Too much hard work has kept me from blogging recently, but there’s a lesson here. David Batstone’s Right Reality newsletter the WAG, a great source of inspiration, pointed me to a report that says that hard work, not natural talent, is the key to success.

While people have often suggested it’s both, the research suggests that there’s no such thing as a natural talent for a specific thing. Moreover, the fact that some people continue on to greatness in any particular thing is due to ‘deliberate practice’: “activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance”.

I think there’re two parts to that. One is finding or knowing the right thing to do, and the second is maintaining persistence through an increasing level of difficulty. Neither is a given. Maybe the natural talent is to figure out what you want to do and be willing to pursue it. The necessary adjunct is arranging the necessary support.

Really, that’s what I think we should be doing with good learning game design, using the story and setting the level of challenge to maintain motivation, and then ensuring that the embedded decisions are the necessary skills we want to develop.

There’s more, properly representing the concept, providing useful models of applying the concept to the context, supporting reflection to cement and extend the learning, but not only is this great news for anyone who has a passion, it’s also a boost for the value of good learning design.

In a recent Gamasutra article, Phillip Goetz analyzes strategy-based game interfaces. This wouldn’t be of interest normally, but the approach he takes, talking about metrics of number of steps to accomplish player goals is.

Goetz is talking about how you have to give orders to every ‘unit’ (a game element such as a factory or a squad), but in real life as you have greater responsibility you get greater authority and delegate on the one hand, and you have templates of behavior you can request. The point being, that our goals shift and we look for ways to automate tasks we’ve mastered and have to perform a lot.

The take home I want to suggest is that analyzing tasks and minimizing the steps to accomplish the users goals has been elegantly discussed in Don Norman’s 7 Stages of Action model (from his Design of Everyday Things), and this application is an excellent case study. He also talks about tools to measure things like learner actions so you can map what the user is trying to do to the number of steps to accomplish this.

There’s more (and it gets into the weeds a bit about objects), but this is a great start. Usability is part of learning game design (and learning technology in general), and good examples are one of the great ways to get a handle on it.

CO2FX is a ‘game’ about national policies and the carbon dioxide effects. You have responsibility for the science, economic and policy decisions for a national government. It’s very playable, although figuring your way through the interface takes a lot of exploration and experimentation.

The assessment that it’s a game is somewhat problematic; I claim that the designer can’t claim it’s a game, only players can determine whether it is (it’s a subjective assessment). Using my terminology, it’s a scenario (a simulation is just a model; it’s a scenario when you wrap an initial state and a goal state, possiblly with a story; it’s a game when you tune the experience to engagement).

The experience is certainly challenging, and there’s novelty in that what you do doesn’t seem to have the effect you inferred from the feedback, but the overall drama felt lacking; I didn’t feel quite the sense of urgency or outcomes; e.g. my popularity seemed to be waning, even though there was great economic growth, but I didn’t hear rumbles of dissent or have to weather bad press.

It’s a great example of what can, and should, be done, but it doesn’t stand on it’s own (it’d benefit from some ‘wrapping’ around the goals, to scaffold the learning, and to support post-hoc reflection).  Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s great educational value, but I think the claim of it being a game is a wee bit premature.

I found a review of my book Engaging Learning, by Jon Alekson, who I don’t know. It’s a fair review; he gets what I’m trying to accomplish (making the learning experience more effective), but criticizes my writing as a bit heavy, and bemoans the lack of focus on graphics.

I’ll wear the first one, but remark that it’s remarkably light considering I was trained as an academic and rewarded for dense prose for many years. Besides, my editor praised my ‘warm tone’ :). Your mileage may vary.

As for the graphics, I’ll admit it doesn’t have as much as I’d like. On the other hand, you can actually play a couple of games mentioned in the book on the web (check out the ‘Examples’ here). I’m not a graphic designer, and had little to do in regards to the final appearance as they were done by professionals. And, on the pragmatic side, copyright permissions aren’t much fun.

I haven’t seen many reviews, so it was good to find this one.

There was mayhem in the streets of Palo Alto yesterday as teams of players chased the clues to solve a mystery. At the Institute For the Future we ran a pervasive game as an example of the topic of this month’s meeting. Credit goes to Jim Schuyler of Red7 for organizing and leading the team who developed the game, and implemented it in his FIT environment for just such purposes. Not a learning game, but definitely fun and it *could* be.

Nicole Lazarro of Xeo Design who I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, Mads Rydahl of Planet (a Scandinavian game design firm), and Mike Love from IFTF all helped Jim and I create the design, which was tested, refined, and then run. The game included props such as posters on notice boards, clues to be sent in by phone, and confederates hanging out.

We had an inside team manning the web browser while 3 different teams (each doing the same thing, to have the right group size, but there’s no technical reason they couldn’t have different tasks) ran around figuring out puzzles and text-messaging them to the game system which gave them the next task. At times, interaction with the inside team was required.

It was tough; not all teams solved the puzzles in the allotted time (we had to go back for the presentations by Nicole and myself, and discussion: her on the 4 emotional keys, me on learning games), but the interaction was well-received. Competitive spirits came into play as well as the thrill of discovery (Nicole’s ‘fiero’), and frustration. It wasn’t perfect, given that it was thrown together by a volunteer team in a short period of time, but it worked: 1 team managed to save the day (accomplishing the final rescue), and a good time was had by all.

It was a great learning experience, both in working with others on the design and in watching the players (I followed one team around). In addition to Nicole’s model, Mads was quite keen on having the boundaries between the game action and the real world blur. This actually happened not only by design, but also by circumstance; but a police officer was in the building as the teams left (the mystery was solving a theft), and the confederate’s bike was stolen while he was talking to the team!

There’s great potential in this for marketing (the gelato store built into the plotline did a rousing business on a blazing hot day from the team members), learning, as well as just plain fun. If we believe Pine & Gilmore that the next step beyond the experience economy will be the transformation economy, this will be one of the tools in our repertoire.

I stumbled across the term Heutology, which is a word coined to talk about self-directed learning. It’s very similar to the ideas Jay Cross talks about for informal learning, but it is proposed as a successor to Malcolm Knowles Andragogy, wherein the role of the instructor is lost. I’ve argued that you can’t take self-directed learning capability for granted, as you can’t assume everyone’s developed the skills. And even then, you may need help.

For instance, even though I think of myself as a fairly capable self-learner, I need help on getting past my self-marketing barriers, and have been involved in one of Robert Middleton‘s Marketing Action Groups. A great resource for guidance on marketing yourself as an independent professional.

But I was reflecting on reflection as a critical tool of meta-learning or learning to learn. We don’t do enough of it, generally, though those I see as highly successful usually have a reflection process built into their lifestyles. Organizations say there isn’t enough time for reflection, we have to do, yet reflection is one of they keys to learning, and learning will be the key to ongoing creativity and innovation that will be differentiator for success going forward.

On a more practical note, I’ve been thinking about reflection as a part of our learning design. Of course we provide feedback, and we often have ‘thought questions’, but I’m convincing myself that we don’t do enough. I’ve started ending the scenarios I develop with a series of thought questions (credits to Deborah Zimmerman, of Agile Mind, who first tossed this into a scenario we developed on nursing) to generalize the learning. In scenarios you can only present so many contexts, and for transfer to broader contexts you can ask questions like:

• “How would that play out in a different situation?”
• “What would this look like in your own work situation?”
• “Can you hear this in your own life?”

I’d like to suggest that you consider wrapping up any learning content with some reflection questions before you close the experience, as a practical step. And find time to reflect in your own life, becoming clear about what you’re looking for.

Today I was working with a team (coordinated by my long-time mentor/colleague/friend Jim Schuyler, who knows the most interesting people) to design an experience for an upcoming event. Dialed in for a big part of the planning session was Nicole Lazzaro, a real revelation!

Nicole gave us a rundown on her insightful take on the four “fun keys” that serve as emotional signposts in the gaming experience. They’re a different cut through the elements I draw upon, and are insightful and well-based in her research on game playing. Moreover, she taps into an element I have largely ignored (owing to my own ‘non-social’ learning style; I’m not asocial, I’m just shy and kind of independent), the social aspect.

Her elements were:

• Fiero: an Italian word capturing individual triumph over adversity (requiring frustration beforehand). This is something that movies don’t do well, she asserts (and certainly vicarious triumph isn’t quite the same). I was pleased to hear her use ‘hard fun’, which those who know me is a concept I tout, though her take was more specific than mine. I align this with a perfectly-pitched ‘challenge’.
• Curiosity: this is an ‘easy fun’ which is interleaved with the hard fun, providing choice and opportunity to explore. I have choice and novelty which are combined to some extent here. Her take is that this leads to wonder, surprise, and/or awe. Delightful!
• Relaxation/Excitement: I didn’t quite get the nuances here, obviously, because this seemed like a twist on the shift between fiero and Curiosity. It’s a continuum, but the bits that did ‘stick’ included playing to learn and achieving goals, and also the importance of meta-cognition. These are concepts near and dear to my heart, so I’ll have to pursue these further.
• People fun: Here she included the joy of working with others, and also Shadenfreude “pleasure taken from someone else’s misfortune”. I tend to focus on individual learning experiences, and so she’s providing valuable new perspective to me here. This incorporates all the social emotions from envy and jealousy to camaraderie, gratitude, and generosity.

I have written about emotion in elearning(a PDF), but this is an elegant analysis of emotion in the gaming experience, and valuable for learning game design as well. There’s a brief introduction in a Gamasutra article summarizing a session on emotion that Nicole participated in (free registration may be required). Have at it!