Ahead of I/ITSEC, a couple of new reviews of The Guide

Here are two new reviews of The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games out, ahead of I/ITSEC. Obviously, it is great to read reviews for any author. But in a field that is emerging as quickly as ours, the context of the reviews - the little observations in the corners - are as interesting as the simple "thumbs down" or "thumbs way down." Finally, for a book as non-linear as The Complete Guide, just hearing people describe their experience in engaging the material is I hope helpful to others and certainly fascinating for me.

One review is at eLearningFuture. A quote:

Unlike authors who write from deep within academia, Clark reaches out to field professionals constantly to keep apprised...

This is a hot issue for me. My editors gave up on asking me the question, "what is the citation for this quote," because my answer was always, "first-hand interview." When in research mode, I spend a bit of time reviewing journals, but a lot of time on the phone.

It brings up at least two questions. The first is, can academics "study" in real time a rapidly emerging area, especially using any type of traditional methodology? When there is no solid foundation of common terms and expectations, what is the value in second-hand information? The second question is, can academic institutions (or other members of the industrial educational complex) study themselves, challenge themselves, and then improve themselves any more than insurance agencies or banks can? And if they cannot, how does improvement happen?

A second note about The Guide is at ForgeFX. What I like about these comments is how well the author sums up the ambition of the book, as simply:

Describ[ing] common patterns across the wide array of simulations that exist.

Honestly, that is a better description of my book than I was ever capable of producing.

So thank you to both reviewers, and for everyone who has both publicly and privately commented on the book.

eLearn Magazine publishes review of "The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games"

"The publication of The Complete Guide to Simulations & Serious Games gives hope that we may soon reach a tipping point where every educator is aware of the learning potential released by well-designed simulations and sim-based games. Aldrich has provided the blueprints for the revolution." - Peter Shea, in eLearn Magazine

eLearn Magazine has just published a review of my newest book, The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games. I know many people are still trying to find the perfect Christmas, Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa present for that special simulation designer in their life, or perhaps looking for meaningful and enjoyable reads for themselves during the holidays; if so, take a look!

Weekly Poll: How Should CLOs Weigh Investments in Social Networking Compared to Sims?

This week's poll strives to get at "How Should CLOs Weigh Investments in Social Networking Compared to Sims?" Here are the options:

• Social Networking all the way. It is fast, relevant, and just requires a solid infrastructure. Twitter me there!
• Sims are the way. They ensure the delivery of critical content and allow for validation. Social networking is a sink hole.
• Social Networking is the dog, and sims are the tail. A good sim is (only) one thing that spurs a good community.
• Sims are the natural progression of formal content. While social networking is an inevitable context, it is mostly an IT issue and HR issue.
• It doesn't matter. CLOs pretended to consider sim-based models last year and are pretending to consider social networking this year.

Please vote!

Training Magazine posts excerpt from The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games

If you would like to read an excerpt from the beginning of The Complete Guide, Training Magazine has posted one here. It sets up the narrative for the whole book, including why schools and corporate programs, as well as so much research projects, are currently set up to fail.

Please enjoy it, and to those who have linked to it from their sites already, you have my deepest thanks.

Weekly Poll: Do you play popular games that don't personally interest you at all out of professional obligation?

I am going to try and post a poll once a week for a while and see if enough people respond to create interesting data. The first question here is pretty straightforward:

If you are involved in the creation of Serious Games, do you play popular games that don't personally interest you at all out of professional obligation?

Part of our work, Step Three in Simulation Design in Three Easy Steps, is to find the "close-enough" game models to use as templates and frameworks. Part of our fun for most of us, meanwhile, is to play games that interest us, either as a result of genre or subject matter or designer. But do we make ourselves play games that are popular or well rated that don't interest us, out of a sense of professional obligation to see the mechanics? Do we consider aligning our own work with the games of the moment?

Please take a moment and answer the question. Also feel free to respond to this post with comments.

Chewonki Illuminati

Stump Stories as Faux Interactivity

One type of interactive structure is the branching story. Users are given multiple opportunities to make choices, and then the story continues alone the new paths based on the user actions.

Advocates of interactivity remain mixed about how "game-like" this technique really is, but at the very least I can say that if done well, it can be very effective, both in terms of engagement and instructional value.

Then there is the technique of using "stumps" instead of fully realized branches. Here, users are given choices, but all but one lead to immediate dead ends. These "stump stories" have a structure that look more like this:

The purist in me chafes at these, much as a carpenter may be offended by the particle-board used by mass producers of furniture. I get especially irked when a vendor sells these as fully interactive. I find myself asking, how low are we willing to settle? On the other hand, there is an efficiency and relative ease of creation. More examples of these can produced. Most importantly, there is still a focus on end-user action in context, which is more than most traditional formal learning content today. And they even have one advantage over traditional branching stories - they meet one of the earlier Sim Design 10 Commandments: More Skilled Users Finish Faster Than Less Skilled Users.

I think, as with most things, as long as there is truth in advertising, as long as the concepts of "game-like" or "a flight simulator for business skills" are not used and thus further watered down by these models, as long as customers and users are smart enough to understand the trade-offs, these might still be useful stepping stones and evolutionary steps.

These fit into Level One Interactivity, as defined in Learning Online with Games, Simulations, and Virtual Worlds:

Why The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games is Science Fiction

It is a cliché of quite a bit of literature, such as The World According to Garp, and especially science fiction, such as Dune and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, to feature in the story some book that has significantly shifted the perception of a population. The authors of the literature that feature these magic books tease the audiences with little passages and quotes, while following around a few characters' existence in the resulting world.

It's a great technique, but also frustrating. My goal soon becomes to read the magic book itself, not the surrounding narrative. It is not that I believe that there really could be this new transformative bible, any more than I believe there could be the spaceships or light sabers. But I want the author to step up and fully realize the prop, as they might design and produce the kitchen and office spaces of a spaceship, not just the bridge.

That was what I set out to do when writing The Complete Guide. I tried to zip ahead 10 or 15 years, stipulate all of the current arguments around sims, then imagine a world that was being transformed by education that worked, and then finally to categorize the techniques and philosophies that necessarily would have had to been created and refined to get there.

Of course, to accomplish this connecting-of-the-dots, The Guide had to be built on a firm reality. It had to help people today, which from emails I have received it has and does. It had to have been based on real experiences, both my own and others who have served as lead designers, which it was.

But I still think if Amazon were a little smarter they would categorize my book as science fiction. And if they were even smarter than that, it might also be under philosophy as well.

Of course if Amazon were truly brilliant, they would just put it under "science fiction props" next to toy phasers and replicas of terminators. So I suppose I ought be happy with where it is.

You can't predictably make educational content "fun," only "more fun for some people"

The raison d'etre for the serious games and educational simulation movement must not be to make educational content fun. If fun is the primary goal, the movement will fail.

This is because "fun" is not an objective attribute, such as "pink," "500 words," or "about monkeys." What if fun for some people is not fun for others.

Worse, the seemingly same experience can be fun or not. Here is an example:

Every day, two boys who lived next door to an old man played basketball in the driveway. They had been doing this for months, and would make a racket late into the evening.

One day the old man approached the boys and said, "My friend will be in town next week, and he can't walk, but he loves the sound of basketball. So if you could play everyday for all of next week, I will give you two hundred dollars." The boys gladly accepted the offer. They played the first few days of the week excitedly. The middle days reluctantly. And the last few days laconically. The man paid the two boys at the end of the week, and the two boys, now sick of basketball, never played in the driveway again.

The old man never had a friend coming over, of course. He just hated the boys' commotion, and figured it was the cheapest way to get rid of the problem.

Computer Games in Classrooms?

There is a corollary to this. Some advocates want to bring computer games into the classroom. Meanwhile, some parents wish their children would play less computer games. Now to me, these two groups should be natural allies, not enemies. Once computer games are in the classroom, no student will ever play them again for fun. Said simply, playing Halo 3 after a really important test is fun. Playing Halo 3 as the really important test is pretty miserable.

There is an even bigger issue. Serious games advocates believe that once we understand how computer games teach, then instructors will apply better these new techniques of instruction. Serious game advocates are wrong here as well. Why expect schools to learn instructional design from computer games, when generations of literature professors have not learned instructional design from the great novels they purport to teach? Even Serious Games advocates write papers that use the forms of the most tenured of professors, rather than the techniques of Grand Theft Auto.

What are the most important design criteria of content from the Serious Games movement?

But I digress. You cannot make most content fun for most people in a formal learning program. And by fun, I mean where almost all of the students both consume the content in a desired flow state and then act to spread the content virally to their friends.

At best what you can do is make it more fun for the greatest percentage of the target audience. Using a nice font and a good layout doesn't make reading a dry text engaging, but it may make it more engaging. Playing the Binary Game doesn't make learning binary numbers fun, but it does make it more fun. The driving focus, the criteria against which we measure success, should be on making content richer, more engaging, more visual, with better feedback, and more relevant. And of course more fun for most students.

Unless....

Is there any chance for pure fun in formal learning on the horizon? Yes. But you must get rid of grades and other forms of external coercion. Given that we all know this, I fear that some advocates will recommend an unsustainable bubble-world whereby serious games exist, but only in a vacuum of "not-for-credit" activities, while the "real" part of a class, the "for-credit part" still adheres to the same old methodologies.

Schools: From Stockholm Syndrome to Cruise Ship

Schools require compliant students. The worst case scenario for the best public and prep schools is a massive revolt of smart kids asking, "why are we being taught this curricula; what are the qualifications of the instructors or institutions to prepare us for the future; why are we being taught using books and term papers and tests?"

The traditional coercive tools for school are always a combination of carrots and sticks, promises of bright future for compliance and threats of public and total failure for resistance. Fair enough.

As a result, students often find themselves displaying signs of Stockholm Syndrome. This situation, when victims under the total control of a few people form sympathy with their captors, has been identified from studying hostage situations. But many students as well form a bond with teachers and institutions they feared, and who had similar (perceived but wielded) absolute control over their lives and futures.

We are all seeing the emergence of another sweeping approach used by the ranks of the industrial education complex - turning higher ed campuses into cruise ships. Universities are lavishing perks upon perks to the students, from swanky food and fashion outlets to high-end stadiums and other recreational areas.

This shameless pandering has two costs. The first is that the cost for students of colleges is spiralling beyond "out of control." The costs for tuition are simply catastrophic. Meanwhile alums are being asked to donate even more (with the fund raising processes monopolizing the mind share and creativity of school administers, just as it does with politicians). One friend of mine wrote a large check for his Alma mater, and then drove to campus in the middle of a giant freshman lobster bake.

The second problem with campus-as-cruise-ship is more subtle, but more problematic. Schools have always been out of touch with delivering skills that give students more control over their future lives. But the quasi-austere conditions at least created motivation for students to join the productive world. Now, students are shocked to learn that they are not just unqualified for most jobs, but the living conditions are a massive step down as well.

One result is that students are even more reluctant to leave their university country clubs. They become grad students, get their doctorates if they can afford to borrow the money, and then professors. And the great industrial education complex chugs on.

We as a nation are debating health care, as we should. But the failure of schools to produce students who have control of their lives and are decent stewards of their families, communities, and planet is a far bigger crisis with much larger consequences. And the recent strategy of higher ed, rather to reform the relevancy to instead pander and placate to students is completely the wrong direction.

A final note. The simulations and serious games movement continues to be pulled in two directions. One is "making content more fun" and the other is "creating richer content." The first direction is currently a more popular perception, and highly aligned with the cruise ship model: "Let's learn history, but on the shuffleboard court!" The future of the movement, however, is in the second direction. This will take work and investment beyond putting up more plasma television sets in the student lounge. It means recommitting to a future of education.