What's your theme song?

A few months back, we had a discussion in the office about what music we would have playing if we ever were a guest on a talk show. You know...what music would be your entrance music, what music would you have playing as you make your way across the stage, onto the field, or into the room. This song, this music, should represent you...make you feel something...inspire you. It should tell people something about who you are. It should make you want to dance...it should make Ellen get up and dance with you.

The funny thing is that theme songs, kinda like nicknames, are hard to pick for yourself. While on some level you have to embrace your song, it also has to mean something to other people. In other words, not only do you have to embrace your theme song, but it should make other people think of you.

Sports teams have long used music, and theme songs, to fire up their players and the fans. In Cincinnati, Bengals players and fans know that Welcome to the Jungle by Guns N Roses signals the beginning of the game.  The Seattle Seahawks play The Verve's Bittersweet Symphony whenever they have something to celebrate, and the New England Patriots have a tradition of entering the field to Ozzy Osbourne's Crazy Train.

We all know that music activates a different part of the brain for memory and recall; its why stroke patients who lose the ability to speak can often sing fluently. Music helps us tie meaning to emotion and strengthens our social connection to others through shared understanding and experiences.

What if our organizations had theme songs? What if your learning organization had a theme song? What would it be? And what does that theme song say about your organization?

Our theme songs are not just who we are, but who we aspire to be. They show what makes us unique, provide a window into our personalities, and motivate us to get up and do things. Do big things. Do cool things. Do things that will make a difference.

As a little inspiration, here are some of the Tandem Learning members' theme songs...

Koreen Olbrish: Because I'm Awesome, The Dollyrots

Jedd Gold: Solid Gold, Marilyn McCoo

Marcus Hswe: Walk this Way, Run DMC with Aerosmith

Kristen Cromer: That's the Way I Like It, KC and the Sunshine Band

Stacey Blitz: Ballroom Blitz, Sweet

So what is your theme song?

ARGs (alternate reality games) for learning

After launching our second ARG for learning this week with our development partners Hybrid Learning, and after I pulled a double shift last week on #lrnchat talking ARGs (early and late transcripts), and I realized that a blog post about ARGs and how they can be used for learning is well overdue. Why should you be thinking about ARGs for your next event, or corporate learning initiative? Consider this tweet from Kristen Cromer regarding our pilot test results for our latest ARG:

Client tester reacted to ARG test run by jumping up and down saying "I want to play more!"

So...when was the last time you launched a training program that made people jump up and down? Yeah...that's what I thought. The truth is, ARGs can incorporate many of the elements that traditional training lacks: social learning, experiential learning, game play, and competition. And...brace yourself...fun.

So what is an ARG? And how can you use them to help people learn?

Alternate reality games (ARGs), also sometimes called pervasive games, are designed to combine real life and digital game play elements. Typically, ARGs are "tracked" online but the actual game play consists of real life activities. There are many entertainment-based examples (eg, I love bees, The Lost Experience, Numb3rs Chain Factor) and emerging examples of ARGs for serious purposes (eg, Urgent Evoke, World without Oil). A new area of focus is how ARGs can be leveraged for corporate training.

I've seen a lot of confusion in the term ARG--some people use "alternate reality games" and "augmented reality games" interchangeably.  For a point of clarification, alternate reality games refer to game play that integrates real life and online game play; augmented reality games refer to games where there is a technology overlay on reality that contributes to play (think the 1st down line on televised football games).

Its difficult to make generalizations of what an ARG is or looks like for learning. Just as there are an unlimited number of games and rules for game play, the same is true for ARGs. Designs could range from something very simple (eg, a scavenger hunt) to something very complex (eg, large scale, problem-based learning leadership development). There are, however, some basic design principles and "lessons learned" that have become apparent as we have designed more and more ARGs for corporate learning.

• Design is the key: just as with any game, ARGs are most successful when they are designed for the type of play and outcomes that both make them fun and engaging as well as focused on achieving the desired goals. This is not instructional design; this is game design with learning goals. A huge misconception is that because you've played games, you know how to design them. Don't underestimate the amount of time, energy, thought, and expertise that it takes to design a fun game, let alone a fun game that accomplishes your organizational learning goals.
• Technology drives the experience: you shouldn't underestimate the importance of the game design, but neither should you underestimate the importance of having a solid technology plan for driving and tracking the game play. Much of the basis of a good game is the mechanics--you can't play Yahtzee without dice or poker without cards. Technology enables game play and is an essential element of what makes an ARG successful.
• What's your story?: everyone loves a good story. The most successful ARGs embrace storytelling as a key element of the game play. For corporate training initiatives, the storytelling elements can either mirror real-life scenarios or be more of a fantastical overlay. Strategy for the storyline should align with the design and objectives, but should not be overlooked as a critical aspect of the experience.
• Stick to the point: yes, it might be fun to plan an ARG with a Mission Impossible theme, but it might not be appropriate for a game focused on team building. Make sure that your design is led by and focused on your learning objectives. Recognize that anything that doesn't support your goals might distract from them and be strategic about what you focus on to reduce cognitive overhead.
• Follow the rules: people play games to win, and rules dictate what you need to do to win. Part of the complexity of game design is setting rules of play to balance game play at the sweet spot between "too hard" and "too easy."
• Play to learn not learn to play: beware of designing game play rules that are so complex that there's a significant learning curve to figure out how to play the game. Unless, of course, the goal of the game is to promote critical thinking skills...then it might be appropriate :) But in general, ARGs should be designed with clear rules of play to help players focus on the content and accomplishing the learning goals instead of figuring out how to play or win the game.
• Should you keep it on the down-low?: in the past, part of the intrigue and appeal of ARGs is that they have been secret or subversive, which created an atmosphere of being "in the know." But for learning, you probably don't want your training experiences to be secret, but it might not be a bad idea to think about how you can still create that feeling of subversiveness. Secret clues, bonuses, and secret codes are all examples of ways that you can create a "secret" feel to game play. 

We've launched two ARGs for learning in the last few months and are in process of developing two more. Corporate training initiatives and live events and conferences are great opportunities to leverage the strengths of ARGs at a comparatively low cost. How would you rather learn and network with your peers? What kind of shared experiences could an ARG provide as a basis for learning and relationship building? The possibilities and opportunities are endless.

Check out more information about our Constellation Academy of Wine National Sales Meeting ARG that launched this week here. I previously wrote a bit about our DevLearn 09 Zombie Apocalypse ARG here, and I'll be presenting the case study on both of these ARGs at the LEEF Conference in Harrisburg, PA on June 17th & 18th (and running an ARG for the conference as well!). I'll keep you updated on our upcoming ARGs as well. Stay tuned!

Game design strategy: content versus concept

My 7 year old is a gamer. He prefers what he calls "learning" games (he's not much for the "fighting" games...doesn't see the point). But recently, he's transitioned from simply playing games into making his own games and animations. He started out with Scratch and now has moved onto Alice. I can't say enough about either of these programs; if you have kids who are interested in games, they are great tools to get them started.

In helping him think about what he's designing, we've been referencing other games that he's liked playing. Two of his favorites are Big Brain Academy on the Wii and The Impossible Quiz, which he plays on his iTouch but also on the laptop. Both of these games have been highly engaging, and both of them are quiz/puzzle-based. But their design is pointedly different, and provide some insight for learning game designers.

Big Brain Academy focuses on a series of questions that fall into different categories, such as visualize or compute. The questions vary, and your performance is measured in the time it takes to complete and how many you get right. For example, in the compute category, you might be asked to pop balloons that have numbers in them, from low to high. The first few are pretty easy, but then negative numbers are introduced and players need to understand the concept of the number line in order to be successful. The game play focuses on repetition to keep increasing the number you get right, and how quickly you get them right...essentially, repetition for mastery of the concept.

The Impossible Quiz is equally, if not more addictive. The first quiz is 110 questions long, but questions are puzzles themselves and if you burn through your 3 lives, you start over from the beginning. You get the exact same questions every time. Game play is progressive...by the time you get to question 84, you can fly through the first 83 questions because you've learned the tricks and solved the puzzles. The challenge is solving the next puzzle, not repetition of the previous puzzles for mastery. The content is the challenge, and once the content is mastered, its time to move onto the next question.

So which design is better for learning? Both of these games are highly engaging and the sense of accomplishment elicited is intrinsic in the game design. But at the end of the day, my son is a master of the number line in any context, but I'm not sure he's any better as solving puzzles...he just knows the answers to The Impossible Quiz. If the learning goal is to communicate content, The Impossible Quiz design gets the job done nicely. If you want to teach a concept, focus on the design elements seen in Big Brain Academy.

For now, the 7 year old is more interested in emulating content puzzles...be on the lookout for "The Impossible Space Quiz." In the meantime, check out his portfolio on Scratch...and feel free to leave a comment if you see something you like!

(This blog post approved by Jackson Olbrish.)

Instructional versus experiential design: do you have what it takes?

If your instructional design experience has focused on e-learning modules or workshop development or print instruction...you don't have the skill set to design experiential learning. At least, not yet.

Instructional design typically focuses on the systematic layout of content in a way that can be easily understood, and hopefully learned, by the intended audience. Classroom curriculum development, print, e-learning...typically they present the content, explain the concepts, and allow for some kind of practice before providing some way of assessing what you learned. Most instructional design degree programs focus on this pattern, and applying it to different content. Many instructional designers become experts at breaking content down into easy-to-understand, bite-sized pieces--making difficult concepts easy to understand.

This actually makes a lot of sense, right? If something is difficult to understand, its important to simplify it so that it is understandable. This type of instruction is important, and has its place. But its not the same as experiential design.

The truth is, life is complicated. Decisions are complicated. Many times, there isn't a right or wrong answer--there are better and worse answers. There are often hidden implications in addition to the obvious ones for any decision we make. There's a reason why its called complex decision-making. Its not easy. And you really can't simplify it so that its easier to understand. We can really only get better at dealing with the complexities of the real choices we are faced with every day by practicing making those tough decisions.

Enter experiential design. Where immersive and experiential learning succeeds is in replicating realistic environments and presenting complex problems that require deeper reflection and understanding than most content or concepts presented in traditional training. To design experientially, you have to design a mirror to reality. You wouldn't want a doctor to perform surgery on you who hadn't practiced numerous times and faced a multitude of different situations before. Nor would you want to fly on a plane with a pilot who had only flown a couple times before getting in the cockpit. Why would you want a company full of employees who weren't skilled in handling the complexities of business decisions that companies face every day? No, those decisions typically aren't life or death. But they could mean the life or death of your organization.

In real life, there are very seldom heroes who always make the right choice or villains that always make the wrong ones. Most of us struggle day to day with facing tough choices, weighing all of the options, and making the best decisions we can. The potential of experiential learning design is to be able to provide practice making those decisions and seeing the potential short-term and long-term implications and outcomes before we make the decisions in real life. Call it insight. Call it reflection. Experiential design allows us to help people overcome short-sighted or narrowly-focused decisions by providing the long-term and wide-reaching implications.

Isn't that the kind of thinking and understanding we'd like to see in all of our organizations? Isn't that what we'd like to see in ourselves?

I'm looking forward to talking about this topic more at Learning Solutions, March 24-26th in Orlando, in my session with Ellen Wagner and Cammy Bean titled New Skills for Instructional Designers. And I'm thrilled to be participating in Harrisburg University's LEEF conference June 17-18th where I'll be spending 2 days hearing amazing case study examples of experiential design in simulations, games, and virtual worlds for enterprise (& I hear I'll be presenting on alternate reality games as well...).

Its time that instructional designers more specifically define their skill sets and identify their expertise. Are you designing for simplicity or complexity? In either case, do you know what it takes?

The name of the game in virtual worlds? Monetization.

I'm at GDC (Game Developer's Conference) in San Francisco this week. Learning a lot, seeing some great, and some sketchy, sessions...I've only got the Summits & Tutorials pass, so I won't be able to comment on the regular conference sessions. They did away with the Virtual Worlds summit track this year, but they keep creeping into the other sessions. Lots on social gaming and mobile, and a bit hit or miss (but I think better) line up in the Serious Games summit track.

One initial observation? Much less discussion on design, unless of course you want to learn about design for monetization. Holy cats, I know people ultimately are in this to make some money, but the emphasis on the manipulation of players to convert them into paying customers, and if you're really lucky, subscribers, has been downright depressing. The session on what social gaming can learn from virtual worlds featured "Hangout" which is evidently a new teen world, and initially, primarily targeted to girls. It reinforced every superficial stereotype of young women that the media perpetuates, and it was described with such a casualness that everyone may have missed that it was a soulless vehicle to pander to the media bias that the most important things to teenage girls are clothes and boys. SIGH.

The best session I attended so far was by Eric Ries, who talked about the ecstasy and agony of being a start up, and provided two really interesting case studies on virtual worlds start up companies There.com and IMVU. For those who don't follow these things, There.com just shut down yesterday and IMVU is one of the most successful (if you look at profitability and active users) virtual worlds. Main lesson learned? There.com followed the "rules" and it killed them...IMVU did the opposite and it's flying above the carcasses of other dying worlds.

On a positive note, met some great guys working on some virtual world stuff for enterprise that, if what they say is true, is going to turn some existing platforms on their ears. There are cool things on the horizon...stay tuned for when I can actually talk about it (after I see it and sign an agreement to what I can actually say...) but its about time that we had a browser-based platform for corporate uses that leverages other open API technologies, no?

Its a different vibe this year. It seems a lot smaller. It actually seems a lot quieter, and a bit more desperate. I learn the most at GDC of any conference I attend because seeing what is happening in the entertainment space helps shape how we are designing for corporate learning. We're bolstering our knowledge of ARGs (alternate reality games) and mobile learning through the sessions and technology featured here. But the unrelenting circle-back to "this is how you can make money" is starting to bother me. Good design in entertainment should lead to more customers...good design in training materials should lead to more informed, more educated, more highly skilled learners. Yes, tell me how you're designing for engagement...but not to get someone to push the "Pay" button.

Second Life Viewer 2...wow

If you've ever heard me speak about virtual worlds for learning, you've heard my mix of love and hate for Second Life. I love the openness, I love the freedom, I love the complexity...but it made it too complicated for most users. Navigation wasn't intuitive. Attrition rates after the first log in were atrocious. It didn't integrate with other technologies well. Frankly, for most people, it was just too hard.

I have friends in the virtual worlds industry who stood by Second Life. To be honest, I wasn't sure Linden Labs "got" that the same thing that made Second Life great was also the thing that was holding it back.

But yesterday, I tried out Viewer 2.

Yeah, here's where I take some of that back.

Sure, its still Second Life, with the prims and the rezzing. And no, the new viewer didn't magically fix security concerns or the (in my estimation, silly) worry about inappropriate content. But Viewer 2 tackles the usability issues head on, and makes Second Life a lot more digestible for a new user...and that, my friends, has been the biggest obstacle to virtual world adoption.

I don't want to detail all of the new features...you can find the write up here. I will say that little features like streamlined navigation, the improved search functionality, and the simplified menus help overcome a lot of the issues that new users faced in the previous interface. The embeddable media (audio! video! Flash!) makes me swoon. But the single biggest improvement in Viewer 2? It works like a web page. Its intuitive with minimal poking around. Its better designed for user experience.

And that's what makes all the difference. Game changer? Maybe. Gauntlet thrown? Definitely.

Why you should be Learning in 3D - Blog Tour Stop

It doesn't seem all that long ago that I got a call from Dr. Karl Kapp asking me if I'd mind being interviewed for his and Dr. Tony O'Driscoll's new book on virtual worlds for learning. When he told me that he wanted to talk to me about the future of virtual worlds, I have to admit, I was both excited and skeptical. Excited to be asked to talk about my grand visions of the potential of this technology I had been immersed in for the last few years, that I've tried to understand from the inside out. Skeptical that the enormity of the change that I envision, that what I really see as the future of virtual worlds, would reach far beyond what would be captured in this book. I had a real fear that after talking to me, Karl might just decide that my fanatical rantings were a bit of a bridge too far for what they wanted to achieve in writing what I knew would be the theoretical foundational text for virtual worlds for learning.

A few months later, I received the chapters I was quoted in for review. I was truly just scared to look. Again, I was caught in the delicate balance of hoping I didn't sound crazy and hoping that the book was portraying the future big enough. After doing the vanity scan, I got brave and read the preview chapters, Chapter 8: Steps to Successful Enterprise Adoption, and Chapter 10: Back to the Future.

There was good news on two fronts. I didn't sound crazy. I sounded like I was in good company.

What Karl and Tony have provided with Learning in 3D is the foundation for how learning in immersive environments happens, how different these learning environments and experiences are from other environments, and what that means to organizational learning--and structure. When people ask me where they should get started to learn about virtual worlds, I've never had a great answer...links to a variety of vendor sites, to blogs and to some of the people I follow on Twitter. Now I have an answer. This book is the first step.

What you might be surprised to learn is that one of my favorite sections of the book is actually Chapter 7: Overcoming Being Addled by ADDIE (#lrnchat rule: DRINK!). From my perspective, and granted its a biased one, one of the major barriers to successful immersive learning implementations is the lack of instructional designers who can effectively design appropriate content for these new environments. Kudos to Karl and Tony for not only acknowledging this, but beginning to tie together the granddaddy of instructional design process models with the skills and perspective of design needed for these new learning environments.

I'm honored and thrilled to have in some small way contributed to this book because, yes, they painted the big picture. They provided the rationale and issued the imperative. Learning in 3D provides the necessary background to understand not only why immersive learning environments are important, but the risk of not including them as part of your corporate learning strategy. The future is immersive, the future is contextualized, the future is empowered and engaged regardless of your physical location. The future of learning (at least part of it) is in 3D.

Buy your copy today and use the code L3D1 for a 20% discount.
Then check out the wiki or the Facebook fan page.