Episode 132 Rob Alvarez on Get Started in Gamification
Rob Alvarez on Get Started in Gamification
Episode Summary:
In this episode of Experience Points by University XP, host Dave Eng welcomes gamification expert Rob Alvarez to discuss gamification and games-based solutions. Rob, known as Professor Game, shares his journey into gamification, emphasizing the importance of meaningful learning experiences tailored to specific audiences. They discuss key principles for creating engaging learning experiences and strategies for overcoming challenges like scope creep and mindset barriers. Rob also introduces his free gamification course and resources available on www.professorgame.com. The episode encourages listeners to explore gamification's potential in education and beyond.
Rob Alvarez
he/him/his
Game-Inspired Facilitator & Consultant
Professor Game
Rob is an expert, international keynote and TEDx speaker and consultant for the use of gamification and game-inspired solutions, to superpower loyalty and engagement. At Professor Game he interviews successful world-class experts and practitioners of gamification and game-based solutions that bring the best of their experiences to get ideas, insights and inspiration to make learning experiences meaningful and inspire us. He's also a professor and workshop facilitator for gamification, game-based solutions and LEGO SERIOUS PLAY (LSP) for top higher education institutions around the world that include EFMD, IE Business School and EBS Universität among others.
(LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/company/professorgame
(Facebook): https://www.facebook.com/ProfessorGame/
(YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv_mnV5NcloSzVc5xv7rcHGc74lXWNtZO
(Website): https://professorgame.com
Dave Eng:
Hi, and welcome to Experience Points by University XP. On Experience Points, we explore different ways we can learn from games. I'm your host, Dave Eng from games-based learning by University XP. Find out more at www.universityxp.com. On today's episode, we'll learn from Professor Game himself, Rob Alvarez.
Rob is an expert in gamification and game-inspired solutions for loyalty and engagement. He hosts the Professor Game Podcast, interviewing experts in these fields to extract ideas for meaningful learning experiences. Rob also teaches and facilitates workshops on gamification and LEGO Serious Play for institutions like the European Foundation for Management Development and IE Business School. Professor Game promotes gamification's benefits across education, corporate, and public sectors, encouraging meaningful experiences through its podcasts, workshops, and consulting services. Rob, welcome to the show.
Rob Alvarez:
Excited to be here, Dave. You've been on Professor Game Podcast as well, I think at least a couple of times, so excited to be on your show as well. I know we've known each other for a while, been doing stuff together as well, so super excited to be here and get to meet your audience as well.
Dave Eng:
Great. Thanks, Rob. Yeah, I remember being on your show. Originally, Professor Game was one of the milestones, I would say in my career, so I'm really happy to return the favor and welcome you to the show today.
Rob Alvarez:
Nice. Absolutely. Thank you.
Dave Eng:
Right. So first off, I want to get started with my first question, which is your origin story. And if there are any listeners right now that have been listening to Professor Game for as long as I have, you probably already know this, but there are going to be some people on here who are just meeting you for the first time. So Rob, can you share a bit about your journey into gamification and games-based solutions, and what inspired you to become an advocate and expert in this field?
Rob Alvarez:
So, it depends on how far back you want to go, but to give you a gist of sort of the ancient history, I mean, for me, the whole thing based in games, of course, started when I started playing games. I had early experiences with video games, in particular, and I do remember having the Nintendo Magazine back in the day. I think it's still around, and thinking that was my dream job, right? You play games most of the day, and then you get to talk about them, or write about them, in that case, and I said, "Well, this is the thing I want to do when I grow up," and, of course, do get to grow up, study careers. I did computer engineering, I did my MBA, all sorts of things, but when I moved to Madrid after, again, I kind of left the whole playing games and that kind of stuff a little bit in the past, after I got into university and got busy and adulthood, so to speak, and I got here and I started working in something that, at least at that point, was definitely a dream job for me.
I always liked the whole education side. When I was in the university, I did a little bit of sort of helping out teachers, doing stuff, and professors, and I started working at a university, so completely associated to the teaching part, and our department was not admin or anything like that. We were creating engaging and interactive learning online materials. They had been working on the online space at IE Business School and University for, at that point, something like 15, 12 years, and they had started creating this, saying like, "Look, we create all these things for online learning. How about we let people ... We take advantage of this medium of online," so they started creating these materials, and that's when it really, really started for me.
We were creating these interactive learning materials, and in many ways, they were using simulations, games-based learning, game mechanics, gamification in different ways. Not explicitly. Maybe ... I'm not sure if intentionally or not. And when I saw this, I started looking at my past as well, and the things that got me excited, I realized that they were doing some of these things, and I started researching and looking into that, and sort of intentionally creating the materials I worked on using all of these principles.
And that's, again, when it's kicked off for me. I started going to conferences to talk about the great things that this department was doing, my projects, in particular, but others as well, so I started becoming a little bit of a voice in the space. And again, it was a good platform. They'd been doing online learning for a while, had a pretty good name, and I thought like, "Well, what else can I do? How can I continue spreading the word?"
Eventually, I also started distributing these materials to other universities. And that's great, but it's a private university they're selling, so there's only so many other schools and universities that can do it. And I remembered that I had a stint in radio shows back in the day many, many years ago, which was one of the things that was not successful about it was precisely the medium. The radio itself, it was AM as well, instead of FM, which was a lot less popular at that point. And I had been listening to podcasts for a while and said, "Well, why not create a podcast?," and there was a lot of questioning around like, "How long are you going to be able to do this? There's not so many people doing this stuff, right?"
And I can attest 300 and many episodes later, at this point, that there are plenty of experts. There's a lot of people doing great things in gamification, and that basically, after that, it just sort of exploded for me. I started doing small consulting, started doing workshops, started doing teaching. Eventually, as we were discussing pre-interview, I basically have dedicated my entire day and my life professionally to Professor Game and doing consulting, doing teaching, doing workshops. This is sort of the story of my life, at this point, for gamification, game-based learning.
Dave Eng:
Wow. Thanks, Rob. I knew some of that story beforehand, because obviously, we talked to each other before, but I kind of want to know, because I had a similar trajectory. Were you surprised later in life that you're like, "Oh, wait a second. I've been playing games, but I could probably make this part of my personal professional career"? Did it surprise you when games kind of circled back in your career?
Rob Alvarez:
Absolutely surprised me. Again, my dream of working at the Nintendo Magazine kind of died.
Dave Eng:
Yeah.
Rob Alvarez:
I mean, I always loved playing, don't get me wrong, especially the experience of when we had the Nintendo, Super Nintendo, playing with two people, and there was two or three other friends around, and everybody's screaming at the screen, and then Nintendo 64 came up, and we could play at four people at a time.
Dave Eng:
Yeah.
Rob Alvarez:
Social experience was something I loved, but don't get me wrong, I was not good. Had eSports been a thing back then, I would've never had a single chance at that beyond, I don't know, my own school or something, if I had any chance even there. I just enjoyed the whole thing. And again, writing about these games could have been something that it would've been interesting for me, but then, again, it is like, "Well, yeah, there's a few lucky people who get to do that stuff, some people get to be game designers," and that kind of dropped off my mind for a long while, but finding this was like, "Oh my goodness, I'm actually loving what I'm doing, and it has to do with this, so I can actually actively do research by playing more games."
Dave Eng:
Right.
Rob Alvarez:
So it was a complete game-changer, pun intended for me.
Dave Eng:
Great. Well, I know, Rob, one of the things I really envy about you is that you have so much time to dedicate to consulting and facilitating workshops. It's really, really enviable that you can share all of this with a lot of other people and just like the community as a whole. So I wanted to spend question number two, talking about some of your key principles, specifically in your experience, what are some key principles or strategies that you believe are essential for creating engaging and meaningful learning experiences using gamification?
Rob Alvarez:
The first one is a bit, I don't want to say disappointing, but beyond unexpected and something people sometimes don't want to hear, and it's that yes, there are ways of scaling some of these things, but when you use these principles, and when you're thinking about the experiences, especially learning experiences, you are designing for someone, you're not designing for everyone. That's a key mistake that we tend to make. So don't try to go for the masses, especially at the start. Maybe eventually, it becomes something that everybody, or you can expand a lot on, but initially, you want to think about your classroom. You want to think about those 30, 40, 20, 50, 60, 100.
I don't know how many people you can have in your classroom, but those people, just them. Forget about, "Oh, yes, and then this can also make sense if I use it here and there," and, "I'm a professor of marketing, but this thing I'm creating can be used by professors in finance, and I don't know, strategy as well." Maybe, maybe, and that could be exciting, it could be nice, but forget about that for a second. Right now, focus on making it, as you were saying, meaningful. Make it meaningful for those people you're creating it for.
Not for everybody, and maybe you will take it from there. You can't imagine how many times, and again, from the experience I mentioned at the university, when I was creating materials for, sort of internally, and working with those professors and some of them who had already done things with the department, how hard it is sometimes to get them to focus and say, "Oh, yeah." But I was thinking that this case that we're going to make, sort of the experiential and online, it's great because it can also be used, and it's like, "Yeah." Pause for a second. "I know that your case is fantastic, and I'm sure it is."
For a second, how about we forget about everything else, and make sure that every single point you need to hit on your session number five, where you discuss these five things is hit on the learning material. How about we just focus on that? And then, if other things come up, fantastic, and if not, just as good, because we're not creating it for everybody, we're creating it, again, for session five, where you're discussing these, I don't know, key marketing principles or whatever, which was one of the things that we were most focused on, sort of the business stuff. And that's super hard to swallow sometimes, and it's super hard to convince people. Like now, working with clients, it's like, "Oh, we want to do all these things," or, "What do you want to do?" "Oh, we want to make things fun."
It's like, "Well, yeah," but let's narrow that down to what you really want to achieve, right? Oh, you want make sure people learn, and they have fun. Well, you can do both things. You could get them to read a book, and then play on your PlayStation or whatever console, or PC, or whatever you want to do, or board games, right? "How do we integrate these things together?," is usually by getting to understand deeply what it is that you want to achieve and narrowing it down.
And I listened to an entrepreneurship podcast, I've been listening to quite a while, and he uses the acronym for FOCUS. He talks about follow one course until success. In this case, you can kind of do the same thing. It's just one course. It's this thing that you're doing.
Then, once you achieve success with that, maybe you expand that material, or you create another material that can cover other points, but when you try to boil the ocean, you don't even warm it up a little bit, unless you do, things that have been happening to the environment, but that's a completely different discussion, right? You want to grab a little bit of water and boil it out, if that's what you're actually looking for. If you want to make tea for example, that's what you really want to get to do.
Dave Eng:
Great. Well, thanks, Rob. I appreciate it. I know that one of the ... So you used one of the phrases that often comes up in my workplace, which is, "Boil the ocean," but the other phrase that comes up, and I really thought about this in your response, is that, "When you prioritize everything, you really prioritize nothing."
So I kind of wanted to know, do you have any insight on how to have that conversation with clients or your co-workers, whether they're very excited about gamification and they want to generalize it, but you, as a practitioner, as a facilitator, you really want to focus their energy and their effort on achieving like a tangible goal, like what you said before about your FOCUS acronym? So do you have a key takeaway that individuals can use to help people focus on achieving a specific outcome?
Rob Alvarez:
It definitely has to do, like different audiences require different things. When it's my students, for example, there's things that I can do versus when it's clients, and let's not get started, it's student as a client in this situation. Students are, maybe they're paying stuff at the university or not. It doesn't matter, but they're still students, and in the best of senses, we treat them as students. So it's easier for me.
I was doing this today, in fact. I'm coming back from a workshop. We were working on the game mechanics, and I paused and said, "Wait a second. How about?" And they were choosing two different types of players for their game, and hence, the game mechanics were sort of broader, and they were having more challenges, and I said, "What would happen? Would it be terrible, or would your initiative just die out entirely if instead of two players, you just pick one?"
They'll just looked at me for a second like perplexed like, "What are you talking about?" And then, after that I was like, "Oh, actually nothing bad would happen. We would just focus on one. It's not the end of the world, right?" Like, "Oh, okay. Would you recommend that one?" That was the next question, that it says like, "Yeah, definitely."
It's easier when you hit a brick wall because you might hit a brick wall. It's easier to know, "Oh, we just were targeting the wrong player," versus having three types of players and trying to figure out if it's a wrong combination, or if none of these work, or what's going on. If you hit a brick wall with the players you're trying to target, you just focus on another one, and that's it. It's easier to pivot from that. Whereas, when it is about the client, and it's not just about them paying, but about them owning what is happening, it's slightly different.
There's definitely a lot more of left hand that you might want to be using. I always start asking broad questions and I get broad answers, right? "Oh, want to do this, and then we want to do this as well, and this other thing, and then with these people and these other people as well, but it's a platform, but it's also this other thing," and I get this like a huge, humongous answer, right? It's like, "Oh, that sounds great." What I try to do is use my own experience and common sense and basic knowledge of these, which I'm usually having a very basic knowledge of the subjects themselves, to get a little bit more of the understanding and say, "Well, yeah, what I'm hearing from you ..."
And, again, trying to grab from the common things, the threads that they have is, "This seems to be what you're focusing on." So I make a hypothesis, and of course, I always say like, "I could be entirely wrong. Please correct me, but would this be, if I had to choose one thing, would this be that one thing?" And again, they can say yes, they can say no, but it doesn't matter if it's a yes or a no. It helps focus the conversation a lot more, but it's something to be sort of careful around because you don't want to tell them that they're doing the wrong thing.
You don't want anybody to feel stupid. I like the way Yu-kai always puts the, people don't want to feel stupid with gamification, and clients don't want to feel stupid in front of you, in any way. So it's a balance of showing your expertise without showing off, so to speak, so that would be sort of my, I don't want to say ninja move, but it's what I try to do, to make sure that I help them focus, because in the end, again, I could definitely just take that for, "Oh, yeah, they gave me a super broad answer, and we take that," but then when you start prioritizing, when you start deciding, "Oh, do we take this path or this other path?," you always have to refer back to that objective. And if it's too broad, it might not help you in the decision and you might make the wrong decision, which, again, can happen. It's okay, but it makes you waste time that you could have saved, at least with these hypotheses initially being clearer, because again, you'll make mistakes, but if you can justify your mistakes, it's easier to understand you and your client what's going on.
So I would rather always help. It's a way of trying to narrow down what they're saying, and they can definitely say no, and we start all over, or they give us, "Oh, from those things that you said, it's actually more on this side," and grab onto that and start digging deeper, right? There's a technique from Toyota for understanding the sort of the root causes of problems. They talk about the five whys. That's definitely something I would use.
I don't know if you want me to dive into that. I don't know if we have much time left for that, but it's something easy to find on the internet as well, the five whys Toyota, and you'll definitely find many people talking about this. It's essentially, they give you a broad reason, and then you start asking, "Oh, yeah, but why do you think that is important?," and then, they give you something that's sort of deeper down, and why and why. Eventually, you really get to the core of what it is that they want, because in the end, what you want is you finalize the project, you achieve whatever you set out to achieve, and everybody's happy about that, not that you achieve what you set out to achieve, and then they say, "Well, that's not actually what we wanted," which is a possibility if you don't narrow it down well enough.
Dave Eng:
Yeah, I think that it's not necessarily like the five whys, but I know that the company I'm working for right now, it really focuses on asking why several times in order to get to that root cause. And I think that you really summarize that well in asking people like, "What is their actual true objective here?" And for those listening, Rob also brought up Yu-kai. He's referring to Yu-kai Chou, who's also a big name in gamification, and I would even say the father of gamification. He runs the website, Octalysis, but I also wanted to spend more time here, Rob.
I wanted to give you time to answer the third and last question, which is gamification challenges. I know we talked about this before, just coming off that last question about how to address, what I like to call like the scope creep of projects and getting people to really generalize, but really, you want them to specialize. But, again, I'm leaning on you as a consultant and workshop facilitator. Other than the scope creep, what are some other common challenges that you encounter when introducing gamification concepts to individuals, organizations, or institutions, and then how do you overcome them? If you could give us some insight on your process.
Rob Alvarez:
Sure. So, in fact, when you get to the scope creep, it's actually almost good news, at this point, because you've already surpassed the first barriers, which are, the biggest one I would say is the mindset. Maybe the person who contacted you is excited because they like games or they saw the example out there, where things really worked out, and it was games or whatever that looks like, but then usually, or oftentimes, at least, that person is not the final decision-maker, or is not the only decision-maker. You have to convince other people as well and get them to understand that this is possible, or you are helping other people. They're saying, "Oh, we want to do this."
For example, they say, "Well, we don't have the budget to hire you for all this time or somebody else, and we got to do it ourselves, so can you help us sort of understand what's going on here? And we want to do it not once, but 10 times. So, again, hiring you 10 times is maybe not the best thing. We want to multiply, so how do we get there?" And usually, the biggest barrier, as I was saying, is the mindset, is people sort of either not understanding that this is actually working or a possibility, or feeling that this is not something that they can do themselves.
And don't get me wrong, this is work, and it requires ... It's not like sitting down and playing a game. It definitely requires work, and sitting down, and discipline, and thinking, and doing brainstorming, and narrowing down your decisions, and then opening up again, and a bunch of things that work, and meetings, and all that stuff, but it is. If you decide to make that mindset shift of games are not just an entertainment medium, which they still are and definitely will be, there are also a possibility for achieving other things, and those other things, in the case of game-based learning is yes, you can be playing, but you can use that as a vessel for learning, or as a vessel for transporting something that leads into conscious or subconscious learning when you start understanding that that is possible, and that you are the one who can make that change, you can do it yourself, it completely sort of changes the mindset. I've seen people go to workshops.
There's one, in particular, that happens more often than others when I work with the EFMD. Those are typically either faculty or admin members of a master's program and so on. Some of them are super excited, and they're the ones who pushed to get that seat on the workshop, but there's others who somebody decided that somebody had to be on that workshop because they overall wanted for this to be done at their university or department, and this person was chosen, and maybe they didn't really want to be there, right? They don't really believe in that, or they don't think they will be able to do it. They have all these barriers.
When you see the people understand these principles, you can sort of literally see their faces, and it's like something completely changes. It's like, "Oh, but actually this is something that I can use, and not only I can use, it's something I can create myself." Right? Of course, you can have practice and get better and all of these things, and you have frameworks and strategies and all of that, but passing through that is something that is possible. When I was thinking about what career to study, I remember thinking like, "My mom's a designer, my dad used to be an actor. They're sort of artistic, in that sense."
I felt I was zero, zero, zero artistic. In fact, I started engineering because I felt math and these things, they're contained, and my boxed mind, "Is it going to be able to handle this? I'm not kind of a creative person." That's what I thought, at least. And I completely sort of broke my own mold in that sense, and it's not easy.
I understand it's not easy, that before that opens up, you really feel like you're not going to be able to do these things, but through a couple of exercises and doing this and that, people open up. And if they open up to the experience, at least initially, it's like, "Well, I don't know what I'm going to get from this, but let me try," that sole initial thing, if we do things right, I think, it's more enough of a spark to get them to push through. At least, in my experience, where I've seen is ... Well, in fact, there's an exercise that I do and that I've shared now on one of my resources, where people actually get to experiment with using game mechanics and creating something with game mechanics, where before, again, you think, "Oh, this game designers is for game designers." For me, it was graphic design and architecture.
That's where people who were sort of in that world. That's not something for me. Probably, now, if I reconsider that, I wouldn't have studied that yet, but I wouldn't consider myself entirely incapable of doing that. Crossing that barrier, I think, is a key challenge to overcome, and that we all can do that. As I mentioned before, I even ... I don't know if you don't mind me sharing a place where people can go for free and register and see this resource that we've created at Professor Game.
Dave Eng:
Yeah. Actually, I wanted you to talk more about, Rob, this latest offering, which I'm really excited about, because I know you've been working on it for many months now. Can you share more about that resource?
Rob Alvarez:
More than I should have, that's for sure. So, yeah, I created ... If you can find it on www.professorgame.com/freegamificationcourse. It's not a full course. It's more on focused on, as I said before, understanding some of the key principles initially, and also sort of changing your mindset about, "What is it that you are able to do?"
But I do give these tools available for anybody who wants to register. You do have to give me your email. That's a price to pay for something like that, but that's all I ask, at this point. I had been working on ... I wanted to make sure that it was something that was short enough for people to be willing to engage with that and say, "Well, this is a small enough investment. That's something I can do," and then I realized as well that since my medium is podcasting, "Why not turn it precisely into something within that medium?," because I love podcasting for many reasons, but one of the things that podcasting gives you is that you can do it while you're doing other things, right?
So it doesn't really take away time from you. I'm literally out of these ... It's three episodes. It's like 20 minutes each episode. The only time where you'll need to not be working out or driving, or cooking or whatever it is you're doing while you listen to podcasts is like five minutes, during or after, where you actually sit down and do the exercise that I propose.
And then, if you want to do it every day, for some time and catch your creative purpose around games and gamification, that's great, but if you do it just once and change your mentality and realize things that you can do, it's going to be more than enough to do that, and that's sort of where this miniseries podcast is centered around, getting people to take that initial step and realize that they too can be a gamification or a game designer in their own fashion.
Dave Eng:
Nice. Well, thank you, Rob. I'm definitely going to include that link in the show description and references. So thank you for sharing that. I appreciate it. Other than that free resource, I just want to say thank you again for joining us today. Where can people go to find out more about you?
Rob Alvarez:
Definitely the best place is to search wherever you're doing stuff for Professor Game. That's where you'll find the podcast. If you're interested in podcasting and you're listening to the podcast right now, you can also find my podcast wherever you're listening. There is a free gamification course that I mentioned before on www.professorgame.com/freegamificationcourse. On LinkedIn, you can also put Professor Game.
You can find my company. You'll see me there as well, Rob Alvarez. I would say those are probably the best places to find me. I used to be a bit more on Twitter. Not so active anymore. I have an account on Instagram, but LinkedIn is probably the best place to connect.
Dave Eng:
Excellent. Thank you. And I just want to remind everyone, I started my path in gamification and games-based learning through Rob, so I highly recommend his resource. It's where I got my start. Basically, I can route back everything I've learned about gamification, games-based learning to its origin point, which is Rob, so I highly recommend Rob's resources and also www.professorgame.com.
So Rob, thank you for joining us today. I appreciate it.
Rob Alvarez:
Thank you very much, Dave, and thank you for your kind words. I'm excited to know that ... They talk about the ripple effects, that a little bit of what I've been doing has definitely gone through to you, and you've done all the fantastic stuff that you've been doing it, which is full credits entirely to you, for sure.
Dave Eng:
Great. Thank you, Rob. I hope you found this episode useful. If you'd like to learn more, then a great place to start is with my free course on gamification. So in addition to signing up to Rob's course, you can also sign up to my free course to learn a little bit more about gamification at www.universityxp.com/gamification.
You can also get a full transcript of this episode, including links to references in the description or show notes. Thanks for joining us. Again, I'm your host, Dave Eng from games-based learning by University XP. On Experience Points, we explore different ways we can learn from games. If you like this episode, please consider commenting, sharing, and subscribing.
Subscribing is absolutely free and ensures that you'll get the next episode of Experience Points delivered directly to you. I'd also love it if you took some time to rate this show. We live to lift others with learning, so if you found this episode useful, consider sharing it with someone who could also benefit. Also, make sure to visit University XP online at universityxp.com. University XP is also on Twitter @University_XP, and on Facebook and LinkedIn as University XP.
Also, feel free to email me anytime. My email address is dave@universityxp.com. Game on!
Cite this Episode
Eng, D. (Host). (2025, February 23). Rob Alvarez on Get Started in Gamification. (No. 132) [Audio podcast episode]. Experience Points. University XP. https://www.universityxp.com/podcast/132
Internal Ref: UXPIY5LY9ULV
References
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Eng, D. (2020, March 26). What is Games-Based Learning? Retrieved May 17, 2024 from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2020/3/26/what-is-games-based-learning
Eng, D. (2020, April 30). What is Gamification? Retrieved May 17, 2024 from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2020/4/30/what-is-gamification
Eng, D. (2020, May 28). What are interactive experiences? Retrieved May 17, 2024 from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2020/5/28/what-are-interactive-experiences
Eng, D. (2020, December 3). Game Mechanics for Learning. Retrieved May 17, 2024 from http://www.universityxp.com/blog/2020/12/3/game-mechanics-for-learning
Eng, D. (2021, November 23). How do players create meaning in games?. Retrieved May 17, 2024 from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2021/11/23/how-do-players-create-meaning-in-games
Majaski, C. (2023, April 09). Boil the Ocean: Business Jargon for an Impossible Task. Investopedia. Retrieved from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/boil-the-ocean.asp