every single batch. The form has a box for explaining a low score. Nobody used it to give one. One participant wrote in it: "No low score. It was fantastic."
A leading HR-tech platform, Frontline Manager Program, 13 participants: 100% understood the objectives. 92.3% said they would apply it. Not one disagree, across all four outcome metrics.
What Participants Say
"Various new concepts and mental models and how I can apply them readily."
Participant, AI Bootcamp for Teams
"Good learning experience. I should be able to apply the knowledge."
Participant, AI Bootcamp for Teams
The Games
How We'd Work Together
It starts with a 20-minute conversation. I'll ask about group size, seniority, the behaviour you want surfaced, and what you want people to leave with. If one of the seven games fits, I'll tell you which one and why. If it doesn't fit, I'll tell you that too - I'd rather lose the booking than run the wrong day.
I quote per delivery, not per head. The price moves with session length, group size and travel. If you're a training vendor or an L&D consultant bringing games to your own clients, the terms are different - have a look.
The games are most of it, but not all of it. I also run two AI programmes - a weekend one for individual founders and leaders and a corporate one in three sizes - and a five-session mentorship for people who want to design their own game instead of booking mine. All of it is on one page here.
The Practical Bits
Sessions are in person. Groups from 15 to 150. Anywhere from 90 minutes for Sticky Fingers to 6 hours for Welcome to Zombiepuram.
Most people arrive with a specific need. Cross-functional collaboration. Stakeholder management. Deciding under ambiguity. Influence without authority. The game follows the need, never the other way round. If nothing in the catalogue is close enough, I build you one.
I work with L&D heads, HR Business Partners, and training vendors who take the games to their own clients. The design conversation happens before every single engagement - not to sell you a game, but to work out whether a game is the right answer at all. Sometimes it isn't. I'll say so.
No lectures. The game generates the data. The debrief is where the value is. And every session closes with a named action, a named situation and a named date.
Where This Came From
Before Put The Player First, I worked in learning and development, corporate side and consulting side. And I kept watching the same thing happen. Technically excellent programmes, beautifully built, producing no change at all. Not because the design was bad. Because slides and case studies and reflection sheets simply do not reach the part of the brain where habits actually live.
Games were my answer to that one specific failure. Since 2019 I have been designing, testing and sharpening them around a single question: what format genuinely changes the behaviour of leaders who stopped expecting training to challenge them years ago?
Outside the facilitation work I run TTRPGCon, India's serious tabletop gaming convention. I'm a D&D game master. And I write about learning design and play on the blog.
Come and Say Hello
Book a discovery call WhatsApp +91 99458 61640
With love from Bengaluru, this is Arvindh saying over and out.