On Sunday I drove down to the San Francisco studios of KALW 91.7 FM here in the Bay Area to talk with Marty Nemko about simulations and games. He runs a show about workplace issues (and anything else he wants to talk about), has years of experience, and turns out is quite well known. He’d gotten interested in simulations and games, and asked me to appear to talk about the issues for the first half hour of his show. (The second half hour he answers callers and gives 3 minute ‘career makeovers’; I stuck around to listen and it’s very interesting.)

Now, I’ve been on the radio before, interviewed over the phone from Tasmania when I was living in Australia. And I’d been in a TV studio before (for reasons I can no longer recall!), and was interviewed for TV in a makeshift studio while in Colombia. But this was my first visit to a working radio studio with a live broadcast. Two guys were holding a philosophy talk show before Marty’s show, while we talked and then taped Marty’s intro for the next week.

We’d intended to have him go through simulations during the session, with him verbalizing the experience, but it didn’t work out well, so we ended up just talking about simulations. We talked through lots of issues in the half hour. You can actually listen to it as they record it and Marty makes it available (NB: it requires Real Player). It’s always strange to hear one’s voice played back.

He welcomed me to ask questions, and my main one was “what do you to keep from getting too nervous”. It’s funny, I speak alot and am usually not nervous, but for some reason the novelty of the format caused a few butterflies. His answer was insightful, about how in the end it really won’t matter. You always make mistakes and wish you said things differently but it won’t really make a difference in the bigger picture. Quite right.   I started a bit tentatively, but got going.   Also forgot it was being broadcast (and recorded) and talked with less diplomacy than would’ve been ideal.   C’est la vie.

Overall, it was quite the learning experience. It’s part of my learning strategy to push myself into new situations, and this certainly qualified! Interestingly, too often we forget our old technologies in the excitement of new ones (people seem to forget about discussion boards, but they’re great for certain types of eCommunity, as is happening with ITFORUM). Radio’s a case in point, as we know from podcasts sometimes audio is a great channel.

…and it’s the same news. The online certificate in game design (based on my book, Engaging Learning) that Training’s Live+Online was offering was cancelled due to insufficient signups. It’s a relief, in that having done so many presentations in the past month, I’m exhausted. It’s disappointing, in that I was looking forward to the challenge!

It works so well face to face, it’s even survived cross-cultural delivery. I’d designed it to work well online too, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see another time whether it’d have worked. Thanks and apologies to those who did sign up. I will be running the face-to-face workshop at TechKnowledge in San Antonio at the end of February, so that’ll be the next opportunity (and last, as it currently stands, it’s the only remaining one scheduled!)

One of the questions that continually comes up is what tool to use. Particularly for model-driven games, where the interactions are driven from an underlying simulation instead of from fixed branches (where the relationships are implicit in the links, not explicit in a model), everyone wants a tool to make it easier. And I’m pretty sure that can’t happen. Sure, you can use a tool for modeling a specific domain, e.g. Excel for business sims, but there can’t be anything more general than a programming language (e.g. Flash) for building any game you might need. From a response I sent to a correspondent:

Basically, there’re so many different types of relationships you’d want to model that any tool would have to be focused on a subset, otherwise it’s so general that there’s no advantage. Not sure what Stottler-Henke’s claim on SimVentive is, but the overhead looks pretty heavy to me. Other than that, Stella might be general enough, but for instance Excel will work as an engine for business models and other numerics, but could have trouble with softskills, etc. So I still think a high-level programming language is the best tool. Even game engines (e.g. Unreal) are optimized for certain things, and shoe-horning other types of games into them may compromise the learning goals or add unnecessary overhead (read: cost).

There are tools for branching sims (Captivate has added that capability since 2 and advanced it in 3 as I understand, and SimWriter is potentially the best ‘industrial-strength’ tool focused on that capability), but for model-driven interactions I haven’t seen it and am pretty convinced for principled reasons that you can’t have it. Hey, I’d like to have such tools available, for everybody, so I’m not pushing a negativity barrow here.

And I don’t want this to put you off going the extra level to get a model/simulation-driven interaction. When lots of practice is necessary, it’s the best way (branching scenarios have limited replay, and at some point it gets cheaper to do a model-driven interaction that multiple branching scenarios). Further, if you focus tightly on the decisions that will have the biggest impact, and focus on design rather than production, it’s not that hard and not that expensive.

Of course, match your needs to the solutions available, work with knowledgeable partners, but consider deeply immersive practice when it really matters.

I’ve mentioned before how I got into this field, and back then what we were doing was creating educational computer games. Playing the original Colossal Cave adventure, I realized how we could put meaningful skills into these environments (not really what we were doing at DesignWare). Still, I thought of them as games.

Later, when I built a game requiring analogical reasoning (based upon my PhD thesis) and then with Quest, and more, I continued to think of them as games. When I finally wrote about how to design them, I used the phrase Simulation Games in the title, partly at the prodding of my publisher. So it’s been interesting to see the recent struggles with naming that are going on.

Ben Sawyer, moderator of the Serious Games discussion list, recently had a post discussing the various nuances of the term ‘serious games’. He differentiated his interpretation from what the eLearning Guild has called Immersive Learning Simulations (ILS). Interesting, the Guild chose that name when they received serious feedback (1784 respondents represented here) from their great research tool that the phrase ‘game’ was seriously problematic:

As you can see, there was a strong feeling that the name had to change. On the other hand, there was speculation that the reason the ILS symposium at the upcoming DevLearn conference was cancelled due to low signups may well be because of the label. So, what’s going on?

It is true that some of us are focused on the corporate space with these, while others are almost definitely not interested in that space, instead being in, for the lack of a better term, the political/social action space. I like to think that my design principles work for either, but Ben’s message made clear that using games to ease kids pain, to exercise, etc, don’t qualify in his mind. I don’t quite agree, as my approach starts with an objective and provides systematic steps to achieve that objective, but there are things that wouldn’t qualify.

The issue for labeling in corporate learning is that some companies are concerned enough (concerned being a diplomatic euphemism) to actually block the term ‘game’ from any search through their firewall (!). As I’ve said before, a simulation is just a model, when you put the simulation in a particular state and ask the learner to take it to a goal state it’s a scenario, and when you tune that experience until engagement is achieved it’s a game. Clark Aldrich says it slightly differently, putting ILS at the intersection (think ‘Venn Diagram’, I can’t find a copy on his site) of Simulation, Games, and Pedagogy (I agree if you essentially equate the word ‘games’ with ‘engagement’ :).

Regardless, if you’re not at least considering deeply immersive practice through scenarios (though the one connotation that scenarios mean branching is too limited), you’re missing a powerful learning experience. More, there are very good reasons to think that tuning the experience, at least to some degree, makes the learning even more powerful. Finally, as I’ve said before, they’re not as expensive as you might fear.

So, regardless of name, consider the outcome, and make your learning practice as powerful as possible!

Because of the blog, I occasionally (increasingly?) get pointed to check out some things. Some of them clearly are marketing/PR but not labeled as such, others are just clueless (asking me to support a paper-writing service?). This one was clearly marketing, but they were offering value. It’s a game where you drag and drop countries onto a European Map.

The game itself is interesting: the countries are identified by shape and two letter URL code. Even when you get it in the right place, you’re not told what the country is by name. At the end you get feedback about what you missed. It’s hard at first, when you get a country that’s landlocked and there’re no boundaries shown. Also, I confess I didn’t know what country .by was (still don’t).

So I missed several because I have no idea where they are (never studied European geography, but I’m one who survived his schooling), and others because I didn’t get them in quite the right spot with no other countries to line up. It’s got some flaws from helping you learn the countries, but it’s fun and it will help you learn their relative locations. The order seems to be the same each time, which isn’t good. If you could put in the ones you know, you might be able to build up to the ones you don’t know. Still, it seemed some interest, some value, some fun.

And I was going to give you the link, but then I found they’d a sneaky way to get their code into my blog. I’m sure they thought it’d be cool to embed the link and the game right in my blog, but I prefer to choose what appears on the page. If they’d said that I could get a link and embed, I might have, but not having it done when I was trying to cut and paste the countries I’d missed (I’m was willing to own up about them).

I had to edit the code to get it out! That’s sleazy. So, no link for them, just an object lesson on what not to do.

There was quite a ruckus recently, as Yahoo hired a person because of their leadership as demonstrated by ability to lead a World of Warcraft guild. Bob Dean who I earlier mentioned, told me the story of his son, who was hired because of his knowledge of (and interest in) the Air Traffic Control system. This was learned not through book, nor courses, but by a simulation built on top of Microsoft’s Flight Simulator.

Microsoft’s Flight Simulator is an interesting story in itself as, originally built as a training tool, it became popular as entertainment. What it lacks, however, is context. There’re airports, but no people and consequently some distance from real flying. What Vat Sim adds, as I understand it, is other flyers and air traffic control. It’s a community of interested people who play these roles and make the flying experience more complete. It’s not designed to be training, in this case, but instead a way for enthusiasts to play together. Yet it’s obviously quite effective.

Our conversation wandered off into issues in sim design, and the role of Authenticity (the topic of Pine & Gilmore’s new book). Bob was curious if there were any other simulations that might inspire careers, and I couldn’t think of any offhand (though America’s Army certainly qualifies). Certainly people might try combat, flight, driving, and medical/vet simulations, and the various Tycoon games might allow some feel for those jobs. Know of any others?

Tomorrow (September 25 at 8:30 Pacific), several of us from the eLearning Guild’s Immersive Learning Simulations research report will be holding a free webinar on the topic. If you’re interested in simulations and games, register. We’ll talk briefly from our areas, and answer questions. Hope to ‘see’ you there!

In the type of learning games I talk about, to go beyond branching scenarios you need to build a model. That is, a branching scenario captures the underlying relationships and consequences implicitly in the branches, but to build the underlying simulation for an engine/rule-driven game, you’re going to have to capture the relationships and causality explicitly. It’s not difficult, but it’s a unique skill set that not everybody has. And you need it to be successful in creating a design that can be documented and produced.

So, people often ask what the ‘reality check’ is for the type of person who’s likely to be able to do this. My short answer used to be anyone who programs, though that’s a much more limited set than we’d like. It’s got to be someone who can map some statements about relationships into some unambiguous representation such as rules, formulas, or look-up tables. And it typically should not be the same person who’s being creative (hard to be both the creative diverging, and the modeler converging). I thought of a better answer, however.

I think a good indicator is whether you have ever captured your thinking in a formalism. A couple of frequent ways people do this is to create a working mail filter rule, create a new macro, or build a complex spreadsheet. It’s got the same notion of capturing a relationship that programming does.

So, I guess I’d claim that if you’ve been successful at that sort of task, you’re probably capable of doing the modeling. If not, e.g. you avoid the sort of tasks I’m talking about, you should find someone else to handle that on your design team, and take the creative role.

The other day, the following comment appeared in the Serious Games discussion list:

This gets to an issue that I believe is important, what does it cost an average team to build a good game. I have seen RFPs that had ambitious, laudable goals, such as aids education. … But the budget was in the low six figures. If the game was built for that kind of money there is no way it could achieve the goals.

And it really made me mad! It’s driving me nuts that folks are saying that meaningful games have to cost in the high six or low seven figures, because you don’t need that much; you can get meaningful learning outcomes in games in the mid-high five and low six figures. How do I know? Because I’ve done it, and know I can do it reliably and repeatedly.

On principle, the point is that if you get the design right, you don’t need to spend lots on production. If you know what you’re doing (and you should), you focus in on the key decisions, work them into a setting, sweat the details, model the design, and produce it. Now, I admit that these aren’t Wii-quality games, rather they’re likely going to be Flash on the web, but that works. You don’t need 3D scrolling graphics and rendered worlds (in fact, they can get in the way).

So, before you write off creating real engaging games, make sure you’re not buying the pricetags some folks would have you believe. If you do have that type of budget, I can help there too ;), but seriously, unless you need an America’s Army or some other mass-market quality game, don’t think you’ve got to break the bank!