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.

Do virtual world evangelists REALLY want them to go mainstream?

Happy new year, everyone. Looks like I'm gonna start 2010 with a rant...

A few weeks ago, I submitted a session on virtual worlds for the Enterprise2.0 conference in Boston this year. There were 465 proposals submitted, which I think is A LOT. When I submitted my session, I did a search to see how many other proposals related to virtual worlds had been submitted. Out of 465? Three. One on virtual events, one on how the military has used virtual worlds, and mine.

Even worse (and I could have a whole separate rant about the voting system), there's a community vote to get sessions included into the conference. You don't have to attend the conference to vote, just register on the site. Now, I can't vote for myself, and I know at least 8 or 9 of the people who voted for my session (including my mom)...and I've been pimping this session for the last few weeks on Twitter and Facebook. I have a lot of people involved in virtual worlds who've followed or friended me. Total votes for my session? 15.

Really??

Even if you think my session description was crap, hell, sign in and tell me and the rest of the world how bad it is. Better yet, propose your own session. I'm sure someday I'll be irritated by the number of people submitting competing sessions, but it would be a welcome change from virtual world sessions being less than 1% of submissions at a mainstream conference, when we should all be promoting this technology that we all talk about as the future of communication, collaboration, learning...

I've been in an interesting position in the learning space, being one of the only people who's been running around trying to talk about how virtual worlds could be leveraged for enterprise learning, one of the only people who has spent an ungodly amount of time in-world experimenting, studying motivation, pushing the technological capabilities, and getting to know all of the available platforms. I have attended and/or spoke at every virtual world conference I've known about for the last two years, I've met almost every other evangelist of serious virtual worlds. I love this technology, I love the vision and the excitement and the conviction of the people who use it and advocate for it. But I've come to a conclusion that really bothers me.

I think too many of the virtual worlds evangelists are actually virtual worlds snobs.

What happens when virtual worlds go mainstream? We lose control. We're no longer visionaries. We become the grumpy old timers who reminisce about the old days. Our specialness, our perspectives, our unique insights will be swallowed by the masses, who will commercialize and change and make mainstream what has been a fringe technology for so long.

But that's what we supposedly want, right? We want everyone to understand why we believe in and advocate for virtual worlds. We want people to realize their potential. We want to see amazing new innovations that spring from widespread adoption. We want standards and security and easy access. We want our parents to understand what we're talking about and for Oprah's avatar to broadcast her show from her island or grid. We want everyone to log in every morning and share a virtual coffee before teleporting to a meeting with their boss. We want everyone at our family reunions to actually "get" what we do.

Don't we?

Or are we all too busy talking to ourselves, preaching to the choir...and not REALLY evangelizing.

I don't know if my session will be included in the Enterprise2.0 conference, but I do know one thing. We should all be looking outside of our current virtual worlds circles if we want this technology to experience widespread adoption.

Unless we really don't.

The end of a decade and a year to remember

I was trying to reflect on the year 2009, and was having a hard time with inspiration. I feel strongly about reflection and goal setting, but to be honest, I'm overwhelmed with the enormity of the events of this year for me.

Then I started to think bigger. I noticed a bunch of people on Twitter were reflecting on what they were doing 10 years ago, and it actually made me think about how my life has changed since the clock struck midnight on January 1, 2000.

I've bought two houses.
I've welcomed my 3 kids into my life.
My parents moved in with me.
I lost my grandmother.
I started a company.

I was really, really busy.

So 2009. Our sophomore year at Tandem Learning. It seems like personally and professionally, a lot went right and a lot went wrong this year. I think what I will remember most about 2009 is how I changed. I couldn't blog about my reflections on the year without talking about the amazing people, and some dear friends, that I met through Twitter--people who I'm now happy to say are also my "in the flesh" friends. I learned how to rely on and depend on people this year in a way that I never have before. I'm learning (sooo still in process) to be better at asking for what I need. I got better (again, a work in progress) at separating out my personal time from work.

Most important, I think 2009 was the year where I started to see who I really am. I say started, because I'm in no way thinking I have things all figured out. I confirmed some things I already knew, but discovered a lot of things I didn't even have a clue about. Momentum keeps you from slowing down and reflecting sometimes. Momentum has driven me through this decade but 2009 was a whole year of self-reflection. It wasn't an easy year, but it was an important year. I will remember this year for everything that I learned about myself and the foundation that it laid for the next year, the next decade...the next adventure.