Please don't read my new book on a Kindle!

As readers of this blog know, my new book, The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games, will be available tomorrow, and is available via the Kindle right now. So let me beg... please do not get this book on the Kindle. If you want The Guide, get the dead-tree version!

First, this is not a broad anti-Kindle statement. I believe for any linear book, such as a novel, Kindles seem sublime.

But The Complete Guide is a reference book. More than that, it is a reference book to an entirely new field and discipline - that of simulation design. This is a foreign intellectual landscape.

I believe the most productive reader will open it up to random places and read an individual entry or two (yes, this is a great bathroom book!). They will bookmark or underline interesting thoughts. They will write questions for themselves, or note their own new ideas. Then they will back up to the start of a section. Then they will go to the beginning of the book. They will read for about thirty pages, then jump around again. They will reread entries. They will share quotes and entries and sections with colleagues and friends.

I believe finishing the book, or at least most of the almost 600 pages, will be an accomplishment not unlike finishing a good simulation. It will be work on the part of the reader, not because of the writing (which hopefully is sufficiently accessible, pithy, clear, and even funny) but because it represents the tectonic reversal of a lifetime of linear "formal learning" content. When done, people will have earned their new perspectives on the world, the role of media, the real opportunity of education, and their own work which they will inevitably have.

To help this, the "worness" of each page as read will serve as footprints. People will be reminded where they have been.

The book starts off as a journey - a new place to explore at the whim of the reader. No two people will read The Guide the same way. The book rewards curiosity, not replaces it. It then becomes a reference - a place to return to as a reminder and inspiration and framework. For all of these reasons, and unlike my other three books, I believe accessing The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games via a Kindle would result in a miserable experience.

(By the way, I put this same request on my author blog on Amazon! I wonder if they will let it stand...)

The Importance of Playing Games for a Sim Designer

There is always an uneasy relationship between sim designers and computer games. Computer games represent simultaneously a vision, a trap, and the embodiment of a near-damning misrepresentation.

Still, it is up to any sim designer to play quite a few computer games, at least a few hours a week. We must look at and understand the current repertoire of mechanisms, including complexity and functionality of interface schemes, solutions to visualization challenges, even level and game length.

I like to look at popular games, critically acclaimed games, and examples of new genres. To accomplish this, I try to download as many free demos as I can for different systems, including iPhones, PCs, and PS3's. Even the old coin-operated arcade games have a lot to teach us.

The good part about my profession is that I could charge clients for playing computer games. The bad part about me is that I never will. Still, there are worse things than to overlap work and play so specifically.

Ten Signs to Look for to Indicate that Simulations and Serious Games have Reached Stability

I am very excited about the transformation in all areas of intellectual property that sims can bring. They have the opportunity to impacting all capturing knowledge, growing the wealth of nations. Yet still I worry, as with any emerging technology, that the naive supporters and opportunistic hucksters will flood the field with toxic examples and experiences.

So here are the signs that I look for that sims have reached stability:

1. The average student takes at least three hours of simulation content per class.
2. The average employee encounters five hours of sims per year.
3. Authoring environment become widely available and produce professional (corporate-level) quality for ten common sim genres.
4. At least three of these are open-source.
5. Students create design documents and finished sims at 1/100th the level of term papers.
6. Academic institutions give degrees in Simulations and Serious Game at one tenth the level of broader instructional design degrees.
7. Institutions will spend about one tenth of their resources on developing new formal learning programs on sims.
8. Research reports, including academic and corporation, produced will focus on the sim content model of actions systems results at one tenth the level of traditional case studies and analysis.
9. Custom e-learning developers dedicate about one fifth of their resources on sim development.
10. The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games: How the Most Valuable Content Will be Created in the Age Beyond Gutenberg to Google (First Edition) will be looked back as "a good start" but a valuable collectors edition nonetheless. The current twelfth edition of "The Guide" will be much more authoritative, but much of the commentary will have been stripped out by the publisher, angering the original fans and purists.