The top five reasons why computer game designers should care about serious games

For those people getting excited about Harrisburg University of Science and Technology's Learning and Entertainment Evolution Forum (LEEF), here are the top five reasons why game designers and publishers should care about serious games:

1. Many of the most successful computer games ever, such as Roller Coaster Tycoon and SimCity, have been serious games. (See Big Skills as a game design challenge, and even Middle Skills.)
2. Serious games are making significant progress around artificial personalities, including dialogue, body language, and belief systems, that traditional computer games need. (See Creating Artificial Personalities, not necessarily Artificial Intelligence.)
3. Much as current movies are borrowing heavily from documentaries (shaky-cam, anyone?), so can computer games borrow from serious games (including virtual products) new interfaces and game-play models to add realism to experiences.
4. Serious games are developing new genres of interfaces, goals, and gameplay that can be evolved into either completely new computer games or additions to existing genres (See Genres). Because serious games designers are not trapped by the conservative design required of huge budget productions, they can explore faster.
5. Adopted and supported games used in classrooms is maturing into a long-term, stable source of revenue that circumvent the three-month hit-or-failure current computer game model. (See Top Ten Serious Games and Educational Simulations used in College Classrooms.)

Alan Kay and human universals vs. non-universals

When I was talking to Alan Kay about educational simulations a few weeks ago, he shared a model that I found helpful. Kay spoke about human universals vs. non-universals.

The universals are a list of characteristics of virtually all cultures, and certainly all children, share. These universals include:

• Social
• Language
• Culture
• Fantasies
• Stories
• Tools, Art, Technologies
• Goals, Plans ...
• Play & Games
• Fixed Rules, Flexible Strategies
• Case based learning
• Case based reasoning
• Superstition
• Religion/Magic
• Theater
• Simple, Short term fixes
• Quick Reactions To Patterns
• "The Other"
• Supernormal Responses
• Vendetta

He compared these to non-universals, which I would describe as non-intuitive perspectives but, once hard-earned, are seen as self-evident. There are examples of systems (the often invisible stuff connecting actions and results) written about here. These represent a "cultural technology," and include:

• Writing & Reading
• Deductive Abstract Math
• Model Based Science
• Thought, Thought, Thought
• Equal Rights
• Democracy
• Similarities over Differences
• Slow Deep Thinking
• Legal System over Vendetta
• Perspective Drawing
• Theory of Harmony
• Agriculture

His point was that movies and advertisements and other pop-culture tend to invoke (and pander to) the universals. Those are the easy things, the hardwired things. I am guessing all upcoming summer movies will borrow much from the first list. But in Alan Kay's perspective, education must develop conviction in the non-universals.

I think all of us designers have dipped into (sometimes heavily) the list of universals, and even included some as acceptable learning outcomes. And fairly or not, a lot of people associate games (even serious games) with the reinforcing this list of universals.

The trick may be to "pace than lead," to use the universals as a pathway to the non-universals. Students praise our design in the short term for the universals we reinforce. But they praise our content in the long term for the non-universals.

A lot of "revolutionary" thinkers about twenty years ago, like John Seely Brown, asked more of us to summon our hidden child, to challenge assumptions and unlearn our baggage. Given how many of the people in the workplace have defaulted to "winging it" (invariably with huge amount of fake/unearned confidence and even underlying threats) I may now implore more of us to nurture our hidden adult.

Podcasts for the Learning and Entertainment Evolution Forum (LEEF) on June 18-19

For those of you who like to hear an author's voice rather than read his or her words, here are some short podcasts, at http://www.harrisburgu.net/leef2009/podcast/podcast.xml.

Or:

Clark_1.mp3

Clark_2.mp3

Clark_3.mp3

These lead up to Harrisburg University of Science and Technology's Learning and Entertainment Evolution Forum (LEEF) on June 18-19, where I will be a keynoter. For more information, check out: http://www.leef2009.net/.

I hope to see you there!

Clip of Japanese Version of Virtual Leader

One of my earliest simulations, Virtual Leader, has been translated and deployed all over the world. (Note: I was NOT involved with vLeader 2007 - SimuLearn just took content I had prepared for other reasons and added it, while taking away some later scenes.) Take a look at a clip of one version, created byI-Think:

The Competition between 21st Century Skills vs. Retraining vs. Science and Math in Obama Education Priorities

I have been spending a lot of time in DC over the last month, participating in planning sessions at increasingly high levels. And I am being drawn into the interesting competition in the Obama administration between three different education objectives.

The first is to develop what is being popularly called 21st Century skills (that I have called Big Skills). These are skills that have not showed up on traditional curricula, and are around topics like leadership, project management, innovation, and stewardship. The excitement in this area is that it could challenge the traditional K-12 curricula in areas that would both help students immediately in their day-to-day life, give them more power and control of their entire lives, and also align schools with business, whose absence of such critical skills have largely resulted in the current economic crisis and US decline in global competitiveness. The problem is that plenty people believe that all of the skills are unteachable. Thus, in swinging for a home run, Obama could spend precious time and resources and whiff completely. And of course plenty of academics believe leadership (and other "learning to do" skills) is vocational.

A second contingency is focused on how to retrain American workers for what is thought to be new jobs in the new economy. They wonder, for example, what will it take to train fired car manufacturer employees into people who can install and maintain new wind turbines.

A third contingency believes that education should be increasingly focused in the traditional but underfunded and underdeveloped areas of pure science and engineering. These advocates cite recent declines in patents relative to other countries and innovation based manufacturing as proof that we need to double down, or even triple down, our efforts in these areas. The critics however might suggest that the current emphasis on science and engineering is too limited, too exclusive, and just not the right fit for too many people.

The good news for us simulation designers is that we will play a critical role in any of these three areas. We may uniquely be able to create media to support the 21st-century skill goals. We could drastically cut the costs and increase the efficiency (including scale) of a retraining focus. And we could lead the revolution in re-thinking and re-engaging a new generation in science and engineering. The only bad scenario however may be the most probable - when all is said and done, nothing new really happens.

The Need for Sleep to Process Information in a Simulation-Centric Class

Should we add "bed," alongside whiteboard and lab, in our list of great educational tools?

I have found with any experiential and complex-systems based learning program, it is paramount to have the participants first get an exposure to the task, and then "sleep on it" before continuing. When students were not able to sleep on it, they were anxious and dissatisfied and learned less. In contrast, when the students did break up learning with sleep, their subconscious processed and assimilated the information, and they returned to the program the next morning without the trepidation they had shown the night before and in the control groups.

Said simply, the same program that took the same number of hours, if broken up with a good night's sleep, resulted in significantly better student enjoyment and, more importantly, organization and retention of the material.

Possible problems of ignoring the role of sleep

The existance of this simple rule can hurt simulation deployments in at least three different ways. First, this can confound a training group's insistence on a "one-day" or "half-day" program, especially where students are unreliable in doing any prework (universities, thankfully, don't have this problem). This also can hurt some attempts to measure the effectiveness of simulations, as researchers often try to control all variables and shoe-horn in an entire simulation experience in a single (often long) session. Finally, this can hurt the widespread adoption of a simulation if an evaluator tries to skim a simulation in a half-hour, and then "doesn't get it" so doesn't support it.

Chunking well

As with a fine wine, authentic learning has to breathe a bit. A simple chunking process, where students experience at least 30 minutes to an hour of the interface in its entirety and at least some of the mechanics, even ideally getting a little stuck (which can be done as homework if the students are responsible and the deployers of the class have credibility), sleep on it, and then dive in to harder levels can be the difference between success and failure, between meaningful experience and frustration and confusion.