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(Serious) Games in 5 paragraphs

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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

Evaluating Serious Games (er, ILS)

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I’ve been working with a group creating the rubrics for evaluating submissions in a 2nd Life serious game competition. It’s an interesting issue, as there’re broad variances in what folks are thinking. As a reaction to a draft consensus of opinion, I rewrote the criteria to be evaluated as:

Learning
Comprehensiveness of alternatives to right answer
Match of game decisions to learning objectives
Appropriateness of feedback

Usability
Appropriate interface match to action
Interface navigation

Game
Naturalness of feedback mechanism
Continuity of experience
Seamlessness in embedding decisions into game world
Appropriateness of world to audience
Relevant to irrelevant action ratio
Appropriate challenge balancing
Level of replay (linear, branching, engine-driven)

I know this can be done better.     Your thoughts?

It’s an effort to combine my aligned elements from both education and engagement (the theoretical basis for my book on learning game design): clear goals, balanced challenge, thematic context, meaningfulness of action to story, meaningfulness of story to player, active choice, direct manipulation, integrated feedback, and novelty (see below), with the more standard elements necessary to make a successful online experience.

Alignment of Engagement and Game Elements

I find it useful to revisit principles from another angle, as it gives me a fresh chance to put a reality-check on my thinking. I think my older model holds up (and has continued to over the years), and the extras are not unique to learning games. Some elements cross boundaries, such as feedback having to components: one being the relation to the learning, and the other to the action.

The principles state that, done properly, the best practice (next to mentored real performance) ought to be games. Or, as I like to say: “Learning can, and should, be hard fun!”

Big Question: Learning Design for Digital Natives? Bugwash!

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This month’s Learning Circuit’s Blog Big Question of the Month is: Do we design learning different for digital natives? My short answer is no, but let me elaborate, as I’ve gone off on this in various places but not here (as far as I can see), and I think there’s something importantly wrong going on here

Let’s start with the hypothesis: that these digital ‘natives’ are fundamentally different than us – they’re immersed in a digital world, are better multi-taskers, and need more immersive and engaging learning environments.

My take is a twist on this. The old ways of learning are wrong for everyone; the instructivist model of tell & test doesn’t work for the new generation any more than it did for the old one! It was designed for industrial efficiency in delivery, and wasn’t worried about effectiveness as it was really a filter to higher-learning for those who *could* learn in this way.

So we do need to do new learning design, immersive and engaging, but for everyone, as it brings in the elements we’ve lost. We used to have apprenticeships, and we’ve gone away from this. We need to get back to contextualized task performance with learning layered on, for everyone! No wasted time, no dull and plodding content push, but instead meaningful action and appropriate information nuggets.

Look, the differences in this new generation are more attitudinal than mental skill set. Ask any mother about multi-tasking! It’s not about catering to them, it’s about the best learning for everyone.

Fantastic Gaming (long)

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In the Serious Games discussion list, Richard Wainess posted a thoughtful and eloquent reply to my request for research on the value (or not) of fantastic settings, in which he argued about the necessary learning design depth required in game design. I‘m primed for the discussion since I‘ve just been in the process of designing a learning game with a team. I thoroughly agree with him, and I’d highly recommend you find and read his response except for the fact that it appears there’s no archive. However, I had assumed the issues he‘s suggested, and penned this (slightly modified) response:

I think you’re missing the value of fantastic settings in effectively adding on top of what you say. We could set a task (e.g. negotiation) in several real-life environments, including with a car dealer, with the boss for a raise, with the kids about bed time (bad idea), etc. Or we could set it in space, for example, negotiating with suppliers for equipment, with civilizations for territory, with buyers for products, etc. Once we ensure we’ve put the necessary skills into the game, across differing contexts, and added the post-game reflection, is there a potential benefit for having a more compelling storyline? That trades off positively against the less direct transfer?

Yes, it takes different contexts to abstract and generalize, but let’s not neglect the value of motivation. So I agree it absolutely *has* to encompass the essential skills across contexts (broad enough to generalize to all relevant situations, and to no irrelevant ones). But there’s more than just that. My hypothesis is that embedding them into an exaggerated storyline may enhance the outcomes more than a real-world setting (and the more so the more general the skill).

If it’s not a storyline that the learner cares about, they’re not going to engage like they will when it really matters to them (e.g. the car *they* want to purchase). So we need that motivation, that emotional engagement as well. And that’s when we’re going to want to align the cognitive and game engagement. When people really have to perform, they have external motivation. Don’t we want to embed that in the experience as well?

I suggest that once we get the educational process down and vary the settings in context, that increasing the motivation through a compelling storyline that both is a meaningful application of the skill and is a storyline that the learners care about, will increase the outcome measure more than an more realistic, and dull, exercise. It’s testable, and I want the answer rather than just relying on my intuition (which will suffice for now; I too am trying to meet real needs, not just satisfy academic interests, but I’d feel far better knowing the answer one way or another).

My feeling is, rightly or wrongly, that not enough people get the depths he talks about, and on the other side, the argument I make above. I‘d like the answer, but in lieu of that, I‘m going to stick with my belief. (And later, Richard responded about how my response made him smile, as he’s starting just this research.)

A further claim from another respondent said that we just need to make the next Oregon Trail, which spurred this rejoinder:

If you don’t have the academic underpinning that Richard argues so eloquently for, all the cool window-dressing won’t lead to a thing. If you’ve infinite resources, you can iterate ’til you get the outcomes you suggest, but I’d prefer to draw upon principled bases and shorten the development process by systematically combining deep learning design with creative engagement design.

It almost appears that the few good edutainment titles were more a case of “even a blind pig finds a truffle once in a while” (a botched metaphor, to be sure, but personally relevant as how my friend described me finding my wife) than the result of a real understanding; there are too many bad titles out there. I don’t want to trust to chance that NASA’s MMO will be effective, nor burn through too much $$ to ensure it. I’d like to use what we know to help do it reliably, and repeatably. We owe it to ourselves and to society to demonstrate that serious games are a viable learning vehicle, not a hit or miss (or money sink) proposition.

Ok, so I‘m opinionated. What did you expect? I didn‘t spend, off and on, 25+ years doing learning game design to just throw up my hands. So, am I off my rocker?

The Apple of my Design

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There’s an interesting article on Apple’s design process at BusinessWeek (no, I don’t read it; I learned about it somewhere else :). Now, I’ve taken a long look at design over the years from a lot of perspectives, partly because I taught interface design for a while, but mostly because I want to know how to execute good design in general (and how to support it). I’ve similarly looked at what makes effective learning, what makes engaging experiences, etc. And design’s fun!

Along the way, I looked at graphic design, instructional design, architectural design, industrial design, etc, and design in domains like writing, comics, etc. Design’s interesting, in that you’re trying to explore a potentially vast space of possible solutions, and you don’t want to miss any areas of the overall space in case you miss out on a great solution. We tend to prematurely converge, bringing in subconscious constraints from our cognitive limitations like functional fixedness, set effects, etc. So, what we look for are ways to help keep us be highly divergent before we get convergent.

Across disciplines, you see repeated effort to do this. Brainstorming is of course common. An approach I knew a small interface design house used was to have to parallel teams working separately on a design before choosing one to develop further, and in Apple’s approach we see a much bigger version thereof.   Egoless design (sharing and being open to constructive feedback), no-limits design (what would you do if you had magic), kitchen-sink design (look at what others have done; as far as your lawyers will let you, plagiarize), etc, are a few of the rubrics I came up with to help facilitate thinking out of the box. They are all tricks to help widely populate the design space. Systematic creativity is not, in fact, an oxymoron, but the result of the fact that certain processes increase the likelihood of the best solution (yes, it’s probabilistic).

Apple’s approaches of the multiple solutions, and the parallel meetings really do help partner systematicity with creativity in demonstrably effective ways. There are interesting lessons here. Design is a key component of the ability to continue to innovate, which is a critical survival skill, even more so going forward. Design on!

Warcrack

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My wife was away, so I had the kids and a big deliverable. Life was hectic until Friday, and we had the weekend to kill. Both kids were looking for downtime, so I had a chunk of time at my disposal. Now it was time to do something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time: I signed up for the free trial of World of Warcraft (which, in case you somehow don’t know, is *the* massively multiplayer online role playing game, or MMORPG, set in a ‘swords & sorcery’ fantasy).

Now, this isn’t a frivolous pursuit; as I tell the attendees at my (learning) game design workshop, to do this well you have to be on top of the different forms of media experiences and what makes them engaging, to have the broadest repertoire of sources to draw upon. I also say that it’s important to try games outside your area of comfort. Being ever mindful of financial issues, I note that a great way to do this is to try out the free trial demos of all the different games that are available. So, it was with serious intent that I started my trial…oh, the heck with it, I like fantasy, and I was looking forward to it. OK?

Now, it’s a bit of a confession to admit that this was my first MMORPG, but I also to get to admit that it wasn’t much different than I imagined. You move around, and fight monsters, gaining levels, attempting to get more powerful weapons and armor. That said, there are some very interesting features, and some frustrations.

The world is quite simply gorgeously realized. It may not rival the best console games, but it’s certainly stunning, particularly as it’s playing over a network! And the entrance for new players is quite reasonable. They do suggest you read the manuals (which I’ve yet to find), but they give you hints as you go along, and set you a series of quests that develop your skills. The nice thing about the quests is that they’re reasonably well set in the world.

It’s quite impressive, BTW, just how much they can cram into a small area.   You don’t go far to be questing after new goals, even surrounded by a bunch of other folks doing the same.   It doesn’t feel crowded, but right next door to a previous quest is a new one.   You didn’t realize that just beyond that rise, there was a whole new camp of evil creatures, yet when you make that traverse it’s totally plausible that they were there all the time.

The difficulty goes pretty linearly, the farther from your home you go.   The world is constrained to have you doing things in this area, then this next, one, and each gets gradually   harder.   If you go too far too fast, you’ll die.   Of course, dying is of no real consequence, either, you can go back and revive your corpse and keep playing (and it’s not morbid, really).

It *is* a multiplayer world, with all that conveys. There are other people clearly doing the same quests you are, and you can all do them independently, but you do realize that it’s a ‘setup’. And there are the predictable puerile folks doing things like creating inappropriate names and yelling obscenities. However, as a trial user I couldn’t join groups, and the quests were capable of being done alone. I could see how coordination would help on some I’m currently at right now, but I worked out one on my own via some strategic thinking.

There are only a couple downsides. For one, some of the interface elements are not ‘safe’ enough. I was trying to look through my stuff to trade and sell, and I think I bought something and then sold it back again before I realized it. Unfortunately, the price you get is less than the price you pay, so it was a very quick act of unintended philanthropy. It’s also surprisingly hard to find good information about certain constraints. As I mentioned, the manual is hard to find, and it’s tough to find answers to specific questions. I’ll admit that I have a tendency to charge ahead (at least, in games ;) and just try things, which isn’t bad but may lead me to inappropriate actions that I’d rather have warnings about at the beginning. And it’s a very rich world.

It’s well done, and it’s clear what a big budget will let you do. I think that there are some real good ideas in helping new folks (newbies) get up to speed, when you have a large investment in time to pay off. and, it really is fun, but ‘hard fun’, and I’m going back ’til my trial is over.   Then I’ll stop. Other things to do, and no need to acquire yet another time sink. But I’m glad it’s a limited time trial!

Scope of Responsibility

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The Learning Circuit’s Blog Big Question of the Month for March is “what is the scope of our responsibility as learning professionals”. It’s an interesting question, and what prompted it is an interesting read in itself. I’ve been on the stump in a variety of ways suggesting our responsibility is quite broad, if we want to matter to the organization, and we should.

First, I believe it is the learning professional’s scope of responsibility to go beyond courses to resources and job aids, portals, knowledge management, eCommunity, etc, populating the ‘performance ecosystem‘ to support individuals throughout their development and meeting their performance needs. This is the foundation of my elearning strategy, though of course it goes beyond elearning and eventually covers all learning, including coaching & mentoring, instructor-led, organization of workspaces, informal learning, etc.

That’s pretty good, but it’s not enough. I think there’s a broader issue of Creating a Learning Culture (disclaimer: I co-wrote a chapter), which involves ensuring that the climate is supportive for learning, where individuals believe it’s ok to reflect, share ideas (even mistakes), and more. I think that this shouldn’t be taken for granted, but is the result of deliberate effort, and that the learning professional should be working to develop and promote this.

How much would you pay for this now? But wait, there’s more! I think the biggest gap, and the biggest opportunity, is in developing learners as learners, scaffolding them into a learning culture where they are confident and competent self-learners, understanding their role in the learning process, taking command and actively engaging in learning. And this, too, is a role that learning professionals should be supporting. It’s a layer across the previous activities, but should have the largest organizational payoff.

I suppose this seems like quite a lot, but it’s really at core about creating the learning environment in an organization, which includes lots of elements including the culture, goals, as well as resources. As I captured it in a diagram for thinking about the learning environment:

Learning Environment

our responsibility, to me, means watching out over all of these, and ensuring that the area within the organization is as optimized as possible, and in alignment with the elements outside the box. So, do you buy into this?

MMORPGs as Learning Environments

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I was recently part of a PhD thesis project that asked some folks to do a Delphi process about the educational use of MMORPGs. It was interesting, and of course thought-provoking, and now it‘s done I can talk about it.

Beyond the obvious benefits of a potentially motivating context for learners, and commitment by the learner to the extent they‘ve customized the experience, there were some deeper issues. However, there appeared to be assumptions that it had to be massively multiplayer, and that existing such games would be used, as opposed to designing ones with specific characteristics to work with a selected cohort of learners. So we can first talk about those assumptions, and then move beyond.

One obvious concern is that in an existing environment, there are no specific learning affordances other than the game mechanics (which may not have much social benefit: there are little benefits to beating up kobolds outside the game environment). Now, some of the game mechanics may have transfer, particularly social ones, c.f. the leadership skills purportedly developed in World of Warcraft, so there are reasons. And, of course, you can always talk about learning in such environments.

The flip side of the social environment is the possibility for inappropriate social activities that can happen in real life, e.g. bullying, but this is not unique to the online learning environment and merely needs the same approaches of education and monitoring that you‘d want in real life.

Now, if you can design characteristics of the environment, such as the ability to build things (e.g. as in Second Life, where you can do 3D modeling, but it‘s not a game), and you can create the context and task for learners, you can embed specific learning outcomes into the environment (you know that designed learning environments is what I‘m about).

Of course, I‘ve also mostly been about individual learning experiences, and have argued that unless you‘ve social learning objectives, there‘s not a principled reason to build social games. However, that is neglecting the benefits of collaboratively problem-solving (though it can be done by post=game reflection), which often has great learning benefits (e.g. social learning theory: Bandura, Vygotsky, etc).

One of the big themes that emerged that I hadn‘t really tweaked to but now embrace is that such environments may foster 21st century skills. Such environments naturally include communication and collaboration, and could easily be augmented.

And, of course, one of the challenges even if we could develop and deploy these is ensuring that mentors or teachers are capable of scaffolding the learning from these environments. That, I think, is a 21st century skill needed now amongst educators, and it still needs to be developed (and motivated and rewarded!).

It‘s pleasing to see these explorations, and here‘s hoping there‘s more.

Spores of Imagination

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A wise colleague of mine pointed me to this video of Will Wright talking about his new game Spore to the TED conference (I was invited once, years ago when I was in Australia, but it was a lot of money at the time, on an academic salary with the exchange rate then…). It’s a fascinating talk, covering the game design but also the philosophy behind it.

Will Wright, in case you don’t know, is the genius behind Sim City and The Sims, two famous games. He’s revered among game designers because his games are complete leaps to a new game space, and successful. He has a talent for taking something he finds interesting, building a model (a simulation is just a model, a scenario is when you put it in an initial state and ask the player to take it to a goal state, and a game is when you tune that experience until it’s engaging), and then making the experience of manipulating the model into a game. In particular, one of the hallmarks of his work is his ability to tune it in unique and non-obvious ways (e.g. monsters coming in to smash your cities) to create a compelling and yet thought-provoking experience.

Here he talks about the game design, but couples it to important issues. How games are toys that can help us learn. It’s the final statement that resonates, about using this new game as a tool to foster long-term thinking. Really, that’s what I’m on about, using games as tools to develop new ways to think. And here’s a master. Enjoy, and reflect.

Good news bad news…

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…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!)