Steve, I like your emphasis on ‘good enough’. My experience is the same. Focus on what’s really important/what people get wrong, not the whole enchilada. WoW may be overkill, since we have sticks as well as carrots in most instances, and as Will Wright told me, “tuning is 9/10s of the effort”, so the cost to tune to commercial-level of engagement may not be the best investment. Unless, of course, there are also marketing advantages or big opportunity (cf America’s Army).

Thanks for the feedback!

We’ve done a few things with virtual worlds, but these worlds were selected for their ability to reflect fairly accurate contexts for the part task practice scenarios. And even using these virtual worlds we didn’t put a lot of cash into sharpening the underlying programming, physics, or scripting. We leveraged the virtual world as a facilitated environment. Sort of a low level simulation. By creating scenario role cards and rotating team members between roles it was a pretty effective practice environment. However, I’m fairly confident we could have been nearly as affective without the technology using some improv. We reduced our tech complexity by building facilitation into the mix.

I tell folks these things about simulation:

1. In training, everything we do is simulation. If we aren’t simulating performance, even at a cognitive level, our training sucks. This counts for the classroom or the correspondence course.

2. In simulation, full-task is a pipe dream unless it’s using the exact equipment in the exact environment with the exact team makeup. Too many people say ‘if it does everything, we can do anything with it’. Most of the time this is a total waste of resources and hits a pretty small part of the population – where’s the VOI there? Part task will go a lot farther, a lot faster, for a lot more of the audience.

I’ve got some diagrams that represent some scales for part task simulator / activity implementation in some of my presentation materials.

I’ve been ‘studying’ games for around 30 years:) Most recently have spent quite a bit of time in the World of Warcraft. The concept of mastery and level progression holds a lot of promise for skill support. I’m not sure that the time invested would be worth the return (both in development and the performer’s virtual ‘/played’) but if we want to engage folks – addiction is one way to do it;)

Of course, the preparation for the extraordinary situation would be intense (i.e. there would need to be guidelines for setting up the situation, scaffolding for the creative process, resources that students could draw on available within the virtual world–some of which might need constant updating as the needs arose, support to help students reflect on what is going on so as to learn from the process, and motivational support to keep students engaged, especially during “failures”).