Weekly Poll: Do you have Access to Sufficient Sim Authoring Environments?

Finding a good sim authoring environment is necessary for the widespread adoption of sims in general. So please vote on this poll.

Do you have Access to Sufficient Sim Authoring Environments?

• I create many sims, and I am satisfied with the authoring environments available to do so.
• I create many sims, but would want to use additional authoring environments if available.
• I don't create many sims. I would spend more time creating and using sims but I don't have access to the right authoring environments (they are either unknown to me, too expensive, or do not have the right functionality).
• I don't create many sims, but knowing about and accessing the right authoring environments is not the reason.

Please vote! I would like to get 50 votes if possible for this poll to make it a more valid datum point for all of us.

Units: How CEOs, Presidents, and Hostile Aliens view Life on Earth

The following is based on the introduction to the chapter on Units from the award-winning The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games. Check out the unanimous five star reviews on Amazon.

Sim designers have to think about the world differently than producers of more linear content. While traditional writers may look at capturing the world in terms of paragraphs, or stories, or timelines, or directions, one of our most fundamental constructs is modeling the world through units.

Units are a self-contained, distinguishable, discrete object.

Units exist in a context, typically on a Map and/or Work Process and with other units. They can move, often along paths. They have attributes and momentum/ inertia.

When on a map, their geographical position matters. They can probe, and might have some advantage if close to resources, such as water or the CEO. They also have size.

Some can be bought, built, placed, and upgraded. They can be destroyed (when their health is gone), or shut down.

More complex units play a role in an ecosystem. These are self-contained, autonoma optimized for environments. They have sensors, creating internal views. They may reproduce, and even mutate, as one type of adapting. They may catch and spread contagion.

Unit. Workers in the compute game Tropico perform necessary activities, such as moving raw materials to factories, and finished goods from factories to the docks. They require food and shelter, and, as a constituent, they can vote for or against the player every election. Source: Tropico by Take2 Interactive Software

Units turn one resource into another. They might turn money into customer satisfaction. They might turn research into finished products. They might turn time into information. They might consume a constant stream of resources (fixed costs) and/or variable. They may have an organization level, and work in roles and in formations. Emergent behavior occurs when enough units act simultaneously.

These units can represent a complex system by themselves. They may recursively be made up of smaller units. They may have goals. They may have items, even an inventory. They may communicate with other units, beginning by handshaking.

Skins and meshes can differentiate units. Very distinctive units might have character (and therefor have their jail time commuted).

Memes are ideas that have many of the property of units. Vehicles can be considered a unit. Structures can be considered larger units that cannot move.

Units, especially with robust artificial intelligence (AI), can also be called agents. They may run scripts, even have situational awareness, conceptual dead reckoning, and intuition. They can even be players themselves.

Conclusion

The more we use the constructs of units, the more we realize how powerful and flexible they can be. I have used the behavior of units to create interesting artificial personalities, for example, where the position of the units represents the beliefs of an on screen character. Moving the units against inertia and obstacles represented shifting the character's opinion.

Putting students in environments with interesting units (or giving the homework assignment of creating their own units) often makes more sense than having them read or write long passages. The problem is that the activities of reading and writing are still so much more supported by our default authoring environments of word processors, while creating units that interact in interesting ways takes programming and other "advanced" skills. Still, this will change in the next few years, and soon creating and interacting with units will become a natural part of framing the world.

Research Questions:

• How many different types of units are there?
• For each, what are the attributes?
• What does the map look like?

While designing a sim, identify the fluid, semi-fluid, and rigid content

When designing a simulation, one has to be mindful of three different types of content:

• The rigid content, which is nearly impossible to change once built (or once an authoring environment is procured);
• The semi fluid content, which can be changed but with expense and difficulty, requiring a certain level of expertise, and in a way that may create seams in the simulation; and finally
• The fluid content, which can be changed easily, without seams, at almost any point including post-employment, and by someone without specialized experience.

Typically, the rigid content is the structure of the display itself, the framework of the goals, and the nature of all interactivity. I often refer to this as the genre and is framed by any authoring environment. When looking at the program of a sim, the rigid content is often compiled in a large inaccessible executable file.

The semi fluid content includes all of the drawings, animations, voice recordings, and sets or backgrounds. Usually, this content is stored in folders off of the main directory, hopefully in industry standard formats such as JPGs and MP3s.

The fluid content includes all text, which should be easy to identify and change by anyone. For example, the words that make up the story go here. This content should be captured and accessed in XML files. Fluid content also includes level design, and branching links, including branching dialogs and state based diagrams, and weighting of algorithms, which also be stored in XMLs (albeit more cryptically and in a perfect world well documented). Finally, the most important fluid content should be tips that help the end user navigate the sim, including what user activity triggers them, and what they say and do (such as pause the sim or highlight a box). No matter how smart we all wish that we were, we can never fully anticipate when these will be needed until real people use the sim in real situations.

Therefore, as one is considering simulation design, one has to consider which content will need to be changed on an ongoing basis and need constant maintenance. Likewise, as one is building a simulation, one needs to nail down first all of the rigid content, next all of the semi fluid content, and only last the fluid content.

Corporate Sims: About 100K per Finished Hour to Build

One of the perennial questions is, how much does it cost to create an effective serious game or educational simulation?

In the past, I have tried to break this question down by genre, such as branching story or interactive spreadsheet. But all of the most recent sims that I (and my partners) have designed and built have converged along a single meta-genre of Flash-based, self-paced, and highly visual, highly engaging, and interactive, using both "first person" and workbench perspective, with various degrees of pedagogy built in.

Fairly consistently for corporate projects, my sims tend to cost about 100K/finished hour.

Further:

• From a curriculum perspective, these sims cover twice as much "content per hour" as traditional eLearning. For example, what was covered in a two-hour program can be accomplished in a one-hour sim. This is useful for estimating cost of a project, but also represents a considerable ROI savings in terms of employee's time.
  
  
• More importantly, from an effectiveness perspective, sims actually transforms real-world behavior and conviction, as measured six months after programs have been deployed. (Traditional eLearning programs typically just allow an organization to check off a box.) This dramatic increase in effectiveness sounds unbelievable, as it addresses a problem that traditional educational programs have had for decades. But as one understands the methodologies and sees the third-party research, one sees these real results as increasingly inevitable.
  
  
• There are no further costs. Once a program is done, the organization owns the program. There are no per-user or annual licensing fees. There is not even the administrative costs of tracking. Most importantly, the facilitation is built in - there is no ongoing need to use (and pay) live instructors (and also no expensive and time-consuming train-the-trainer programs). Finally, this enables organizations to effortlessly expand the use of the content beyond its originally defined audiences, sometimes including not just other employees but customers and vendors as well.
  
  
• The sims are infinitely scalable over space and time. As noted, there are no human coaches necessary to limit use or to force students into awkward and hard to schedule synchronous virtual classes. Further, organizations can typically can deploy them all over the world as the interactivity and visual nature makes the content natively global. Care is even taken to create a look and feel that will not be dated in a year or two, as is the case with video.
  
  
• Organizations can have them built one hour at a time, and chain them together. This creates a manageable first sim, with room to grow to handle more ambitious curricula. (Although some organizations will want to create a two or three hour program at once.)
  
  
• These sims are highly customized to the organization's unique situation; they are not based on an existing common engine that is simply reskinned. This includes a customized tone, from serious to aspirational to cartoon.
  
  
• Typically, the new visualization of a situation lives beyond the sims, and becomes a valued piece of analysis and strategy as well as a formal learning sim.
  
  
• The formal learning programs are trackable and measurable. And more than just click-throughs, the employees have to demonstrate a working, dynamic ability to use skills. This is becoming increasingly valued for both legal and business operations considerations.
  
  
• Employees (from the old guard to the new hires out of college or even high school) rate them well, not just for being engaging, but also in making them more powerful.
  
  

We have entered the phase where sims are no longer risky to build and deploy, and instead, if the right team is used, are highly predictable to create and uniquely effective to deploy. The greater risk now (to not only a program but even an entirely formal learning organization) is not to use them. As always, email me if you have any questions or want more information.

Skill Sets for Serious Games and Simulations

What are the roles for creating a serious game or educational simulation? For projects in which I am involved, here is what ought be on the team (and keep in mind that, especially in smaller projects, the same person can meet several different roles):

Title: Client Manager/ Sales Person/ Client Requirements

Description of Responsibilities: The client manager is the de facto lead of a sim project. They are the people who identify and secure the project to begin with. Then they provides a constant voice of the customer to the development process. They may or may not be involved directly in the content creation process. But they are constantly looking over everyone's shoulders, and often making final judgment calls on tough decisions based on what they believe the client wants. The client manager may also assist the project manager and the lead designer in setting up a critical approval meetings, project pilots, and meetings with subject matter experts.

Percentage of Entire Project: 20%

Title: Lead Designer (and other Designers)

Description of Responsibilities: (This is the role I take) The lead designer can be thought of as, in movie-making parlance, the director of the simulation. He or she controls the tone, content, and length of the experience. The lead designer is responsible for all of the necessary research for the simulation, the level structure, the interface, mock ups of screenshots using PowerPoint or crayons, identification of users, walkthroughs, meta-coding and framing of underlining systems and mechanics, goal states, all written material including dialogs, and more, and often presents all of this in the design document. The lead designer is also responsible for ongoing calibration. (See The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games for full details.)

Percentage of Entire Project: 20-30%

Title: Lead Programmer (and other Programmers)

Description of Responsibilities: The lead programmer is responsible for creating all of the code for the sim. This includes prototyping, piloting, creating any authoring or editing environment, and creating a finished simulation. In many projects, this category also includes the different skills set for evaluating and adopting third party technology and tool sets. (Most of my projects require Flash or increasingly HTML 5).

Percentage of Entire Project: 20-30%

Note: Programmers may create rough authoring environments that significantly increases the time it takes for the designers to input and refine information.

Title: Project Manager

Description of Responsibilities: The project manager has to be a master of precision and tact. They have to be there to support all of the other people and talents, and yet at the same time enforce deadlines and budgets through soft and hard power. Ultimately, the project manager has to be of high skill level and low ego. They report to the client manager. It is a sure path to failure when a project manager tries to overreach and seize control of everything, just because they have the role of managing the project's budget.

Percentage of Entire Project: 10%

Title: Lead Artist

Description of Responsibilities: The lead artist is responsible for all of the art of the project. This includes the aesthetics of the interface, any and all color schemes, drawings, and animations.

Percentage of Entire Project: 10%

Title: Database Systems Integrator

Description of Responsibilities: The database systems integrator is responsible for all integration of the program into the customer environment. This includes SCORM compliance, LMS integration, database integration, and a knowledge of the end user environments. This role often extends the furthest out, as client implementation environments change months or even years after the simulation has been successfully installed.

Percentage of Entire Project: 5-10%

Title: Voice Talent

Description of Responsibilities: Voice talent provides all of the voices for the sim, including narrator and characters. Typically, voice talent are professional actors. They always come from the outside, are quite expensive, are hired for one or two sessions, and are critical to the ultimate success of the simulation.

Percentage of Entire Project: 5%

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Title: Subject Matter Experts

Description of Responsibilities: Subject matter experts provide the knowledge that has to be captured and developed in others through the sim.

Percentage of Entire Project: 0%. Curiously, subject matter experts are often not factored in to the cost of creating a serious game or educational simulation. This is because they are often rounded up by the sponsors or even accessed asymmetrically through books or podcasts. Still, given how important subject matter experts are, and how much most people complain about the lack of cooperation from subject matter experts, one can't help but wonder if paying them out of the simulation budget might align motivations over time.

Has Dr. Seuss over-influenced Sim design?

Many of my fellow sim designers find themselves making up some new species and ecosystem. You know what I mean: "the glorms are just like humans, but all they need to live is a single food protein, sunlight, and water."

The argument for the Seussian approach (named after, of course, Dr. Seuss) is compelling. It mostly follows three correct trains of thought and one wrong one:

First, Seussian sim characters are obviously abstracted. They can focus the participant on a few key issues.

Second, Seussian characters don't have to be perfect (technically, to behave with 100% fidelity to the real world). One of the most common statements from a sim students is, "Oh, people don't act that way." By creating your own world, you make the rules, and you can short-circuit this common complaint.

Third, new types of critters avoids having to localize a sim on one nationality. Given that sims are perfect for diverse audiences, this has a lot of appeal.

Fourth, and this reason is less defendable, Seussian characters can be "fun." Now the problem with this, of course, as with all game elements, is that what is fun for one person is not fun for another.

While I think these reasons all need to be addressed, ultimately the Seussian approach causes more problems than it solves.

First, it puts off a lot of people. Ruling a planet of snicklewhacks (or whatever) puts a level of contrivance that simply doesn't resonate with enough people. Any game element, almost by definition, appeals to some while turning off others.

Second, it takes up too many resources that should be spent on making a better product. Creatures need body language, even entire cultures, and all of that distracts from the core goal. Let's say that I need body language to suggest my creature is sick. I would rather the designer research the real world body language than make up new ones (such as "the juntiopians turn blue and spotted when sick..."). The nice thing about using real is that other subsequent designers can build off of each other's work. (Having said that, I am all for creating a new invention, a new president, or even - in one current sim - a new sport. Creating a single new mythology is hard enough. But an entire ecosystem inevitably ends up thin.)

Third, it does take the designer too much off the hook. It does allow the modelers to ignore reality and the transfer of perspectives or skills to the productive world. If one argues (as I do) that content is there to drive intelligent actions, than Seussian settings interrupt the application of the content post-sim.

Ultimately, I think the Suessian approach is a great but distracting shorthand. I would hope that a sim program instead can make explicit the limitations and the abstractions of the simearly on (i.e. "This sim will look at the relationship between short term and long term use of land. It focuses on the cost of food as a factor of the health of the soil, but does not take into account cost as the result of the actions of other countries." Or, "these are obviously not real people. But they will respond in a way that will align with at least some of your own experiences. By learning to manage these simulated people, you will better manage real people.").

Having said that, (and yes kids, write this down because this will be on the test) the level of systems and interface abstraction (mathematical or otherwise) should align with the level of visual abstraction. In other words, graphics should not be photo-realistic if the AI (or other underlying mechanism) is much more simplistic.

A "New Yorker" level of Graphics. This drawing, from Xerox' Document at Works series, is representative without being fanciful, and represents a good target for sim designers.

I believe a good defauklt goal for most current sims is about the level of a New Yorker cartoon. Real, but abstracted, including exaggerations and holes. The nice thing about that is that it provides an accurate level of most systems as well. This seems to the level of The Sims, where "sims" speak in their own sim language and spend simoleans rather than dollars. but are still mostly human.

Sims designers have to walk a tight rope. If the goal is perfection, especially when dealing with models of human behavior, we all will be paralyzed by fear. But if the goal is Seussian, we may be letting ourselves a little too much off the hook. Worse, we may fall into the traps of traditional education with "it's not the specifics that matter, it is the very high level lessons."

Commentary: Why are so many research papers on serious games so boring?

I am expected to read new research on serious games. I speak before or after academics presenting on Serious Games and Educational Simulations. I am sent books to read and review.

And I have one question.

Why is so much research about serious games so boring?

And I am not even talking about the focus on stunningly obvious conclusions with which our industry is plagued. I am not sure who values statements like, "Children elect to engage in computer game style activities because they are fun (Quixby, 2003, 2004), and engaging (Wrigget, 1994, 1997)" but I have yet to meet them. Likewise, there are people who insist on first "identifying" then "naming" obvious phenomena with huge labels; you can call it cognitive disequilibrium all you want, but I am sticking with frustration.

But that is not even the real point. My biggest gripe is how can a person unabashedly present information that breaks every rule they praise? How can a 400 page book containing one case study after another conclude that interactivity and dynamic content is necessary for effective learning? How can a lecturer drone on and on about the wonderfulness of social networks because they reward the individuality of the user, and still wait until the end to solicit questions?

One author of a very dry book that advocated games and simulations excused the dryness by saying that he simply did not have enough time or resources to make it more engaging. Of course he was extolling anyone reading the book to take the time making their content highly engaging.

Two more examples:

• Writers of academic papers citing the importance of engagement techniques don't dare to add humor or comic book style drawings for fear that their research will not be taken seriously. (For my recent book Learning Online..., when I was doing my final edit, I asked my Facebook community for a list of funny words. They came up with trombone, monkey, crop circles, and about thirty others. I then worked all but two into the text.)
• Some speakers (and I wrestle with this) think they have too much important material to cover to waste time with interactivity and audience participation. So they fire-hose the audience like a tour guide sprinting through an ancient city so they can brag on how much they covered.

Many serious games advocates blame others for lack of advances ("schools don't get it" or "corporations are risk adverse"), which are all true. And yet, when we have near complete control, we use the same rationale. In other words, the single people who should be the greatest advocates are a microcosm of the problem. They are crippling the future, rather than enabling it.

If I were running a conference on games and simulations, I would rather hire Thiagi to role model interactivity and audience empowerment, than hire another talking head discussing how important it is. I would rather see a dissertation or article be an interesting minigame or comic book than 120 pages of text saying how powerful they could be. At the very least, we need to infuse our own work with humor, graphics, and non-linearity.

It is one thing to encourage courage in others. It is quite another to role-model it yourself.

(Note: This is an update to a previous article. I have kept the comments from the original article, as they are still relevant.)