As you should know, my book Engaging Learning: Designing e-Learning Simulation Games was published back in 2005.   I was just talking to them about some other possible projects, and the question arose about why it hadn’t been more successful.   I had my story, but I’d welcome your feedback.

I’m quite proud of the book, I have to say; I believe it accomplished what I intended it to, which was to lay out a principled framework about why games are effective for learning, and then give you a systematic process to go about designing them, along with some hints and tips.   It came out at a time when interest was peaking about using games to meet learning needs.   So, why didn’t it fly off the shelves?   My answer is severalfold:

• It wasn’t marketed well.   My publisher basically sent a few copies to reviewers, and then did little.   I may have not been proactive enough in letting them know my speaking engagements, but I did do a lot of speaking and writing.   That may not have been leveraged sufficiently.
• The unique contribution, that this book is about how to design learning games, wasn’t really communicated.   That is, while some books tell you about why it’s important, this was the only one that really gives you a design process.   (And still is, as far as I can tell.)
• At the same time, lots of other books came out that were about games for learning, authors including Johnson, Gee, Shaffer, Aldrich, Koster, and more. They had a different proposition, but some were higher profile for a variety of reasons, and the sheer quantity created confusion.

Now, there are other possible reasons, including most obviously that the book isn’t any good.   I’ve received very nice comments from people who’ve read it, but one of the few Amazon reviews isn’t very nice (I noticed only recently).   So, I could be self-deluded.   Also, I’m not a great self-promoter (that is, while I’m convinced that I’m quite good at what I do, I’m not very active in going out and selling that idea to people).     I probably should’ve been more forward in getting those who told me they liked it to write Amazon reviews (please, feel free!).

I’d really welcome feedback on this, as I did try to make a unique and valuable contribution, and still expect that the book could have ‘legs’ if I can figure out where I might refocus some of my or my publisher’s efforts.   They did mention that they’ve reorganized their marketing department ;).   Comments?   Honest and constructive encouraged as well as supportive.

Ok, so you know I’ll be co-leading the eLearning Guild’s Summer Seminar Series on Immersive Learning Simulations with Jeff Johannigman (hope to see you there!).   We’ll be getting seriously into planning soon, and it occurred to me to find out your thoughts on what should be there.

It’ll be based at least somewhat on my tried and true workshop, but it’ll have Jeff’s expertise in game design, and a broader focus including at least separating ILS from Virtual Worlds.   So, what should absolutely be in there? What would be nice to have? What should we skip?   I’d like to have your input to make it as good as it can be!   So, your thoughts?   (And thanks in advance!)

On Gamasutra (the game developers site), there’s an article that uses the new release of Dungeons and Dragons to inspire thoughts about improving games. What I want to note is the following quote, which nicely captures what I try to tell attendees at my game design workshop:

Being inspired by concepts is not just a good idea. When your skill reaches a high enough level, it becomes a state of mind. Start by analyzing games in similar genres for good ideas. Dissect those ideas and learn from them. Then jump to similar games in different genres. Pen and paper role playing games and board games are a great next step.

A true epic-level master of concept-yoinking like Shigeru Miyamoto can take gameplay features from abstract activities like gardening. Pay attention to everything you see, from movies to conversations with friends to patterns in the ceiling tiles. Where do designers get the inspiration for new games? It’s all thievery.

I remember when Lewis & Reimann, in their online HCI text, said something to the effect of: ‘plagiarize, as far as your lawyers will let you’. The point being not to reinvent the wheel when there’re good examples out there already. You may be the da Vinci of game design, but it’s not the way to bet. Use tried and tested solutions from the world around you; you’ll have plenty of challenge integrating them into a coherent whole without having to reinvent genres.

What I tell my learners is that they have a new, onerous responsibility: they have to start taking in lots more quantity and variety of popular culture – read more novels, watch more movies, play more games, etc (ok, so I’m joking about the ‘onerous’ part :). The reason being, they need richer grounds to mine for ideas to improve their games. They need to consciously evaluate what’s working for them, or others (even if it doesn’t work for them).

When I looked at design a number of years ago, one of the models that came out was a process of modifying (mutating) existing designs or combining elements from more than one previous design. Design is good, streamlined design is better in most instances where pragmatism holds sway, like limited resources, scope, and or schedule (“fast, cheap, or good: pick any two”). So, be an integrator, a synthesist, a problem-solver. Hey, if Shigeru is doing it, you’ll be in good company!

Just as I did for mobile, here’re 5 paragraphs on games:

Serious Games (or, to be Politically Correctâ„¢, Immersive Learning Simulations) have hit the corporate learning mainstream, so you should be asking yourself: “why are people excited” Quite simply, because games (I‘m not PCâ„¢) are probably the most pragmatically effective learning practice you can get. Sure, mentored real performance is the ideal, but there are two potential hiccups: scaling individual mentors has proven to be unrealistically expensive, and mistakes in live practice often are expensive, dangerous, or both. Why do you think we have flight simulators?

For principled reasons, the best learning practice is contextualized, motivating, and challenging. Interestingly, so are the most engaging experiences. It turns out that the elements that cause effective educational practice line up perfectly with those that create engaging experiences. Thus, we can safely say that learning should be ‘hard fun‘.

Then the issue becomes if we can do this reliably, repeatably, and on a cost-effective basis. It turns out that the answer to this question is also in the affirmative. While you can‘t just shove gamers and educators in a room and expect the result to work (all the bad examples that led to ‘edutainment‘ becoming a bad word are evidence), if they understand the alignment above, systematically follow a creative process (no, systematic creativity is not an oxymoron; why do we have brainstorming processes?), and are willing to take time to ‘tune‘ the result, we can do this reliably.

The question is really: when to use games. The answer for engine-driven (read: programmed, variable) games is when we have a need for deep practice: when there are complex relationships to explore, or making the change will be really hard. Branching scenarios are useful when we want to experience some contextualized practice but we don‘t need a lot of it. And the principles suggest that at minimum, we should write better multiple-choice questions that put learners into contexts where they must make decisions where they‘re applying the knowledge, not just reciting it.

And, yes, we can spend millions of dollars (I can help :), but for many needs we may not need to. While there isn‘t any one tool that lets us do this, there are a number of cost-effective ways to develop and deliver on the resulting design. As I like to say “if you get the design right, there are lots of ways to implement it; if you don‘t get the design right, it doesn‘t matter how you implement it”.

Further resources include:

• My book on designing games
• The eLearning Guild’s Research Report on ILS
• The Serious Games site
• Clark Aldrich’s blog on learning games
• My other game blog posts

We’re developing a scenario (code word for serious game :), and I’ve come into a situation where I can see a plausible case for either side, and don’t know of any research results.

The scenario is serving as a the major organizing focus for a course (this specifically is designed for the formal education system). We’ve got a contextualized task that requires applying the curriculum material, and want to make the curriculum material available for access during the scenario.

Here’re the two options I see:

• One is to have all the tutorial material available from within the scenario. The notion is that once there’s a need, having the information available will optimize the moment of learning. The fear is that taking time to access the information could break the flow of the scenario experience. So, if you couldn’t decide how to set up the quantum physics experiment, you’d access a tutorial on said topic from the lab library.

• The other is to have a digested down version of the information (in a ‘performance support’ model, that serves as a reference guide and you stay very much ‘in the moment’, but if you don’t know the material, you exit the scenario to get the concepts, and then you go back into the scenario experience, and use the guides for assistance but they’re not sufficient to actually learn from (unless, of course, you’ve already got some foundation). So, if you couldn’t set up the quantum physics experiment with the ‘checklist’, you’d leave the scenario motivated to read the tutorial and then restart/reenter the scenario.

The tradeoff is learning material available versus any effect on ‘breaking the wall’ between the scenario and the external learning environment.

We’re building the scenario, so we’ll actually have the second, and of course if that’s insufficient we’ll add in the first, but I wondered if there’s any ‘a priori’ information. Research solicited, opinions welcome.