Posts Tagged Serious Games
Curatr will get you laid!
John Nash sits awkwardly and alone, surrounded by papers and a half-drunk beer in a smoky 1940’s bar. His peers gather around him, captivated by the blonde woman who just walked in. They sit; smoking and drinking whilst pontificating on which one of them will bag the blonde. Each agrees that the others have no chance with her, but they are willing to back themselves. Nash sits quietly, pencil twiddling in his hands. His pondering on game theory reminds him of the competition for the blonde he is witnessing. A smile creases across his face as a magical moment of connection occurs in his mind.
“If we all go for the blonde and block each other, not a single one of us is going to get her” starts Nash. “So then we go for her friends, but they will all give us the cold shoulder because no one likes to be second choice”. Heads nod in agreement; we’ve all been there before. Nash continues, “But what if none of us goes for the blonde? We won’t get in each other’s way and we won’t insult the other girls. It’s the only way to win. It’s the only way we all get laid”.
Nash’s friends look sceptical at best. It’s a nice idea, but competition is competition; even Adam Smith said the best result comes from everyone in the group doing what’s best for himself.
“Incomplete!” Nash blurts out, his excitement no longer containable within his mind alone. “Incomplete, okay? Because the best result will come from everyone in the group doing what’s best for himself and the group”.
Such is the story of John Nash’s foundations for his “Nash Equilibrium”, as re-told by the 2001 Ron Howard film, A Beautiful Mind. Supposedly it was this realisation that lead Nash to the concept that something as fundamental as Adam Smith’s principles were actually incomplete.
Simplistically speaking, Adam Smith’s notion that players in a market will do entirely what is best for themselves was refuted. Nash proved that it would be a better result, mathematically, if they all did what was best for themselves AND the group.
Recently I’ve been working on the notion of cooperation and competition in education for our new Social Learning platform, Curatr. Cooperation is a fundamental concept in the field of Social Learning; that if the actors in a piece think and work collectively they will gain benefit above and beyond working in isolation. There’s a lot of support for this approach in online learning, not least because it fixes some of the stuff we broke when we left the classroom for E-learning.
On the other hand, competition is a hotly disputed concept in education. Traditional education systems are set for competition throughout their framework, with grade scores and attainment being at the pinnacle of this system. But the true benefits of such a system are disputed strongly by researchers like Alfie Kohn. His work is well documented and well argued, but for me the most obvious principle is that, in any competition, you will have a winner and whole lot of losers. It’s this kind of thinking that leads us to believe that competition is inherently bad. This is Adam Smith style competition however; everyone wants to be the best, so they further themselves but only one person emerges victorious in the end. This sort of behaviour is typical of Zero-Sum games and what Game Theorists might call Strictly Competitive behaviour. This can be changed in a Non-Zero-Sum environment however.
Cooperating in Non-Cooperative Games:
It might sound like a misnomer, but it isn’t. In Game Theory the idea of “non-cooperative” is very specific – it indicates that players make decisions independent of each other. In Curatr we have an environment in which each player is free to pursue the strategy they wish to.
Game Theorists have a method for plotting and calculating the best strategies for a given situation in what they would call a pay-off matrix. Below is a simplified version of the pay-off matrix for going home with the blonde, where the possible strategies between two players are going for the blonde first, or going to the friends.
Pay Off Matrix - the Blonde in the Bar
If every player in the group goes for the blonde, they all strike-out, as they block each other. As soon as Player 1 escalates his strategy to get the Blonde, the others are forced to follow suit, after all, why would you let your friend go after the Blonde, she is the best possible outcome of acting alone. But you are not acting alone, you are in a group and of course now everyone blocks each other and the Blonde’s friends subsequently tell them to “Go to Hell!”
Because of the nature of the game, where you act as a part of a non-cooperative group, the best possible outcome of acting alone isn’t open to you. The group will respond to your strategy, so going that way is a recipe for disaster. You must adopt the best strategy for you AND the group, which in this case is the bottom right cell, Everyone Gets Lucky.
Now let’s make a leap into the world of Curatr, which is a competitive environment where it is possible for you to “win”; to come first. Coming first will be the result of contributing, sharing and viewing more than anyone else, which will take quite a lot of hard work to achieve. In our payoff matrix we will list two possible strategies – “First” to represent the strategy of coming first and “In The Pack” to represent a strategy of contributing about as much as everyone else in the group. Note that we eliminate a 3rd possibility, contributing nothing, because without contribution you cannot progress through the game at all.
Pay Off Matrix - Curatr
As soon as a player decides to adopt the “First” strategy, the others in the group go with them (“Go To Hell if you’re coming first!”), all adopting the same strategy so as to avoid being left way behind in a race to the top – the desire to win still exists. But by adopting this strategy there is a constant one-upmanship, which grows the content exponentially. Here “Information Overload” occurs and the players block each on the route to success.
The best strategy for themselves AND the group is actually the bottom right, seeking to contribute enough to be “In The Pack”, but never seeking the glory of coming first.
OK, so what?!
Curatr is a game-like environment because we believe that elements of games and gaming are absolutely key in promoting user engagement (see the book, Total Engagement, for others working in this area). We allow users to compete with each other, but significantly, coming first is not the goal of this competition. The best strategy for playing Curatr is to cooperate with your peers in order to maximise the outcome, without any single person stealing the glory.
If the hot blonde in the bar is the best possible outcome for a single player, then we have created a system that encourages players to go for the friend, which is the best possible outcome for the individual AND the group.
So there you have it. Curatr will get you laid.
Curatr – a new platform for online learning
I’ve been a little bit radio silent over the last couple of weeks as we’ve approached the soft launch of our latest creation, Curatr. But now it’s finally time to break cover and see if we can get people as excited about our little creation as we are. So that’s what I’m going to try and do!
First of all, a flashy video. Sorry, but it will actually benefit your understanding of what we are trying to do here and I can’t explain it any better in less than 2 mins!
So fundamentally, Curatr is a new platform for delivering learning experiences over the web. It is the result of us trying to marry-up some great new approaches that have been emerging themes in E-learning for a little while now. At its core are a couple of key principles:
• E-learning works best as a two-way process.
• We can learn from anything.
We’ve added a few more facets to the central tenets as we’ve gone along and there is any number of buzzwords that you can use to describe them. We’re talking social learning, personalised learning, mobile learning, learning by exploration, games based learning and many more.
The upshot of all this is that Curatr is what you make of it and I wouldn’t want to suggest it is the be-all and end-all answer to any of those genres. But it certainly takes a leaf out of their respective books and allows for users to create a learning experience built around whatever approach they deem most suitable. So long as it keeps the two key principles.
The result is something quite different. And, in order to practice what I preach, I made a video in order to explain it, instead of you having to read pages of my waffle!
Right now we are looking for private beta testers to help us bring the project along in the next few weeks. Head over to www.curatr.co.uk to find out more, watch the same videos again and sign-up to the beta.
We’re looking to deliver our first public release as quickly as possible and I promise some innovative approaches to the commercial proposition that goes with it.
I’ll be talking more on the blog about the theory behind it and the features we incorporate but, in the meantime, if you’ve got any questions for me please feel free to put them in the comments here!
On the future of Digital Games Based Learning in Corporate E-learning.
Having recently attended the Games Based Learning conference 2010, I’ve come away a little bit inspired and a little bit confused. Inspired enough to shoot off a bunch of emails to clients about what games could do for their learning. Confused enough to wonder if there is any point turning my business towards this genre.
I actually missed a significant proportion of day 2 of the conference due to a client meeting, hence why I didn’t follow up my previous blog too quickly. As such this entry is a summary of my own thoughts and my impressions from the events; if you think I’m plagiarising someone else’s concepts, I probably am. I’m not saying I’m 100% right on any of this, but this is the thinking that is going to inform my company’s strategy in this genre for the short/medium term:
Video Games Based
A number of examples which we saw GBL10 were on the use of full-on 3D worlds for Learning. These games look and feel like something you’d play on an X-Box (in fact, you might!) and share a number of common attributes:
• They take a highly skilled team of programmers, designers, writers, artists, amongst others to create.
• They take time, months and perhaps years to create.
• They cost a fortune on a “per hour” of learning basis (at least 6 figures).
• They need a forward-thinking project commissioner, willing to take a risk on an innovation.
• They require a higher level of hardware specification to run than might be considered “standard” for many corporate work terminals.
If you take these factors you start to build a picture of the sort of situation where a video game for corporate training is going to be suitable.
Realistically, if you are a project commissioner who has the budget and ambition to realise a video game for training then you are going to turn to established video game experts for the creation of at least some aspects of the end product. It’s the video games houses that hold all the key competencies in this area and you would be mad to do it without their advice.
So the question becomes, how big is this market? Is it worth me re-training my staff to address this? You only have to look at the factors above to know the answer. Big budgets, long lead times, highly innovative, low accessibility – these are all the things that corporate E-learning is moving away from, rapidly. In fact, with a few notable exceptions (which become notable exactly because they ARE the exception), the overwhelming amount of projects in this area will come from one of three areas:
• Military / Defence / Security
• Healthcare
• Public initiatives
I’d suggest that perhaps 2 out of every 3 corporate video games for learning that exist right now are covered by the first 2 categories alone. The key reason for this exception is risk. Where people’s lives are on the line big budgets are available for obvious reasons.
Without being too IBM and given the above statements, I believe that there is a very limited role for purely corporate training video games developers in the UK. The majority of the work will fall to commercial games developers with a track record and the ability to contract in learning technologists where appropriate. To be an independent company working in this genre means almost complete market dominance, especially in the current economic environment.
Video games often limit their corporate appeal because they don’t ‘look’ like learning. Some might take this as a very generation X approach. But here are two facts for you:
1. Most decision makers in corporate organisations are aged 35+.
I don’t know about your organisation, but I need to make money tomorrow, so selling to these people is the task at hand. And this is a demographic that the video games industry has found it very hard to connect with.
Making your corporate learning game look like a video game, even if it isn’t, is a largely pointless activity for mass market penetration. Sure there are exceptions, but targeting exceptions to the majority rule is not exactly a marketing plan.
This isn’t to say that your solution shouldn’t look great – it absolutely should. The trouble with video games is that, in order to make a good looking one, you need to be at the forefront of technology. If you make a half-baked attempt at looking like Call of Duty because you think that will appeal to your audience, all they are going to think is “this looks like crap compared with Call of Duty”. Pick your fights; this isn’t one you can win.
As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, Caspian Learning have sought to simplify corporate training video games development to cut lead times, cut budgets and increase accessibility. They’ve done some good work here and continue to expand, but I rather suspect they are going to be the dominant player in a small marketplace – sure they have a big slice of the cake, but the cakes not huge.
E-learning companies would be vastly better off collaborating with them than competing against them.
Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) video games
COTS video games for learning is a slightly different story. Here the development costs are covered by the game developers. All an organisation is going to pay is a license fee, something like £40 each. Of course the games themselves aren’t really where the learning comes in, they are used mostly as an engagement tool. Around this engagement a curriculum is based, building on the subject matter or the story whilst introducing learning objectives. This is working really well for schools (especially in Scotland, which must be close to the world leader if it isn’t). But I haven’t heard of any examples of it in the corporate training world.
That’s not to say it doesn’t happen, but even if it does, it seems unlikely there is an opportunity for E-learning developers to do much here – an internal function could do this easily.
Casual Games learning
By the term “casual game” I’m referring to the small games which are easily picked up and are usually delivered via a mobile device or web browser. Thanks to the prevalence of the iPhone and its Apps marketplace, this sort of game has mushroomed in popularity in the last two years. Whilst casual games come in all shapes and sizes, they mostly share some common properties:
• Short development time, characterised with updates and iterations to improve the game after release.
• Relatively low development cost, a few thousand pounds.
• Limited functionality and scope, but very easy to use and often addictive in nature.
• Developed by small teams or individuals
• Very cheap to purchase as COTS
• Questionable educational worth
The last point here is perhaps a touch controversial, but my reasoning is that with the limited functionality of a casual game there often isn’t the time or scope to put across any detailed learning objective.
Casual Games have a number of advantages over video games in the eyes of corporate training – mostly around cost. But do they offer the same thing? Probably not. Casual games are just that, casual. With the commercial marketplace growing so rapidly, and with so many games being developed, it seems likely that whatever purpose you can think of for creating a casual game, something similar will already be in the marketplace. And with costs averaging around £1 per unit on the iPhone app store, you’d be pretty nuts to think of developing your own version.
Given their limited scope, I don’t believe that creating customised casual games for corporate training will be a marketplace for us (or anyone else in fact). If you are intending to create casual games for corporate training and sell them to the commercial market, you might have a chance. Covering your few thousand pounds of development cost by shipping a thousand downloads, it’s worth a punt. But if you were a corporate training department commissioning such a project, you’d have to be very sure that something similar didn’t already exist, around which you could build your curriculum in the same way as COTS.
In fact I suspect that corporate efforts to create casual games will fail because they lack the “casual” approach that makes these games appealing. What is casual about a bit of corporate training?
In conclusion
Despite seeing some great examples and being heavily inspired on occasion, I won’t be turning my company into a games development outfit any time soon. I do believe that standalone games have a place as a part of the “blend” that E-learning offers, but these are likely to be small, bespoke pieces of work that sit alongside other offerings.
Where I actually see the future of games in corporate learning is more in the application of the principles which they embody and in the engagement which they can create. Social learning is a big battle ground for E-learning at the moment and in my next post I’m going to detail what we are doing to take social learning online to the next level, using the principles of games based learning.
The problem with E-learning games
A little time ago I was presenting to a group of academics when I was posed a question which I really should have answered better than I did:
How do you define a game?
I trotted out something along the lines of objectives and rules, but I knew I’d copped out of the definition really. So I spent a bit of time researching and it turns out the question has been raised once or twice before. Who knew!
Of all the definitions I came across, one really stood out for me. Now I must preface this with the comment that I don’t necessarily agree with every element in the definition, but it is by far and away the best definition I’ve come across when trying to put games into context. Allow me to present, for your viewing pleasure, Chris Crawford’s Taxonomy of Creative Expressions:
Chris Crawford's Taxonomy of Creative Expression
Crawford’s taxonomy offers a simple to apply rule-set, but is written from the Video Game designer’s perspective. To suggest that all of the criteria above must be adhered to in order for a “game” to be created is perhaps too narrow a view. In fact, the weakest link in the suggested taxonomy comes first in my opinion; the contention that Creative Expression can be defined into that which is designed to make money or that which is simply used to create something beautiful. This is a large generalisation and one I would take issue with. Where Creative Expression is used to educate, entertainment can also be the result. Of course, education may eventually lead to money (whether in increased productivity to an individual or organisation, or into the trainers back-pocket), but then so may Art.
This aside, I think it’s brilliant. A little further explanation to the diagram perhaps…
Crawford identifies that where Entertainment includes Interactivity (stepping beyond videos, books and so on) we encounter “Playthings”. Where goals are included as a part of the Plaything a Challenge is created. Challenges played without Competition are defined as Puzzle’s. Typically, this is where the majority of E-learning games and interactions lie. Whilst many of these E-learning objects are goal orientated, they do not actively present a competitor for the user to play against. Crawford defines this competitor as “an active agent against whom you compete”. Where this agent is apparent we have defined a “Conflict”. Conflicts in which you cannot interfere with your opponent’s performance are defined as “Competitions”. This would typically be exemplified by a running race – you are competing, but you cannot directly influence your opponent’s ability to win. Where Interference is allowed, what Crawford defines as “attacks allowed”, the conflict becomes a Game.
So it is not until all of these criteria have been fulfilled that a true Game has been created. I’ve thus far struggled to come up with any piece of E-learning that I’ve seen meet these criteria. I think this definition perhaps helps to exemplify my issues with topics such as Second Life for E-learning. I’ve no problem with people using it, but calling it a game simply isn’t true. In most circumstances it is used purely for Entertainment purposes, with some interactions stretching it into a Plaything. The most ambitious examples of Second Life “games” I have seen stretch as far as puzzles. But this is no further than a typical “drag and drop” exercise on a web page would take us. It just looks different.
Equally important in Crawford’s definition for me is the idea of a “conflict” being necessary in order for a game to be created. Where competitors play each other in a teaching environment, it is common to see examples of co-operative play. That is, helping one-another to achieve the goals of the scenario. The video game world is the exact opposite of this; it is far more common to blow the heads off your opponents than it is to work with them to reach a common goal.
There are examples of where this is not the case, but overwhelmingly this is where teaching games and video games go their separate ways. Somewhere in the middle of this is E-learning.
I feel that, at the present time, we in the E-learning world are rather avoiding this issue by falling some way short of creating true “games” for learning online. I’m keen for examples to prove me wrong, so please do comment with anything that meets these requirements. In the meantime I’m off to research Game Theory – I feel the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” will be at the heart of my findings…
The future of eLearning – Google Wave versus Microsoft Natal
I’ve been contemplating the future of eLearning for a while now and one big quandary awaits me. Will companies continue shelling out cash to create formal eLearning courses or will they seek to harness the informal learning opportunities that arise in the everyday working process? The latter is the holy grail of the learning organisation and is perhaps a pipe dream. But chasing it is an awfully attractive proposition – imagine the gold at the end of the rainbow.
This week brought us two examples of innovative new technology that, from my eLearning perspective, are almost the epitome of our conundrum. They are Google’s Wave and Microsoft / Xbox’s Project Natal.
Both have big hitters behind them, Google employing the Rasmussen brothers (of Google Maps fame) to do nothing less than reinvent Email. Microsoft employing gaming and AI guru, Peter Molyneux (of Black & White fame). So you know both are serious about changing the way we work and play.
Google’s Wave technology creates new opportunities for us to harness informal and social learning streams. I’ve been telling anyone who will listen (surprisingly few) that Email is one of the biggest technology burdens to organisational learning. Email has its place, but so often information which could be useful to a wider audience is locked up and lost in private conversations, never to be seen again.
Google’s Wave allows users to communicate in a “Wave” (fundamentally a threaded conversation), both synchronously and asynchronously, sharing files and keeping track of who did what, when, plus a whole lot more.
This is exciting me and a few others in the learning world for a number of reasons. First of all, it’s unlocking email and creating opportunities to share and develop knowledge, very much in the “2.0” mould, whilst providing an audit trial of what’s gone on. Second of all I can install it on my server, locking it behind a firewall if needs be. Third, and most significantly, Google have released an API for the open-source Wave technology, allowing developers to build upon the platform and create applications to extend the functionality. I can already see applications to build onto the Wave, VoIP as mentioned by Matt Bury earlier, or perhaps social bookmarking technology for instance.
This may represent a legitimate platform for eLearning developers to build upon in an effort to reach the “holy grail” of harnessing informal learning. And that’s pretty exciting, even if it’s a long way off happening.
If this is the future of informal learning, then Microsoft’s Project Natal, specifically the “Milo and Kate” demo, might just represent the future of formal learning. Its current platform couldn’t be any different – the Xbox. But it’s just as exciting. The demos showed at E3 this week combined a number of new features, from a new user interface, to the “ability” to recognise and respond to emotions.
It was no coincidence that Stephen Spielberg leant a hand at the launch. Before he started shooting “Minority Report”, Spielberg called a meeting of the best technology experts and futurists in the business to brainstorm, over a weekend at the exclusive Shutters on the Beach resort in Santa Monica, on what the near future would look like. I can’t help but think that either the guys and girls he got together were psychic, or they are the same people who are now making Project Natal.
Microsoft showcased a range of abilities, but it was Peter Molyneux’s “Milo and Kate” demo that caught my attention. He showcased a game in which the character recognises, responds and interacts with a player. Watch the video to be impressed, I can’t do it justice in words. The demo is obviously well scripted, although apparently it does work if you stick to the material. I was critical at first, as either AI just leapt forward 15 years, or it’s a bit of scam, as the creators must have made a scenario for the player to move through. But then it struck me; that’s fine. It’s what we do. We make scenarios for players to learn from and lead them through it with good pedagogical techniques. And what an experience it would be if it could look, feel and work like that.
The simplest scenarios I can think of would be aimed at youngsters, who would be learning something relatively basic. But I can see Customer Service training being done in the same way; the computer reacting to your tone and mannerisms. And the Xbox as a platform is interesting. If we are serious about playing games for eLearning, we should surely be developing on the most popular gaming platforms.
But the two concepts, Wave versus Natal, represent polar opposites in terms of the future of eLearning.
Wave represents an opportunity to harness informal learning, its low cost, it’s got “2.0″ appeal and it’s perhaps easier to envisage in the work place.
But Natal opens doors to bring more “play” into eLearning and it provides a captivating and hugely rich user experience. It will also cost a bomb unless some clever authoring techniques can be used.
So which is the future? Commercially speaking, it will be Wave that I rush to invest my time in first. But I wish it was Natal.
Play It Again, Sam
Niels Bohr once said that an Expert is “a person who has made all of the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field”. So quotes Jonah Lehrer, author of “The Decisive Moment”, a most compelling and surprisingly accessible book on the field of neuroscience and decision making. Bohr’s quote is backed up by Lehrer’s science; people learn from mistakes.
Lehrer tells us that emotions are strongly connected to dopamine levels in the brain. And being wrong causes dopamine receptors to give a very strong and unpleasant feeling, something which you probably won’t want to feel again. It is by this method that we learn from our mistakes and the brain revises its models. Without the unpleasant feeling of being wrong, of making mistakes and failing, there is very little to be gained from changing the models we adhere too. Whilst there is a pleasant feeling associated with being correct, there exists a strong bias towards the power of negative emotions – we seek to avoid them at all costs.
Contrast this knowledge with the feedback I recently received from a pilot eLearning programme. When asked the question, “What do you believe will stop mainstream adoption of this learning tool”, a frequent response was “fear of failure”. The program in question didn’t step far beyond the normal pedagogical bounds of most eLearning programs; a study guide followed by a range of questions, presented in a range of interactions. People clearly do hate failing and they seem especially afraid of failing something that has implications for their job. And yet we now know that failing is the best way to teach.
My answer to this is simple. We need people to fail more.
Many of the eLearning programs I have overseen have been fairly linear in nature. Whilst there are opportunities to fail the end result is that, after enough attempts, a learner can always pass through the “gate” and carry on their path to the end goal. We always seem to be treading a line between people learning to manipulate the materials and people actually learning from failure. There’s not much consequence here.
Recently we’ve been involved in a few projects that take the form of simulations or even serious games. The underlying principle is that of branched scenarios, whereby different decisions take a user down different paths. Authoring such pieces is the devils own job, but the outcome is often worth it. And now it strikes me that it might be worth even more than I first realised. With these branched scenarios we are giving learners the chance to fail in infinitely more ways. The whole dynamic of the learning experience can be changed each time the user plays.
And there-in lies the crux. In order to take advantage of these opportunities to fail in more ways, a learner will need to play the game more than once. That’s quite the ambitious statement if we are talking real-world, corporate learning here. ELearning is supposed to make things faster, more convenient and all-together less bothersome than more traditional training means. But now we have to do it twice? Or three-times? Never going to happen…
Well maybe. It’s certainly not the solution for every case. But there can be a push to play again. Stick Cricket is my personal example. It’s a simple cricket game, played over the net, where you whack a cricket ball as far as you can in a few short overs and amount a mammoth score. A nice distraction.
But what turns it into an addiction is the fact that there is no “You scored 80% and passed” message. There is simply a link to see what others around the world have managed to score most recently. And I’ll be damned if it doesn’t encourage you to participate again, knowing that someone in India just scored 250 more than you in a 10 over game.
It’s this feedback loop that encourages you to play again. James Harkin’s book “Cyburbia” tells us more about feedback loops, cybernetics and the importance both play in the rise of social media websites. He contends that it is very act of being “in the loop” that encourages participation. Someone pokes you, you have to poke them back. It’s another trip into neuroscience to explain the why and how, so we’ll take it as read for now. But the implications for this are widespread. If we forgo the awarding of medals at the first opportunity and allow people to evaluate for themselves that others have taken the same journey they have, only they’ve done better, we can encourage learners to attempt the same piece of learning again, only this time to learn from their mistakes.
I think an apt name for this would be a “Learning Loop”. Someone may have already named such a theory (answers on a postcard, or the comments box below) but I believe this is where social media, serious games and eLearning really can come together. Branched Scenarios, which eliminate the need for immediate feedback (wrong answer, try again!) and award success not on the basis of percentage points, but against peer performance could allow our learners to truly rue the consequences of their mistakes and play again.
And of course if everyone fails, what is there to be afraid of? We will all be experts in no time…
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