Search Results for: engag

…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!)

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!

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!