Using Serious Games and Simulations: A Quick and Dirty Guide

In This Post:

Learn what simulations are and aren’t.
Understanding where they fit in an organizations’ flow of skills.
Learn best practices in designing and creating sims.

Section One – Sims: What and Why

A good educational simulation may look a lot like a casual computer game. It may have stylized, fast moving graphics. There may be a timer during some part of a level, and exaggerated consequences of failure. The person engaging the sim may look very much like a gamer, hunched over with a hand tightly grasped on the mouse and eyes riveted on the screen. The student may even be in a flow state, and having a lot of fun.

This has led to a lot of people to erroneously conclude that the primary point of sims is to "make content enjoyable" often (a skeptic may further and logically intuit) at the expense of depth and flexibility while increasing of cost of production and time to “play.” And if a designer of a sim shares this assumption, the formal learning program is unlikely to be successful.

Rather, the necessary goal of a well-designed sim-based program is to develop in the student a deep, flexible, intuitive, kinesthetic understanding of the subject matter. Students learn what their real-world options are in situations, and a conviction in what are often complex and even indirect strategies that lead to positive results. They earn situational awareness.

As a result, students who learn via simulation can improvise better in the real world. They can handle unpredicted situations. The knowledge is not structured around a list of extrinsic “rules” or processes that can be broken if no one is looking (such as posted speed limits), but developed from intrinsic personal experience (such as if a driver had a few near misses and even accidents with significant consequences). This is knowledge they retain for years or decades.

Forcing Repetition

To deliver this condensed experience, sims have to necessarily present richly interactive content models, interfaces and visualizations, and then entice or force students to repeat patterns of actions in increasingly complex and novel situations, and with rigorous short term and increasingly long term feedback. It is here that computer games, much more than classrooms or books, become the better framework to organize content and motivate students. Games have plenty of useful attributes, such as being self-paced, easy to access, good at developing learning through self-motivated repetition without the need for a coach.

Having said that, the content of the sims itself has to reflect the learning goals, not a reskinned game. As we will explain in Part II, an experienced sim designer will first identify key learning goals, then analyze the content through a simulation lens, and only then find a good interactive content model, sometimes inspired by the game world.

Sims in the Context of the Flow of Enterprise Skills

Before going into design and end-to-end creation, however, let’s look at the broader contexts of organizational learning into which sims must be designed to fit.

Figure: The Flow of Skills

Anyone who is in charge of a training organization has to sweat out the flow of skills in a dynamic entity, looking at the four quadrants of expert, instructor, student, and practitioner, and the movement of idea and people between them.

Here are some of the flows:

Instructors might learn from experts, and format the information for students.
Experts might mentor practitioners.
Practitioners might get promoted to expert.
Practitioners may work on special projects, that if successful, then elevates them to expert.
Students might work to get into a class, and get credit for successfully completing it.
Peer to peer communities might chew on problems and come to a solution.

The Eight C’s

It is in the flow of enterprise skills that an organization has to ensure the value proposition of formal learning. The full equation looks something like: (Content * Curricula * Coaching * Certification * Community * Calling *day Care) / Cost, where each are defined as follows:

Content: The material supporting any learning objective.
Curricula: How the content is chosen, validated, organized, and presented.
Coaching: The individual attention helping each student overcome their individual weaknesses, answers specific questions, and leverage their individual strengths, as well as provide motivation.
Certification: Proof and documentation that a level of competency has been reached (which also provides motivation).
Community: A group of peers that both make learning more effective and engaging.
Calling: The vision and mission of the learning organization.
day Care: The ability to house students for a specific time, including classrooms and even virtual environment tools.
Cost: The amount of resources, including student time, a program requires.

The Role of Simulations

There is the recently ramped up focus on dramatically reducing the entire right side of the Flow of Skills chart - the formal role of instructor and the role of student - while dramatically increasing the areas of overlap between expert and novice (middle left), such as peer-to-peer work and social networking, often labeled as informal learning. But all Eight C’s, including very specific content and the corresponding certification/tracking, are even more necessary for both legal and strategic reasons.

Given this, the new models of sims uniquely fill that razor edge of opportunity and necessity for people responsible for organizational or community learning. Specifically, sims should be used when two or more of the following criteria are met:

The application of the content in the real world is critical to an organization or community.
Developing a conviction in the content is critical to an organization or community.
Certification or other measuring and record keeping is critical.
The content is both important for the student to understand, and other formal learning techniques have failed or are too expensive.
The content has a broad, geographically distributed audience.

Structured in chunks no longer than an hour, these new sims develop business-critical concepts and drive long lasting behavioral changes in a way that is engaging for the user, reinforced by a deeper understanding of the material, and can meet certification requirements and other external measurements for the sponsor. Multiple sims can be chained together for greater depth and breadth. And their visual and kinesthetic nature makes them the perfect choice for global audiences.

Section Two: Creating Simulations and Serious Games

What follows is that methodology and identified best practices to produce a sim. Let us first look at a framework to get you through the Design Process in four predictable steps.

Design Step One: Collecting the Top-Down Rules

The first step in designing a sim is to collect all of the top-down patterns that have already been created, including established analysis, best practices, and rules. In this step (and maybe only in this step), traditional educational content and linear material, if they exist, such as courses and curricula, books, reports, famous or inspirational quotes, and rules and policies are very helpful. They also serve to set a scale for what the sim will and won't cover.

If you were building a simulation about composting, you would collect all of common established advice as established by experts. Here are some:

Don't throw in dairy or meat, turn your pile every few weeks, mix in grass clippings to keep the nitrogen at the right level so it doesn't smell, and that people compost to reduce their impact on landfills and improve their land.

Design Step Two: Identifying the Bottom-Up Tiny Relationships

The second step, after all of the traditional rules and analysis are collected, is to uncover the hundreds of tiny relationships. These tiny relationships should roughly follow into the simulation framework of actions systems results. (The form of these tiny relationships are described in detail in the award winning The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games)

Tiny Relationships: Actions

One set of tiny relationships is around actions. Yell. Beg. Put tongue A in groove B. Invest money. Run. These are all examples of actions.

For actions, here are the biggest questions: what are the seriously considered options available to an expert? Then, what do naïve people do? Can they be defined very specifically, down to exact quotes or levels of magnitude?

For example, imagine we were creating a sim around end user computer security. some of the actions available are: a user (when getting an email) can follow an embedded link to a web site (and then perhaps enter personal data), open the attachment, forward an email to a friend, log in or not, even install the suggested program. Or they can try to figure out if the email is legitimate or not. Or they can delete the email, or perhaps report it to their manager or IT department. These are the specific target actions.

Further, a sim designer may also have to surface the activities that are done around the target actions in order to provide an accurate context. For our end user computer security example, people have to make the above decisions around potentially fraudulent emails while they are focusing on doing their job, or managing their personal life, or entertaining and relaxing themselves. These “life” actions might have to be worked into any final set of actions available in the sim.

Tiny Relationships: Results

The second category of tiny relations on which we need to focus is results. For results: we ask, what does success and failure look like? Is it all or nothing, such as the accomplishment of a mission? Or are there three or four things that a person is trying to balance and grow? Or is success in the sim (as well as from the sim) the ability to consistently apply an increasingly complex set of competencies?

Again, we look at target results, but also contextual results if appropriate. The target results for computer security may be smooth IT environment vs. massive virus infection. But the contextual results are just as important: people need to do a job and will entertain themselves. For other examples, being an ethical person or a great leader is also only done in context.

Identifying the results of failure is more interesting, more important, and more counter-intuitive for most instructional designers than identifying success. We have to figure out, what are the various types of failure one can experience, and what are the situations that lead to them? What are the immediate wrong things to do, and what are long-term failures?

By the way, it is tough for any media person to realize that any given user should not see most failure states that have been created. But the one they do see will be targeted to their individual weakness and align with real life.

Tiny Relationships: Systems

The final set of relationships to identify is that around systems. Systems, practically defined, are what get in the way between actions and desired results. If the collection of all sets of tiny relationships are an iceberg, the systems are the part of the iceberg that is underwater - often a huge hidden mass.

Here are two quick examples: When playing Chess, a person may want to capture the other player’s king, but the systems of rules and positions and the activities of an opponent on the board need to be navigated and overcome (which is of course what makes it fun and interesting). Meanwhile, in leadership, we may want to build a great team, but the rules of accomplishment, personal egos and motivation, and reward need to be navigated (which can be fun, but more likely frustrating).

For systems: some questions might be: are there processes or mazes that have to be followed? Are there opponents that are striving to keep the person from being successful? Are there hidden processes that others are following (in our computer security example, bad guys may be taking scraps of personal data and crafting highly targeted profiles for scams)? Are there cycles or balancing loops or feedback loops? Are there delays? Are there some mathematical relationships?

To return to our composting model, here are some examples of all three sets of tiny relationships:

Actions: put different kinds of food in compost (egg shells, coffee grounds, hamburger, plastic, yogurt), turn compost, shovel out and spread compost, put in other organic matter (leaves, branches, weeds), cover pile, start new pile, buy barrels, mixing tools, water pile, sift compost, throw out food as garbage, design compost area
Systems: rain washes through compost, food breaks down with aeration in about a month, food breaks down without aeration in about a year, nitrogen level imbalances can result in smell and inefficiencies, table of what matter contributes what nitrogen amounts; compost creates better soil which creates better growing conditions for flowers and vegetables, growing one's own vegetables results in cheaper and healthier food, garbage costs money per pound to put in a landfill, exposed vegetables will attract mildy attract critters, exposed meat will strongly attract critters, different microbes do different things at different temperatures, earthworms can aerate dirt.
Results: great soil, smell, less garbage sent to landfills, yellow jackets, great vegetables, critters

Finding Them

Many of these relationships are so simple that it feels absurd to even capture them in a document. But there power comes in their rigor, volume, and integration. You have to be a detective here, grilling subject matter experts (and my favorite tool, listening to podcasts), pouncing on every scrap.

Design Step Three: Find the Closest Existing Toolset, Game or Sim Genre, or Microcosm

We have already identified the high level rules and the mounds of tiny relationships. Now, find an existing simulation or game that comes close to the framework or spirit of some or all of what you want to accomplish (if you possibly can).

Is it a first person shooter? Tower defense? Branching story? Then, borrow the established format as much as possible. If an engine exists, such as Second Life or Adventuremaker, figure out how to use it (this can save more than 80% of the development time). Regardless, use the gameplay and level design conventions. In many cases, you will also draw models from other genres as well, glomming them together. Even the most narrow toolset allows for importing of great ideas.

There are times when there are no appropriate games or sims, let alone toolsets. In these cases, find a perfect example or microcosm that can serve as the model for the interaction.

The Order Matters (A Lot)

While each of the above three steps ultimately should inform the other steps (as we will soon discuss), the order is actually hugely important. Interestingly, depending on if you start with step two or with step three, you get dramatically opposite effects.

Starting with the identification of the little relationships (step two) often occurs when either a researcher or subject matter expert starts an effort. Identifying the little relationships without the framing of the best practices (step one) is a staggeringly complex activity, which while satiates the purists, can take huge amounts of time and overwhelms all but the most intrepid. Projects that start here seldom see the light of day. Even if they do survive, there is so much wasted effort.

In contrast, starting with the identification of the genre (step three) or enigne and filling in the blanks is a much more typical phenomenon. I often see this when either a vendor has a pre-built engine they are using for a new project, or when an organization has invested in a platform or authoring environment themselves and are trying to push more programs onto it. The results are quick (weeks instead of months), cost effective, and efficient. The course is spit out on time. The only problem is that the content is flat. Designers end up merely reskinning rather than teaching anything of note. Two or three different programs, ostensibly covering different topics, starting from the vantage of same engine all look the same, and more importantly, basically "teach" the same thing. We are seeing this in abundance with sims in Second Life, but also from small specialty vendors. From a business perspective, this makes sense for them – the vendor’s internal cost, time frame, unpredictability, and quality of talent needed are five to ten times greater if they are creating a new engine than using an old. But it can result in a substandard or forced student experience.

Design Step Four: Synchronize

Now, at stage four, we have to bring everything together. Use the rules in step one to organize the tiny relationships in step two, and then use the genre from step three to frame everything. You will work in from the three corners to the middle. Ultimately, all three should converge (even if there is fear at first that they won't).

Reconciling Broad Rules and Tiny Relationships

During this process, we start seeing plenty of places where the broad rules from Step One and the tiny relationships from Step Two do not necessary align.

One example is when you are given a list of different possible successful approaches, especially when given superficially illustrative examples. For example, (the old training might read):

To influence someone, a leader can tell someone what to do, but the leader can also bribe then, threaten them, appeal to their sense of purpose, ask them as a favor, or make a logical case for a request. To illustrate (the old training might further read): consider a documented case where a CFO was asked to postpone her retirement, and the new CEO was successful because he appealed to her loyalty to the company.

This may be a sufficient for a PowerPoint slide, but like philosophy, it begs more questions than it answers for a sim designer. Things that need to reconciled include:

Why did the expert (the CEO) use that approach? Was that his favorite influence strategy? Had that worked before with the CFO?
Did the CEO consider two or three different approaches, and what was the criteria that won out?
Did the CEO switch approaches midstream, and if so, why?

At a higher level, I ask, is there a common underlying model of tiny relationships that aligns most (I am not naïve enough to hope for all) of the identified approaches?

There are other situations as well, you will find when sifting through the body of linear content, when different experts have different and contradictory pieces of advice. A classic contradictory construct: Are you turning the other cheek (good) or are you appeasing (bad)? As with the above situation, a goal is to find common mechanics that allows for both.

Creating Strategic and First Person Perspective

The most effective sims use two or more parallel and mutually-reinforcing perspectives. This approach is consistent with generations of computer games and flight simulators. These have traditionally featured a first person perspective and a strategic (aka a radar or "mini map") perspective. The protypical example is of a driving game, where the screen is used to show the world from the driver perspective looking out at the highway and other nearby cars, while also showing a tops-down perspective on the entire track with all competitors. Players made decisions based on both perspectives simultaneously.

The first-person perspective presents the actual decisions that the student will see and make in the real world. This often involves interpersonal conversations. The strategic perspective presents the “big picture” and involves a visualization of a system and interactions often invisible in the real world.

Other Steps in the Synchronization Process

As one closes in on a final design, some tough questions have to be answered. Here are some.

How broadly can the identified actions be abstracted? For our computer security example, all of the actions, in both the target set and the contextual set, can be generally abstracted into the core three actions of accept the incoming request and act upon it, probe the request, or reject the request.

This is critical, as most sims work best in real time, where the computer does not wait for the student. Ideally a few actions are applied repeatedly, in different orders and sensitive to timing. Further, abstracting actions can increase the applicability of the sim to wider groups.

Another type of problem we have to answer: how does the sim handle little failures? Being inappropriately aggressive to a subordinate, for example, is a bad idea in a leadership sim. But does it stop the whole sim? In real life, plenty of successful people have little slips. Is it cumulative? (I am jumping ahead to Step Three, now but….) Arcade games often had a “three lives” model. Is that appropriate?

You may have a few outlier rules (from Step One) at the end of the process that fall outside of the system and level designs that you have created, but that still need to be included. Here you might use traditional pedagogical technique such as slides or pop-ups to convey this content. But hopefully this is minimal, and you know you have done a good job when all three perspectives support each other rather than grind. And often, amazingly, you will gain unique and industry valued perspectives through this process.

In our compost example, my goal is a thriving ecosystem, so I might choose a variation of SimCity or Roller Coaster Tycoon. I might use quality of life, cost, and environmental impact as some core metrics the player tries to optimize. I might create a house area, a compost area, a garden area, and a garbage area, and have people be able to move stuff between the four. Finally, moving away from these genres, I might zoom in and allow people to create and modify their own composting structure.

Of course, the design process has to fit into a larger serious game development process. Let me zoom out now a bit and look at the rest of the process.

The Three Trimesters of a Serious Game Development Process

The time for a serious game usually falls into three trimesters of create, code, and calibrate. In just a moment, let’s look at them in some detail, including key roles and responsibilities.

How Long Does it Take to Create a Serious Game?

Although before we dig in, let’s talk a bit about end-to-end time frames. Everyone asks about it.

Let me come at this from two sides. From one side, the most effective sims of the next five years, single-player and Adobe Flash based, will take about six months to create starting from scratch, and take about one to two hours of student time (we will discuss why this student duration is critical in the final section). From the other side, most corporations want something delivered in about three months of signing a contract.

These two realities are not incompatible, thankfully. There are some significant modifiers that are cumulative (so you can get something out the door in weeks not months if you have to). Here are the key decisions to both decrease and increase the default nine-month development time:

Multiplayer Instead of Single Player:	Multiplayer in Addition to Single Player:
-25%	+60%
Very Light Weight Mechanics:	3D Client Installed “Game-Like”:
- 70%	+ 100%
Reuse Established Approach:	Total Creation of New Genre:
Complete adherence to an existing genre: -60% Engine already exists: additional -50%	Completely new genre: +30% Flexible and reusable architecture: additional + 20%

These time modifiers tend to impact all three trimesters evenly. Now, here are the trimesters in a bit more detail. (And even though I present them as discrete, they really do overlap.)

Sim Development Trimester One: Create

In the first trimester, the sim is designed; using some of the techniques we discussed above. The goal is to produce a great design document, between 30 and 50 pages long. The lead designer (such as myself) immerses him or herself in the content, often becoming an expert.

But yes, there’s more to this trimester. The learning objectives and requirements are formalized, often using people in the role of a client liaison and program sponsor. The look and feel are nailed down, hopefully with the work of a good graphic designer. Any technical decisions, including media, authoring environments, engines, and end-user requirements, are established. Steps also have to be taken to set up trimester two.

Sim Development Trimester Two: Code

In the second trimester, the two or three people in the role of programmers/coders (hopefully well briefed and otherwise involved during Trimester One) will program the material in the design document. They will produce much of the core sim engine itself, and provide the links to the fluid content, such as graphic files, videos, sound files, text, and entire level designs and sim flow, using industry standard media and xmls. The program sponsor, lead designer, graphic designer, and client liaison will be peripherally involved, making decisions, and helping flesh out the numerous parts of the sim engine that need refining. Near the end of this process, the lead designer will begin inputting as much of the final content as possible. About 70% of the project budget is spent in this stage.

Sim Development Trimester Three: Calibrate

In the final trimester, the lead designer finish inputting content into the engine, and the entire package is put in front of target audiences by the program sponsor (by the way, finding the right target audience, and introducing the experience to them, is a surprisingly hard task). The programmers/coders need to be available to make core engine changes, but even more so the lead designer and client liaison have to refine the fluid content. Finally, there can be integration work with the LMS or database.

Final Thoughts

Things have never seemed harder for those tasked with developing the skill sets of organizations. They have to deliver content, and sometimes entire curricula, sometimes with coaching, often with tracking and certification, with the minimal of costs (in terms of development and delivery dollars, student time, and student disruption).

The good new is that simulations and serious games can instruct more, in less time, and at less cost. The most successful organizations will either have an internal sim development capability, or partner with an external vendor that does. I hope following these steps and processes makes the implementation a bit easier and more predictable.

The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games awarded one of Training Media Review's 9 Top Products of the Year

Training Media Review is our industry's most rigorous and increasingly most trusted source of information. Unlike most magazines (and more akin to Consumer Reports), the site is not paid for through industry advertisements, but subscribers. And the reviews are done by deep experts in the field.

So I am humbled and thrilled that The Complete Guide was awarded both an "Outstanding" rating and listed as one of TMR's Top 9 Products of 2009.

Here's their full review: THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO SIMULATIONS & SERIOUS GAMES

So, thanks to The Academy! And thank you to everyone who has used the book to shape their own journey. There is no greater honor than participating in this incredibly important and transformational industry.

Speech from Jeff Sandefer and the Coming Crash of Higher Ed

We are realizing over that, over the last five or ten years, both the Health Care and Financial Services industries failed the communities in which they participated. To many, including myself, it seems that Higher Education may soon similarly be branded as a failed industry in need of change or disintermediation.

If you are interested in this topic, I suggest this presentation (over anything I have to say):

Atlas Podcast: TFI Keynote Speech by Jeff Sandefer

You will also find relevant (and better researched than my own thoughts) Karl Kapp's post: The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow.

Virtual Worlds, Simulations, and Games for Education: A Unifying View

What is the difference between a simulation and a game?

I wrote this article for Innovate magazine a few months ago, to coincide with the release of Learning Online with Games, Simulations, and Virtual Worlds. While pieces have have been excerpted, many have asked for the complete article, which I am reprinting here.

Many practitioners have been struck by a paradox. They sense an overlap between virtual worlds, games, and simulations, and but they know that one is not synonymous with the other. The three often look similar; they all often take place in three-dimensional worlds that are populated by three-dimensional avatars (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Virtual World

Yet as I have argued elsewhere, the differences are profound. Games are fun, engaging activities usually used purely for entertainment, but they may also allow people to gain exposure to a particular set of tools, motions, or ideas. In contrast, simulations use rigorously structured scenarios carefully designed to develop specific competencies that can be directly transferred into the real world. Finally, virtual worlds are multiplayer (and often massively multiplayer), three-dimensional, persistent social environments with easy-to-access building capabilities. They share with games and simulations the three-dimensional environment, but they do not have the focus on a particular goal, such as advancing to the next level or successfully navigating the scenario.

It is not enough, however, to categorize virtual worlds, games, and simulations as either entirely synonymous or utterly different. It is more useful, and perhaps more complete, to see virtual worlds, games, and simulations as points along a continuum, all instances of highly interactive virtual environments (HIVEs) (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Virtual Worlds, Games, and Educational Simulations as a Continuum

This framework recognizes the relationships among virtual worlds, games, and simulations:

All games take place in some kind of virtual world—and not solely a Second Life-style, massively multiplayer online environment. Even physical games are played in a synthetic world structured by specific rules, feedback mechanisms, and requisite tools to support them. Children playing stickball on the curb create a play world structured by the broad requirements of the game and overlaid by its rules. Those rules become stricter in more intricate games and in simulations.
Simulations share key characteristics with games, including the use of a virtual world (that is, to some extent, also structured by the rules and constraints of the simulation) and the focus on a particular goal, but simulations use a more highly refined set of rules, challenges, and strategies to guide participants in developing particular behaviors and competencies that are highly transferable.
Participants often shift subtly between the various modes, moving from undirected exploration of a virtual world then to games and then to more structured simulation as they become comfortable in the environment.

The Swimming Pool

One of the most natural examples to show how participants move across the different uses of a HIVE while staying in the same virtual environment is the process by which children are introduced to the swimming pool. The pool is a synthetic, albeit not a virtual, environment. Some of the rules associated with dry land are the same in this new environment, and some rules are different. From the moment they first approach the pool, children naturally move from treating the pool as a virtual world, to seeing it as a place for more-structured games, and then to using it as a venue where they practice the skills they will need to swim well.

Their behavior and expectations as well as the expectations of those around them change at each stage. At first, new young swimmers perceive the pool as a scary, foreign environment. The challenge at this stage is simply to get them to enter and move around in this strange world. A parent or swim teacher may force them to get in or coax them in, or the novices may dip their toes in while watching other people or they may just jump straight in. Similarly, when introducing students to a virtual environment, an instructor’s first goal is to get students into the environment and practicing basic tasks of navigation, manipulation, and communication. In a third environment, a would-be pilot experiencing a flight simulator for the first time begins by looking around and perhaps trying to move the plane a bit. The goal is to get comfortable simply existing in this new environment.

Once children get comfortable in the pool itself, they start to play. They see how long they can hold their breath; they do flips in the water or sit on the bottom of the pool. They invent small games or their swim teachers give them broad rules for light games, such as tag or undersea kingdom. These games start off very casually and tend to become more structured and more complex. Likewise, as students get more comfortable in the virtual world to which their instructor has introduced them, they begin to mess around. They build crazy objects; they change their clothes and hair and body; they visit places they are not supposed to. In the same vein, the new pilot may try to see what the virtual airplane can do, perhaps by trying to fly it under a bridge or into similarly unlikely situations.

Finally, the children begin to test themselves (either on their own or because their swim teachers or parents push them) through increasingly rigorous rules and specific challenges. They go into the deep end, sometimes getting unwelcome mouthfuls of water. They practice new strokes. They try to swim the entire length of the pool underwater. They go from open-ended tag to racing each other. This is the educational simulation part of the experience; these exercises force them to learn skills that they can transfer to other bodies of water, such as lakes or oceans. Meanwhile, the students in the virtual world, having demonstrated their comfort in that world, receive an assignment requiring them to work together to achieve an instructor-defined goal. They fight a bit as a team and get frustrated; they resolve the frustration and complete the assignment. When the work is done, the class debriefs around a conference table or, perhaps, in the virtual world itself. The pilot-in-training is also working harder, having been tasked with increasingly challenging scenarios, such as landing with broken gear or under stormy conditions. The pilot crashes quite a bit at first but gradually gets more and more comfortable and confident.

The ease with which the children in the pool, the students in the virtual class, and the pilot in the flight simulator move from exploratory virtual-world behaviors to structured but simple games to taking on rigorous simulation challenges illustrates both the differences across these three instances and the connections that link them. It is only by building from open experimentation to increasingly rigorous rules, structures, and success criteria that children learn transferable water survival skills and pilots learn critical flying skills.

Distinctions and Connections

As the HIVE model sees virtual worlds, games, and simulations as both different and connected, there are two large sets of consequences: one emerging from appreciating the distinctions among the three and one related to the view of them as connected.

Distinctions

The HIVE model asserts that virtual worlds, games, and simulations are all different; each has its own affordances and purposes. A virtual world will not suffice where a simulation is needed. The virtual world offers only context with no content; it contributes a set of tools that both enable and restrict the uses to which it may be put. An educational simulation may take place in a virtual world, but it still must be rigorously designed and implemented. Organizations routinely fail in their efforts to access the potential of virtual worlds when they believe that buying a virtual world means getting a simulation.

Likewise, a game is not an educational simulation. Playing SimCity will not make someone a better mayor. Some players of, for instance, World of Warcraft may learn deep, transferable, even measurable leadership skills but not all players will. The game does not provide a structure for ensuring learning. Just because some players learn these skills playing the game, that does not mean either that most players are also learning these skills or that it should be adopted in a leadership development program. Conversely, a purely educational simulation may not be very much fun. The program may have the three-dimensional graphics and motion capture animations of a computer game, but the content may be frustrating. Specific competencies must be invoked, and students’ assumptions about what the content should be, likely shaped by their experiences with games, will be challenged.

Connections

However, the ease with which players in a new virtual environment move from exploratory behaviors to more structured simulation structures also illustrates the connection among virtual worlds, simulations, and games. There are overlaps of both processes and best practices between them. For instance, the same structures that help students get access to a virtual world (say in a university or corporation) also help them get access to a simulation and vice versa. These include help desks, technology test tools, accurate and understandable download information, and password and username management. The aspects of computer game design, such as scoring mechanisms, scripted storylines, and competition-based motivation, can drive increased engagement in an educational simulation. By the same token, a good teacher with a good curriculum can use a relevant game as part of a meaningful learning experience, but the experience must be carefully prepared, presented, and debriefed (Exhibit 1).

One example of the commonality across all HIVEs is the need for introductory structures. These asynchronous, self-paced levels or locations allow students to learn and demonstrate basic competencies in manipulation, navigation, and communication before moving on to the “real” exercise. These have been successfully adopted in Second Life where students often have to navigate through a custom challenge before joining a class for the first time. Computer games frequently have single-player levels with scripted stories and even their own training sequences that players must complete before joining multiplayer teams. Given the parallels between simulations, games, and virtual worlds, multiplayer simulations designed to teach specific skills may do well to include a significant single-player mode in which students can first learn the basic interface and gameplay.

A second area of commonality is the need for communities around games and simulations. Community-building tools and opportunities can be built in as a seamless, integrated piece of technology within the world or simulation or they can be provided separately via a chat room or other tool.

The biggest area of commonality, and this will be true for years and perhaps for decades, is that HIVEs get people to do things. In a formal learning program, this means that they can be integrated with the goal of getting students to learn how to do, not just what to know. To accomplish this, instructors in virtual worlds will find a range of techniques already refined in stand-alone simulations useful, including assessment methodologies such as benchmarking and coaching strategies to manage student frustration and to provide effective debriefing. More complex interactive structuring techniques, such as the use of branching structures or mathematical modeling to allow students’ decisions to guide the development of events in the world, can also help by increasing the interactivity of these environments.

Implications

This HIVE taxonomy has a range of implications for instructors structuring classes and for students exploring virtual worlds. Accepting the idea that HIVEs exist on a continuum, each providing its own benefits but each also being linked to the others, will affect how classes in virtual worlds, serious games, and educational simulations are conceptualized, developed, and deployed. Virtual environments provide a natural way for people to learn by nurturing an instinctive progression from experiencing to playing to learning; instructors should encourage the shifting across experimentation, play, and practice in which students naturally engage. In fact, instructors can exploit that behavior by providing stages that accommodate each stage. Light games and self-paced introductory levels can be used to get students comfortable with basic concepts and the interface necessary to exist in the virtual world, and the complexity can be increased to encourage students to move on to play and practice stages.

Content created for virtual worlds should reflect the nonlinear nature of HIVE learning and exploit the opportunity to learn by doing. The goal should not be to repurpose existing content but to rethink its goals and to imagine new types of content and new modes of presentation that fully access the power of HIVEs for learning. While best practices in content structuring may be transferred from stand-alone educational simulations to virtual world-based simulations, metrics and learning objectives for the different contexts should be different. Learning objectives and assessments around games, for instance, should be focused on the engagement, exposure, and use of simple interfaces while those for educational simulations should measure the development of complex, transferable skills.

Community is also an important element in virtual world-based learning, whether in games or simulations. Even stand-alone simulations need to provide participants some opportunity to access a community even through a separate tool if it is not possible to integrate the community into the simulation platform itself.

Conclusion

This emerging, unifying view of HIVE learning is the future of education (Exhibit 2). It represents, finally, the practical convergence of best practices and technologies, leveraging and building upon what we already know for better results for all involved. However, the critical trick for today is knowing when to look at virtual worlds, simulations, and games as part of a greater whole, sharing best practices when appropriate, and when not to let this holistic view obscure the critical differences among them, optimizing the sense of place and presence offered by virtual worlds, the fun engagement provided by games, and the rigor and transferability of skills promised by simulations.

References

Aldrich, C. 2009. The complete guide to serious games and simulations. Somerset, NJ: Wiley.

Exhibit 1: Examples of Commercial Games Used in Classrooms

Sid Meier’s Civilization Series by Firaxis for history and social sciences.
SimCity Series by Electronic Arts for urban planning and social psychology.
Age of Empires Series by Microsoft for history.
Zoo Tycoon by Microsoft for planning and economics.
Roller Coaster Tycoon by Chris Sawyer Games and Atari for planning and economcs

Exhibit 2: The future of HIVEs

Here are some brainstorming thoughts, some personal speculations, about how content may be created and experienced as universities, corporations, and other organizations increasingly explore the power of nonlinear and engagement-based media.

2010: Understanding and Procuring HIVEs

In the near term, educational and commercial organizations will explore their understanding of HIVEs and where HIVEs may fit in their missions. They will seek to how and when to use virtual worlds, serious game, and educational simulations.

And they will make mistakes. As more organizations acquire access to virtual worlds, corporations and academic organizations will use them primarily for building communities and bridging distances, although about 80% will be greatly underused. Large organizations will commission their own customized, self-contained simulations to teach foundational skill sets, mostly using external vendors. Others will buy and often modify off-the-shelf simulations, such as those now available from Harvard Business School Publishing and Capstone Business Simulation. We will see a proliferation of short, stand-alone simulations, typically using Adobe Flash and often connected to online communities, as the dominant model of customer-build stand-alone educational simulations.

Both socially focused virtual worlds, where users meet primarily for interpersonal interactions rather than to pursue goal-focused activities such as games, and self-contained simulations, when done well, will work better for learning than people now realize, developing in students a greater understanding of and interest in the content and a better ability to apply their learning, beginning a rethinking of the multitude of flawed current assessment methodologies currently in use, such as tests and papers. However, corporations especially will still pursue the Sisyphean task of “managing through metrics,” trying to assess the usefulness of an active virtual community or an effective simulation by seeking a quantifiable return on investment.

In universities using three-dimensional virtual worlds, these environments will increasingly be used to host student work, providing a venue for students to create interactive content, rather than as virtual classrooms. Schools that do not focus on the students’ role in building interactive content will wind down their use of virtual worlds in favor of easier tools, such as enhanced virtual classrooms. At the same time, the military will continue to lead the way in using simulations, using specifically developed simulations to develop soft power through the application of interpersonal skills, an effort begun in earnest a few years ago with projects such as the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), a University of Southern California (USC) project funded by the U.S. Army.

A widespread and growing preference for highly interactive content will have far-reaching implications. Business models structured around the production of linear content will continue to deteriorate. Newspaper and book publishers, as well as schools and traditional training providers, will find themselves in increasingly dire shape. But there are also huge problems in those consulting industries whose major outputs are traditional analysis and recommendations to large clients. Corporations will simply no longer buy traditional reports of events that are accurate, even profound, because they just sit on shelves unused. And the sale of interactive applications via providers such as iTunes and Android will continue to flourish. Simply, the market will shift to reward HIVE production as opposed to traditional media.

2013: Authoring in HIVE Environments

Widespread availability of robust and easy-to-use authoring tools and environments will develop quickly in the next three years. While small vendors will initially meet these authoring needs, these tools and capabilities will increasingly be aggregated by the biggest software vendors. The availability of these tools will enable large organizations to bring sophisticated authoring capabilities in house, as students who grew up authoring in Second Life enter the workforce. The time it takes to build a useful simulation will be reduced asymptotically to about four weeks, but larger budgets will be available for more complex simulations that take years to build. The range of development time for simulations will reflect both the maturity of the tools and the market value of these products.

Just as games have developed and refined such genres as first-person shooters and real-time strategy, the increased focus on HIVEs for learning will catalyze new ways of structuring content around the goal of “learning to do.” The power of simulations and virtual worlds to help teach the Big Skills (also known as 21st-century skills) will be recognized and embraced. Linear content will be viewed with increased suspicion as thin and ineffective compared to the robustness of well-created HIVE content. Institutions supporting schools will try, and fail, to build simulations around traditional content, such as biology and literature. HIVEs will increasingly be seen as a continuous whole; students and teachers will expect a smooth transition between the real world, the open virtual world, the fun game, and the relevant simulation.

Second Life will suffer as corporate customers follow younger users to better looking and more dynamic, but also more splintered, environments. Ironically, as the virtual world market fragments, the platform for simulations will converge. Adobe Flash will run everywhere (including hacked future versions of Xboxes and Playstations) and be the common authoring environment of choice, enabling schools to assign simulations without babysitting hardware.

2016: Rethinking Knowledge

By 2016, the culture will be rethinking the possibilities and necessities of captured wisdom. Research organizations and consulting groups will reluctantly reject the easy lens of linear content and, pushed by competition and client requests, follow a research and analysis process similar to the complex methodologies required to generate simulation-based content, even when not building a simulation (Supplement 2-1). Business reports will talk about actions, systems, and results, not just processes and tips. Search engines will be significantly challenged, with huge investments and infrastructure trapping them in old content, as people realize that you can’t learn leadership from Google. Instead of straight information, people will be seeking interactive, learn-to-do content; they’ll want to access virtual environments that allow them to practice particular skills, such as negotiating scenarios. Google has the same constraint as all linear content is shocking. You can’t learn stewardship, relationship management, innovation, or security any more from Google as you can from a traditional book, magazine, or traditional class. As a shared understanding of the limitations of “learning to know” vs. “learning to do” emerges, the realizations of the limitations “Learning to know” approaches becomes obvious.

Increasingly, everyone from the MacArthur Foundation to Accenture will default to producing interactive content over passive. Reports will be produced not as binders but as experiences, not as bullet points and inspirational quotes but as equations, interfaces, and dynamic relationships. For example, rather than having a report describing new market conditions and evolving customer preferences delivered to top executives of a large retailer, a consultant firm might produce a fifteen-minute mini-simulation that all employees of the company can access; in place of a mass of data that must then be disseminated through the corporation, the client will have a tool that can create across the corporate heirarchy a shared belief in the changes identified by the consultant and an understanding of the new behaviors necessary to adapt. This new research will cycle back into increasingly detailed simulations. As the perceived value of information and expectations for its presentation change, journalism will disappear as a distinct college major and career.

Open-source simulation design will flourish and be compatible with professionally created content. When the $49 laptop becomes a reality, sometime before 2015, China and India will both announce that a majority of their school curricula across all ages will be simulation based. Game makers will enter the educational simulation space for real here, as they see there is a market for finished goods, but they will be too late to create real brands. They will still manage to wipe out large tracts of smaller companies.

2019: A New View of Knowledge and Wisdom

Moving forward, school curriculum in the U.S. will be retooled around teaching innovation and stewardship and other Big Skills. The first Pulitzer Prize to a simulation will be announced in 2019, as well as the greatly diminished use of multiple-choice standardized tests (after years of decline). The last textbook publisher will fold. Pure linear content will be looked at the way we listen to scratchy phonographs. Finally, and truly, the most valuable content in the world will be educational simulations and serious games. IBM will launch a new initiative into this space.

Supplement: Research Questions to ask Subject Matter Experts When Designing an Educational Simulation

Most business research relies on the same intellectual constructs as other forms of linear content- including linear analysis, case studies, and inspirational examples. And like with movies and magazines, these reports end up impressing with their cleverness but don’t actually enable effective action (or any action, except more presentations), because they are not designed to.The process of creating a simulations or other “learning to do” content, requires a different process. Even if the goal is not a simulation, the new types of questions can result in richer, more action driven content. Here are some examples of different questions for Subject Matter Experts:

What situation have you experienced that you feel epitomizes the subject matter? (This could be a real-time event or an event that took place over weeks, months, or years.) Were there multiple situations?
What were your available options? At each moment, what could you have done in that situation, and what might a naive or inexperienced person done? What did you end up doing?
Why would the naive approach fail? What would it not have taken into account?
What were clues that informed your analysis of the situation? What did you see immediately, and what information did you have to look for? How did you look?
What did you want success to be? What did the conclusion end up being?
What were you looking for to suggest that things were going well? What were you looking for to suggest that things were not going well?
What were the “maintenance” or routine activities that you had to do (even including body language) to keep the situation developing well? What would happen if you did not do them?
What was the moment were you knew you were successful (or not)?
What was each person’s best case and worse case outcome? What were their strategies and actions?
What would have been three to five legitimate alternative approaches to the problem or situation?
What were the three to five high-level metrics that you were monitoring? Time? Commitment? Alignment?
What trade-offs were you willing to make? What trade-offs did you make?
Can you graph the high level metrics over the course of the experience?
What were the inflection points for each?
How do the actions impact the high level metrics? What else impacts the high level metrics (be as specific as possible)?

This article may be reproduced and distributed for educational purposes if the following attribution is included in the document:

Note: This article was originally published in Innovate (http://www.innovateonline.info/) as: Aldrich, C. 2009. Virtual worlds, simulations, and games for education: A unifying view.Innovate 5 (5). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=727 (accessed May 26, 2009).

The article is reprinted here with permission of the publisher, The Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University.

American Society of Training and Development's December T+D issue has excerpt from "The Complete Guide...'

The American Society of Training and Development's December T+D issue has an excerpt from "The Complete Guide...' on the description of different educational simulation genres. Take a look here if you are interested.

The piece, however, erroneously lists my bio as being the Lead Developer for SimuLearn, rather than my updated bio of being an independent developer. I am no longer involved with SimuLearn.

Weekly Poll: In which market(s) - Corporate, Government, Education, or Military - do you expect the fastest growth in sim use?

I have joked that sim growth has taken place in EMBC (Every Market But Corporate) over the past few years. But let me throw the question back to you. In which market(s) do you expect the fastest growth in sim use in 2010? Corporate, Government, Education, or Military?

(And please vote. My goal is to get about fifty votes.)

Simulation Design in Three Easy Steps

So you want to build a simulation? Here is a framework to get you through the design process in three easy steps.

Step One: Top-Down Rules

The first step is to collect all of the top-down patterns, including established analysis, best practices, and rules. In this step, traditional educational content and linear material such as existing courses, books, reports, and even rule guides are very helpful. They also serve to set a scale for what the sim will and won't cover.

If you were building a simulation about composting, you would look at all of the best practices established by experts (such as don't throw in dairy or meat, turn your pile every few weeks, mix in grass clippings to keep the nitrogen at the right level so it doesn't smell, people compost to reduce their impact on landfills and improve their land).

Step Two: Bottom-Up Relationships

The second step is to collect the hundreds of tiny relationships. Many of these relationships are so simple that it feels absurd to even capture them in a document. But there power comes in their rigor and volume.

Here, the simulation framework of actions / systems / results can help frame this seemingly open-ended and endless task. You have to be a detective here, grilling subject matter experts and listening to podcasts, pouncing on every scrap.

To return to our composting example, here are some examples,

actions: put different kinds of food in compost (egg shells, coffee grounds, hamburger, yogurt), turn compost, shovel out and spread compost, put in other organic matter (leaves, branches, weeds), cover pile, start new pile, buy barrels, mixing tools, water pile, sift compost, throw out food as garbage, design compost area
systems: rain washes through compost, food breaks down with aeration in about a month, food breaks down without aeration in about a year, nitrogen level imbalances can result in smell and inefficiencies, table of what matter contributes what nitrogen amounts; compost creates better soil which creates better growing conditions for flowers and vegetables, growing one's own vegetables results in cheaper and healthier food, garbage costs money per pound to put in a landfill, exposed vegetables will attract mildy attract critters, exposed meat will stronlgy attract critters, different microbes do different things at different temperatures, earthworms can aerate dirt.
results: great soil, smell, less garbage sent to landfills, yellow jackets, great vegetables, critters

Step Three: Find the Closest Existing Game or Sim Genre, or Microcosm

Finally, find an existing simulation or game that comes close to some or all of what you want to accomplish. Borrow the established rules as much as possible. Use the gameplay conventions and level design to make your life easier. Or find a perfect example or microcosm that can serve as the model, if no game or sim comes close enough.

Note 1: some people start here, and assume a maze game or a branching story before digging into the first two content steps. This tends to result in an educationally flat experience, merely reskinning a genre rather than teaching anything of note.

Note 2: This step is more successful if the designer has played a lot of computer games. It does make sense to engage new titles, and see how the designers have accomplished things. Appreciating and noting new mechanisms and even genres can mean the difference between failure and success in a new program.

Finally, moving away from these genres, I might zoom in and allow people to create and modify their own composting structure.

Composter: Here is my "lazy" composting system. It uses rain and gravity to wash finished, filtered compost into the containers on the bottom. This creates an infinite ability to dump food into the top, maintain a permanent ecosystem of microbes and earthworms in the middle, and get great compost waiting for me in the bottom without having to shovel, aerate, or sift.

Synchronize and Repeat

These steps should greatly shape your simulation design document. Use the rules to organize the relationships. And the genre to frame everything.

And they are iterative - work done in each will help inform the other two. You will work in from the three corners to the middle. Ultimately, all three should converge (even if there is fear at first that they won't).

You may have a few outlier rules at the end of the process that fall outside of the system and level deisgn, but that still need to be included. Here you might use traditional pedagogical technique such as slides or pop-ups to convey this content.

When creating a sim, do you start with high-level best practices, little relationships, or the sim engine?

In The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games, as well as with my clients, I suggest that the design of a sim involves going through three steps iteratively.

The first step is to identify high-level best practices and analysis, which has typically already been captured in existing (albeit not effective) courses.
The second step is to identify the hundreds of little relationships that make up the core knowledge, typically broken into the three categories of actions, systems, and results.
The third step is to identify the close enough game or sim genre that helps frames and dictates the level design and overall look and feel.

While each step informs the other steps, the order is actually hugely important. Interestingly, depending on if you start with step two or with step three, you get dramatically opposite effects.

Starting with the identification of the little relationships (step two) often occurs when either a researcher or subject matter expert starts an effort. Identifying the little relationships without the framing of the best practices is a staggeringly complex activity, that while satiates the purists, can take huge amounts of time and overwhelms all but the most intrepid. Projects that start here seldom see the light of day. Even if they do survive, there is so much wasted effort.

In contrast, starting with the identification of the genre (step three) and filling in the blanks is a much more typical phenomenon. I often see this when either a vendor has a pre-built engine they are using for a new project, or when an organization has invested in a platform or authoring environment themselves and are trying to push more programs onto it. The results are quick (weeks instead of months), cost effective, and efficient. The course is spit out on time. The only problem is that the content is flat. Two or three different programs, ostensibly covering different topics, starting from the vantage of same engine all look the same, and more importantly, basically "teach" the same thing. We are seeing this in abundance with sims in Second Life, but also from small specialty vendors.

Every project needs to balance its own needs. And part of my role with clients is not only to design the best sim, but to map out the best process. But starting with formal content, then identifying tiny relationships, then finding the right genre, is an iterative process that I believe will result in the best programs for most people for the foreseeable future.

The Nine Month Gestation Period of a Serious Game

There seems to be about a "natural" nine-month gestation period for a solid serious game. Having said that, here are a few notes:

Corporations need a deliverable in three months, which is still possible given this framework, but it does shape some decisions.
It is a bit longer (about a year) if an entirely new mechanism or gameplay is being used. And it is much shorter (in total about six weeks) if one is customizing an existing engine.
A good simulation engine, with adequate support for fluid content, has a shelf life of about ten years.

The time frame usually falls into three trimesters of create, code, and calibrate.

Trimester One: Create

In the first trimester, the sim is designed. The goal is to produce a great design document, between 30 and 50 pages long. The designer (such as myself) immerses him or herself in the content, looking at established best practices, lots of tiny relationships, and then relevant existing sim genres (see Simulation Design in Three Easy Steps). The learning objectives and requirements are formalized, often using a client liaison and program sponsor. The look and feel are nailed down, hopefully with the work of a good graphic designer. Any technical decisions, including media, authoring environments, and end-user requirements, are nailed down.

Steps also have to be taken to set up trimester two.

Trimester Two: Code

In the second trimester, the two or three programmers/coders will program the material in the design document. They will produce much of the core sim engine itself, and provide the links to the fluid content, such as graphic files, videos, sound files, text, and entire level designs and sim flow, using industry standard media and xmls. The program sponsor, designer, graphic designer, and client rep will be peripherally involved, making decisions, and helping flesh out the numerous parts of the sim engine that need refining. Near the end of this process, the lead designer will begin inputting as much of the final content as possible. About 60% of the project budget is spent in this stage.

Trimester Three: Calibrate

In the final trimester, the designers finish inputting content into the engine, and the entire package is put in front of target audiences by the program sponsor (by the way, finding the right target audience, and introducing the experience to them, is a surprisingly hard task). The programmers/coders need to be available to make core engine changes, but even more so the lead designer and client liaison have to refine the fluid content. Finally, there can be integration work with the LMS or database.

Staggered Development

While a nine-month gestation period is perceived to be a long time, the best organizations will stagger development. In other words, if you start a new simulation every two months, you will have a pipeline that introduces new sims at a productive and healthy rate. So, as with creating anything of consequence, start now!

How long does it take to build a serious game or educational simulation?

I have been building custom serious games and educational simulations for quite some time now for corporate, military, and other clients. The single biggest questions is, "how long does it take to build a sim?" Here is a formula that I use in my end-to-end project (yes, this is how I would program it into a simulation!):

Base Sim

My suggested simulations tend to be highly interactive, use Flash, drive level 3 and level 4 changes, and take students between one and two hours to complete in a single player environment.

These take about nine months to complete.

But there are some significant modifiers that cumulatively impact that time frame.

Modifier One

Multiplayer Instead of Single Payer	-25%
Multiplayer and Single Player	+60%

Modifier Two (range)

Very light weight mechanics	-70%
Real 3D, client desktop installed, and in other ways "Computer Game-Like"	+100%

Modifier Three (range)

Complete Adherence to Existing Genre/ Engine Already Exists	-40%/-70%
Totally New Genre/ Highly Flexible and Reusable Architecture	+30%/ +50%

Then Just Multiply Out

Start with the base of nine-months, then just multiply out the relevant modifiers. I have found this to be accurate not only for my end-to-end projects, but also projects I am brought into, and projects that I track as an analyst

The Flow of Skills

Anyone who is in charge of a training organization has to sweat out the flow of skills, looking at the four quadrants of expert, instructor, student, and practitioner, and the movement of idea and people between them.

Here are some of the flows (and click to enlarge the skills chart above):

Instructors might learn from experts, format the information for students, who then become informed practitioners.
Experts might mentor practitioners.
Practitioners might get promoted to expert.
Students might work to get into a class, and get credit for successfully completing it.
Peer to peer communities might chew on problems and come to a solution.

There is the recently ramped up focus on eliminating or at least dramatically reducing the entire right side of the chart, the role of instructor and the role of student, while dramatically increasing the areas of overlap between expert and novice (middle left), such as peer-to-peer work and social networking, often labelled as informal learning. If a learning group wants to produce content quickly that is highly relevant, this seems like the most fruitful path.