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!

At the UK eLearning Mission that happened last week, one of the US representatives was from a game development firm established to work in the Serious Games space after having been contacted about one of their pure games (very much like the ‘military squad’ games). They do full immersive games of a scale approaching that of commercial games, and with a similar quality. I assumed at a similar price point, but he jumped on that.

He said they worked out at about $18K per hour of training, but admitted that they couldn’t drop that down to $6K for 20 minutes. It was clear that there was some sort of minimum size before his numbers made sense, but he was cagey about the details. Ah, business…

So it’s not clear what the tipping point is between when you can and should make do with small games or when you want to go for full immersion game play. My natural reactions are to focus on the learning outcomes and keep the immersion for when it makes sense (as his initial example did), such as ambient contextualization, and otherwise situate the decisions you need with the minimal amount of production and tune to get the experience.

I also had a chance to talk to him about the processes they used to develop a game. Unlike the approach I use for small games (see the tools at the Engaging Learning resources page), where first we develop a concept document (audience, decisions, misconceptions, consequences, and a proposed storyline) and then a storyboard (all the screens, variables, initialization, draft visuals, prose, and rules) they develop a script without visual assets at all, and actually put that into the game engine and run it as a text adventure game until they have the play debugged. Then they do the visual assets.

This makes sense, I reckon, for his scale and production processes. An interesting lesson for me (still lusting after a chance to play with a larger size project than I have to date).

GamaSutra (the game development community site; free registration may be required) has several articles summing up panels from the recent E3 expo. For those who don’t know, E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) is the game industry show, where the latest games and platforms are shown off to try to drive business. It’s an enormous spectacle (the game industry now is bigger than movies) with giant vehicles and creatures, hosts of ‘booth babes’, everything to attract the typical (read young male) gamer audience.

However, there are also thoughtful panels, and GamaSutra has some nice summations, including at least four on game design from a variety of perspectives. Check out the overview page which lists all the subarticles.

This past week I was at the eLearning Guild‘s conference (a great conference, as always), and had a number of learnings, as well as a delightful chance to chat with a whole bunch of people.

One of the great delights was finding out that an individual who had attended my learning game design workshop at a previous eLearning Guild conference was presenting the current status of a game project they were developing. They had done an outstanding job focusing on their goals, and consequently coming up with a compelling scenario that really hit their goals for making an impact on their business. He was very gracious, mentioning the workshop (even the book, and I didn‘t even pay him!), and also demonstrating the difficulties as well as the successes they had. It‘s gratifying to have what you say come to fruition, and to see more people trying to take their elearning to the ‘next level‘.

One interesting thing was that they had to use a side bucket of R&D money to do this, rather than having it being a mainstream activity. It‘s sad that they have to sneak it in, and then hope to get support now that it‘s to a ‘playable‘ stage.

I wonder how many people are finding it difficult to sell games. It‘s amazing to think that the most powerful practice opportunity is hard to justify, but the fact is that people‘s minds are limited. Particularly when one of the things that has been labeled as ‘games‘ is those mindless tarted up drill-and-kills. So you have to play games (ahem), and call it a ‘scenario‘ or (inaccurately) a scenario. Which isn‘t inappropriate but I‘d like you to be tuning it to a game for the best learning, not just leaving it a scenario (my terminology is a simulation is just a manipulable model, when you wrap an initial and goal state and a story it‘s a scenario, and when you tune it until it‘s engaging you‘ve got a game).

There were a number of other presentations talking about how to ramp up the engagement of the content, some better than others, but the important thing is that people are now talking more about the emotional content of the learning.

In Gamasutra (free registration required, I believe) there’s a summary of Will Wright’s Game Developers Conference Keynote. Will Wright is the genius behind Sim City and The Sims, and is now working on this next magnum opus (how many can he have?), Spore.

The talk wove together astrobiology in talking about the required research, but what comes out is the tuning required to go from principle to finished game. Will’s told me that despite the simply awesome programming of Sim City, it was only 10% of the work, and 90% is tuning. Some quotes:

“How and when research should be done: even before preproduction begins”

“this initial research led to simulation prototypes, which were just simple apps showing some of the underlying science principles visually”

“many science prototypes needed to be built in order for some of these to become interesting”

and “research should be useful in four areas: innovation, risk, fun and deep messages”

but you’ll have to read the article to find out how research helps these. In short, there’s a lot of work doing the work to ensure that your design integrates a great experience and real outcomes.