Clark Aldrich On Simulations and Serious Games

Weekly Poll: How Should CLOs Weigh Investments in Social Networking Compared to Sims?

clark.aldrich@gmail.com (Clark Aldrich) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 13:27:00 +0000

This week's poll strives to get at "How Should CLOs Weigh Investments in Social Networking Compared to Sims?" Here are the options:

Social Networking all the way. It is fast, relevant, and just requires a solid infrastructure. Twitter me there!
Sims are the way. They ensure the delivery of critical content and allow for validation. Social networking is a sink hole.
Social Networking is the dog, and sims are the tail. A good sim is (only) one thing that spurs a good community.
Sims are the natural progression of formal content. While social networking is an inevitable context, it is mostly an IT issue and HR issue.
It doesn't matter. CLOs pretended to consider sim-based models last year and are pretending to consider social networking this year.

Please vote!

Training Magazine posts Excerpt from The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games

clark.aldrich@gmail.com (Clark Aldrich) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:58:00 +0000

If you would like to read an excerpt from the beginning of The Complete Guide, Training Magazine has posted one here. It sets up the narrative for the whole book, including why schools and corporate programs, as well as so much research projects, are currently set up to fail.

Please enjoy it, and to those who have linked to it from their sites already, you have my deepest thanks.

Weekly Poll: Do you play popular games that don't personally interest you at all out of professional obligation?

clark.aldrich@gmail.com (Clark Aldrich) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 16:46:00 +0000

I am going to try and post a poll once a week for a while and see if enough people respond to create interesting data. The first question here is pretty straightforward:

If you are involved in the creation of Serious Games, do you play popular games that don't personally interest you at all out of professional obligation?

Part of our work, Step Three in Simulation Design in Three Easy Steps, is to find the "close-enough" game models to use as templates and frameworks. Part of our fun for most of us, meanwhile, is to play games that interest us, either as a result of genre or subject matter or designer. But do we make ourselves play games that are popular or well rated that don't interest us, out of a sense of professional obligation to see the mechanics? Do we consider aligning our own work with the games of the moment?

Please take a moment and answer the question. Also feel free to respond to this post with comments.

Stump Stories as Faux Interactivity

clark.aldrich@gmail.com (Clark Aldrich) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:41:00 +0000

One type of interactive structure is the branching story. Users are given multiple opportunities to make choices, and then the story continues alone the new paths based on the user actions.

Advocates of interactivity remain mixed about how "game-like" this technique really is, but at the very least I can say that if done well, it can be very effective, both in terms of engagement and instructional value.

Then there is the technique of using "stumps" instead of fully realized branches. Here, users are given choices, but all but one lead to immediate dead ends. These "stump stories" have a structure that look more like this:

The purist in me chafes at these, much as a carpenter may be offended by the particle-board used by mass producers of furniture. I get especially irked when a vendor sells these as fully interactive. I find myself asking, how low are we willing to settle? On the other hand, there is an efficiency and relative ease of creation. More examples of these can produced. Most importantly, there is still a focus on end-user action in context, which is more than most traditional formal learning content today. And they even have one advantage over traditional branching stories - they meet one of the earlier Sim Design 10 Commandments: More Skilled Users Finish Faster Than Less Skilled Users.

I think, as with most things, as long as there is truth in advertising, as long as the concepts of "game-like" or "a flight simulator for business skills" are not used and thus further watered down by these models, as long as customers and users are smart enough to understand the trade-offs, these might still be useful stepping stones and evolutionary steps.

These fit into Level One Interactivity, as defined in Learning Online with Games, Simulations, and Virtual Worlds:

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

clark.aldrich@gmail.com (Clark Aldrich) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 19:49:00 +0000

(Author's note: yeah, this is a pretty nuanced entry, even by my standards!)

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

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

(For more on the three steps, see Simulation Design in Three Easy Steps)

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

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

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

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

Why The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games is Science Fiction

clark.aldrich@gmail.com (Clark Aldrich) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:27:00 +0000

It is a cliché of quite a bit of literature, such as The World According to Garp, and especially science fiction, such as Dune and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, to feature in the story some book that has significantly shifted the perception of a population. The authors of the literature that feature these magic books tease the audiences with little passages and quotes, while following around a few characters' existence in the resulting world.

It's a great technique, but also frustrating. My goal soon becomes to read the magic book itself, not the surrounding narrative. It is not that I believe that there really could be this new transformative bible, any more than I believe there could be the spaceships or light sabers. But I want the author to step up and fully realize the prop, as they might design and produce the kitchen and office spaces of a spaceship, not just the bridge.

That was what I set out to do when writing The Complete Guide. I tried to zip ahead 10 or 15 years, stipulate all of the current arguments around sims, then imagine a world that was being transformed by education that worked, and then finally to categorize the techniques and philosophies that necessarily would have had to been created and refined to get there.

Of course, to accomplish this connecting-of-the-dots, The Guide had to be built on a firm reality. It had to help people today, which from emails I have received it has and does. It had to have been based on real experiences, both my own and others who have served as lead designers, which it was.

But I still think if Amazon were a little smarter they would categorize my book as science fiction. And if they were even smarter than that, it might also be under philosophy as well.

Of course if Amazon were truly brilliant, they would just put it under "science fiction props" next to toy phasers and replicas of terminators. So I suppose I ought be happy with where it is.

You can't predictably make educational content "fun," only "more fun for some people"

clark.aldrich@gmail.com (Clark Aldrich) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:28:00 +0000

The raison d'etre for the serious games and educational simulation movement must not be to make educational content fun. If fun is the primary goal, the movement will fail.

This is because "fun" is not an objective attribute, such as "pink," "500 words," or "about monkeys." What if fun for some people is not fun for others.

Worse, the seemingly same experience can be fun or not. Here is an example:

Every day, two boys who lived next door to an old man played basketball in the driveway. They had been doing this for months, and would make a racket late into the evening.
One day the old man approached the boys and said, "My friend will be in town next week, and he can't walk, but he loves the sound of basketball. So if you could play everyday for all of next week, I will give you two hundred dollars." The boys gladly accepted the offer. They played the first few days of the week excitedly. The middle days reluctantly. And the last few days laconically. The man paid the two boys at the end of the week, and the two boys, now sick of basketball, never played in the driveway again.
The old man never had a friend coming over, of course. He just hated the boys' commotion, and figured it was the cheapest way to get rid of the problem.

Computer Games in Classrooms?

There is a corollary to this. Some advocates want to bring computer games into the classroom. Meanwhile, some parents wish their children would play less computer games. Now to me, these two groups should be natural allies, not enemies. Once computer games are in the classroom, no student will ever play them again for fun. Said simply, playing Halo 3 after a really important test is fun. Playing Halo 3 as the really important test is pretty miserable.

There is an even bigger issue. Serious games advocates believe that once we understand how computer games teach, then instructors will apply better these new techniques of instruction. Serious game advocates are wrong here as well. Why expect schools to learn instructional design from computer games, when generations of literature professors have not learned instructional design from the great novels they purport to teach? Even Serious Games advocates write papers that use the forms of the most tenured of professors, rather than the techniques of Grand Theft Auto.

What are the most important design criteria of content from the Serious Games movement?

But I digress. You cannot make most content fun for most people in a formal learning program. And by fun, I mean where almost all of the students both consume the content in a desired flow state and then act to spread the content virally to their friends.

At best what you can do is make it more fun for the greatest percentage of the target audience. Using a nice font and a good layout doesn't make reading a dry text engaging, but it may make it more engaging. Playing the Binary Game doesn't make learning binary numbers fun, but it does make it more fun. The driving focus, the criteria against which we measure success, should be on making content richer, more engaging, more visual, with better feedback, and more relevant. And of course more fun for most students.

Unless....

Is there any chance for pure fun in formal learning on the horizon? Yes. But you must get rid of grades and other forms of external coercion. Given that we all know this, I fear that some advocates will recommend an unsustainable bubble-world whereby serious games exist, but only in a vacuum of "not-for-credit" activities, while the "real" part of a class, the "for-credit part" still adheres to the same old methodologies.

Schools: From Stockholm Syndrome to Cruise Ship

clark.aldrich@gmail.com (Clark Aldrich) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 15:45:00 +0000

Schools require compliant students. The worst case scenario for the best public and prep schools is a massive revolt of smart kids asking, "why are we being taught this curricula; what are the qualifications of the instructors or institutions to prepare us for the future; why are we being taught using books and term papers and tests?"

The traditional coercive tools for school are always a combination of carrots and sticks, promises of bright future for compliance and threats of public and total failure for resistance. Fair enough.

As a result, students often find themselves displaying signs of Stockholm Syndrome. This situation, when victims under the total control of a few people form sympathy with their captors, has been identified from studying hostage situations. But many students as well form a bond with teachers and institutions they feared, and who had similar (perceived but wielded) absolute control over their lives and futures.

We are all seeing the emergence of another sweeping approach used by the ranks of the industrial education complex - turning higher ed campuses into cruise ships. Universities are lavishing perks upon perks to the students, from swanky food and fashion outlets to high-end stadiums and other recreational areas.

This shameless pandering has two costs. The first is that the cost for students of colleges is spiralling beyond "out of control." The costs for tuition are simply catastrophic. Meanwhile alums are being asked to donate even more (with the fund raising processes monopolizing the mind share and creativity of school administers, just as it does with politicians). One friend of mine wrote a large check for his Alma mater, and then drove to campus in the middle of a giant freshman lobster bake.

The second problem with campus-as-cruise-ship is more subtle, but more problematic. Schools have always been out of touch with delivering skills that give students more control over their future lives. But the quasi-austere conditions at least created motivation for students to join the productive world. Now, students are shocked to learn that they are not just unqualified for most jobs, but the living conditions are a massive step down as well.

One result is that students are even more reluctant to leave their university country clubs. They become grad students, get their doctorates if they can afford to borrow the money, and then professors. And the great industrial education complex chugs on.

We as a nation are debating health care, as we should. But the failure of schools to produce students who have control of their lives and are decent stewards of their families, communities, and planet is a far bigger crisis with much larger consequences. And the recent strategy of higher ed, rather to reform the relevancy to instead pander and placate to students is completely the wrong direction.

A final note. The simulations and serious games movement continues to be pulled in two directions. One is "making content more fun" and the other is "creating richer content." The first direction is currently a more popular perception, and highly aligned with the cruise ship model: "Let's learn history, but on the shuffleboard court!" The future of the movement, however, is in the second direction. This will take work and investment beyond putting up more plasma television sets in the student lounge. It means recommitting to a future of education.

Does the inherent impossibility of education, training, and other formal learning processes drive all of those involved insane?

clark.aldrich@gmail.com (Clark Aldrich) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:02:00 +0000

Albert Camus famously asked, does life have meaning, and if not, should he kill himself? Here's a similar question I was pondering while in a meeting the other day. Does the inherent impossibility of traditional education, training, and other formal learning processes drive insane all of those involved for too long?

Here are some of the problems facing traditional formal learning designers:

It is almost impossible to change the long term behavior for most students in a contained event, no matter how long. There is a predictable decay curve.

The tools available themselves just too blunt for knowledge capture and sharing. PowerPoint? Lectures? Workbooks? Really?

The measurement techniques are too weak and they take too long, and they measure the wrong thing. Quizzes? Surveys? Standardized tests?

Content takes too long to create, and is always lagging. It takes three months, for example, to solve a problem that needs solving now. It can take years to create a new semester course.

It costs too much to deliver useful content. Development costs... Deployment costs... Management costs... Infrastructure costs...

People are almost always giving the wrong request to formal learning designers. "Use a course to solve my idiot employees' attitude and stress problems..." "Develop a class curricula that will keep children from downloading illegal software."

Delivers of formal learning programs are always a cost center. Charge back this, buddy.

The time to return on investment is too long. Months? Years? (For K-12) Decades?

Most subject matter experts have no passion or desire for participation in the development of a course. The quid pro quo model just isn't there. Participation for subject matter experts most often means doing additional work for no additional pay in a way, if successful, reduces their value to the organization.

The nature of learning interventions are too discreet from life. Leave life. Learn in foreign context. Return. Forget.

The programs are funded indirectly, so students are seldom customers. How many layers are there between a student in a public school and the people who pay for it? Or a corporate employee?

Students themselves are, of course, incredibly inconsistent. They come in with the full spectrum of background skills and knowledge, interests, and needs.

Sponsors require too consistent of a result. Along a single criteria. Really.

Formal learning programs have to be both individually specialized, yet integrated across other programs. Google can't even do this.

Programs require a lot of time on the part of the student outside of engaging the learning content. Downloads. Passwords. Buildings. Buses. Food. Lock down drills.

As a result of deploying classrooms and traditional eLearning content, do people involved in formal learning programs go batty? Do they get paranoid, or turn into hucksters, or do they cast customers and sponsors and business leaders as enemies, or quickly burn out, or just focus on building fiefdoms? Or if all actions lead to pain, then is it easier to do nothing? Is the best strategy to tamp down all sense of ambitions and just go along with the flow?

Is there an answer to this problem? I believe there has to be two. I believe the combination of social media (for the fast, fluid, personalized content) and sims (for the deep, engaging, structured core content) will provide an absolutely necessary spectrum of deliverables, that will save the sanity of many students, sponsors, and formal learning professionals. It may be too late for the old guard, but it comes just in time for this and future generations.

From where do educational simulations used in academics come?

clark.aldrich@gmail.com (Clark Aldrich) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:34:00 +0000

It is a question I get asked all the time: from where do simulations come for academic classes? There are several answers:

Commercial off the shelf games: for some lucky professors and students, computer games built for entertainment and bought through retail channels provides a deep enough and curriculum-aligned enough experience. The two most famous are the Civilization and SimCity series. The pros are that these experiences have reasonable costs (around $40 per student), very high production values, and have at least some element of fun built in them. The biggest con is that only a few such games exist. Further, both deans and parents can be uncomfortable having the students spend their class time playing off-the-shelf games. They can also be awkward to install.
Free foundation, cause, or corporation sponsored sims: there are a lot of free, typically Flash based sims that have been created in the last few years by various organizations. They represent some of the most successful and innovative examples of serious games ([McDonald's game], [Binary Numbers], [Budget Hero]). Where they fit, they can be perfect. The pros are that they are free and typically easy to access. The cons are that they are short, often shallow, and often editorially skewed.
Off the shelf educational simulations: some vendors sell prepackaged off the shelf simulations. The pros are they tend to be rich and detailed educational experiences. They have technical support. They also have instructional support -- notes for how to use them in a classroom environment. They may have gone through several generations of modifications. The cons are: the licensing is often restrictive, and the cost tend to be three or four times as much as a computer game.
Internal development house: some institutions have a staff of people (usually between one and 20) who are dedicated to building simulations to support internal classes. The good news is that these people are focused, have the requisite skills, and are aligned with the goals of the institution. And once built, the content can be infinitely reused and shared. The cons are the often the experiences that result are dry, and take three or four times longer to build than expected. These internal development groups often fight with the subject matter experts with them they have to work. Who funds these groups is also up for grabs from budget cycle to budget cycle.
Modded off the shelf computer games: some professors have to change existing off-the-shelf computer games to make them appropriate for their class. These bundles of changes are called mods. The pros are that for not much money, professors can access very rich environments. The cons are that student still have to buy the original computer game, and often compromises had to be made in order to shoehorn the changes into the computer game, resulting in a suboptimal or even unstable experience.
Professor created simulations: we are seeing an explosion of technology savvy academic hobbyists creating simulations to support their class, developed in their free time. (It was professor hobbyists who also created the genre of interactive spreadsheets decades ago that are still in use today.) The pros are these tend to be perfectly aligned with content, and are deep and nuanced. They can also be freely shared. The cons are the simulations are often makeshift, with kludgy interfaces. They also tend to be more labs than finished sims. Knowledge of how they were built and how to best deploy them tends not to get recorded.

Just as sims come in different Genres, so to do they come in different business models. One nagging question is, should these sims be packaged as books and sold to students directly, or should they be packaged as infrastructure and paid for centrally by a department?

Clark Aldrich no longer tied to SimuLearn

clark.aldrich@gmail.com (Clark Aldrich) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:38:00 +0000

Hi all,

I have been a part-time contractor to SimuLearn for years now, serving to do custom simulation design wherever needed. That relationship has just been severed, so I am looking forward to my completely post-SimuLearn life. My relationships with my other clients are unaffected.

Thanks,

Clark

15 Most Important Generic Questions to ask Subject Matter Experts when designing an Educational Simulation

clark.aldrich@gmail.com (Clark Aldrich) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:33:00 +0000

Interviewing subject matter experts for educational simulations can be tricky. Here are the top fifteen generic questions:

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

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

clark.aldrich@gmail.com (Clark Aldrich) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 23:36:00 +0000

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

Base Sim

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

These take about nine months to complete.

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

Modifier One

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

Modifier Two

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

Modifier Three

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

Then Just Multiply Out

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

The Flow of Skills

clark.aldrich@gmail.com (Clark Aldrich) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:12:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

The Role of Simulations

Given this, are simulations dead? Quite the opposite. We may be seeing the end of the big, ten-hour /two day simulations that required specialized, dedicated instructors and significant set up costs (such as The Manufacturing Game and other b-school programs). This is a real loss, as many of these types of programs had real, deep, measurable benefit. They allowed people the breathing room to challenge their own fundamental assumptions, something that is rare and critical.

The new model of simulations is as one-hour (or less), completely self-paced, web-delivered experiences. The can introduce critical concepts and still drive deep behavioral changes for entire communities, in a way that meets certification requirements and is externally measurable, providing they meet these five rules:

Line up with real life. The sims have to be familiar enough to match to real situations almost immediately. This requires a first person perspective.
Highly Interactive: They have to be rich experience, that are real-time, game-like, with rich feedback. This requires Flash and the use of often-mathematical, dynamic systems.
Easy to access: These sims have to be effortless to both access on the computer and access intellectually. People have to be able to understand them and grow with them. The sims themselves therefore have to pace, then lead.
Topical: The new pressure is for sims to have storylines and contexts that are easy to update, so that the users are getting information that feels current and fresh.
Tied to a community: Finally, even self-paced sims should have some links to an online, semi-private community. This allows people to ask questions and share war stories. Meanwhile, the training group should be monitoring those communities carefully to improve the sim.

I believe we will all miss the big simulation programs of the past. But the new opportunity is to accomplish more, while still supporting the role of practioner more than forcing people into the role of student.

Please don't read my new book on a Kindle!

clark.aldrich@gmail.com (Clark Aldrich) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 15:19:00 +0000

As readers of this blog know, my new book, The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games, will be available tomorrow, and is available via the Kindle right now. So let me beg... please do not get this book on the Kindle. If you want The Guide, get the dead-tree version!

First, this is not a broad anti-Kindle statement. I believe for any linear book, such as a novel, Kindles seem sublime.

But The Complete Guide is a reference book. More than that, it is a reference book to an entirely new field and discipline - that of simulation design. This is a foreign intellectual landscape.

I believe the most productive reader will open it up to random places and read an individual entry or two (yes, this is a great bathroom book!). They will bookmark or underline interesting thoughts. They will write questions for themselves, or note their own new ideas. Then they will back up to the start of a section. Then they will go to the beginning of the book. They will read for about thirty pages, then jump around again. They will reread entries. They will share quotes and entries and sections with colleagues and friends.

I believe finishing the book, or at least most of the almost 600 pages, will be an accomplishment not unlike finishing a good simulation. It will be work on the part of the reader, not because of the writing (which hopefully is sufficiently accessible, pithy, clear, and even funny) but because it represents the tectonic reversal of a lifetime of linear "formal learning" content. When done, people will have earned their new perspectives on the world, the role of media, the real opportunity of education, and their own work which they will inevitably have.

To help this, the "worness" of each page as read will serve as footprints. People will be reminded where they have been.

The book starts off as a journey - a new place to explore at the whim of the reader. No two people will read The Guide the same way. The book rewards curiosity, not replaces it. It then becomes a reference - a place to return to as a reminder and inspiration and framework. For all of these reasons, and unlike my other three books, I believe accessing The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games via a Kindle would result in a miserable experience.

(By the way, I put this same request on my author blog on Amazon! I wonder if they will let it stand...)

The Importance of Playing Games for a Sim Designer

clark.aldrich@gmail.com (Clark Aldrich) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:22:00 +0000

There is always an uneasy relationship between sim designers and computer games. Computer games represent simultaneously a vision, a trap, and the embodiment of a near-damning misrepresentation.

Still, it is up to any sim designer to play quite a few computer games, at least a few hours a week. We must look at and understand the current repertoire of mechanisms, including complexity and functionality of interface schemes, solutions to visualization challenges, even level and game length.

I like to look at popular games, critically acclaimed games, and examples of new genres. To accomplish this, I try to download as many free demos as I can for different systems, including iPhones, PCs, and PS3's. Even the old coin-operated arcade games have a lot to teach us.

The good part about my profession is that I could charge clients for playing computer games. The bad part about me is that I never will. Still, there are worse things than to overlap work and play so specifically.

Ten Signs to Look for to Indicate that Simulations and Serious Games have Reached Stability

clark.aldrich@gmail.com (Clark Aldrich) — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 14:28:00 +0000

I am very excited about the transformation in all areas of intellectual property that sims can bring. They have the opportunity to impacting all capturing knowledge, growing the wealth of nations. Yet still I worry, as with any emerging technology, that the naive supporters and opportunistic hucksters will flood the field with toxic examples and experiences.

So here are the signs that I look for that sims have reached stability:

The average student takes at least three hours of simulation content per class.
The average employee encounters five hours of sims per year.
Authoring environment become widely available and produce professional (corporate-level) quality for ten common sim genres.
At least three of these are open-source.
Students create design documents and finished sims at 1/100th the level of term papers.
Academic institutions give degrees in Simulations and Serious Game at one tenth the level of broader instructional design degrees.
Institutions will spend about one tenth of their resources on developing new formal learning programs on sims.
Research reports, including academic and corporation, produced will focus on the sim content model of actions systems results at one tenth the level of traditional case studies and analysis.
Custom e-learning developers dedicate about one fifth of their resources on sim development.
The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games: How the Most Valuable Content Will be Created in the Age Beyond Gutenberg to Google (First Edition) will be looked back as "a good start" but a valuable collectors edition nonetheless. The current twelfth edition of "The Guide" will be much more authoritative, but much of the commentary will have been stripped out by the publisher, angering the original fans and purists.

The Nine Month Gestation Period of a Serious Game

clark.aldrich@gmail.com (Clark Aldrich) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 12:49:00 +0000

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

It is a bit longer (about a year) if an entirely new mechanism or gameplay is being used. And it is much shorter (in total about six weeks) if one is customizing an existing engine.
While a lot of corporations complain about that time frame, and even use it as an excuse not to move forward, they nonetheless spend nine months or more just making the "go"/"no go" decision. Nine months seems like a long time if you look forward, but if you had decided to do it nine months ago, it would be done.
A good simulation engine, with adequate support for fluid content, has a shelf life of about ten years.

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

Trimester One: Create

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

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

Trimester Two: Code

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

Trimester Three: Calibrate

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

Staggered Development

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

Simulation Design in Three Easy Steps

clark.aldrich@gmail.com (Clark Aldrich) — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 12:35:00 +0000

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

Step One: Top-Down Rules

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

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

Step Two: Bottom-Up Relationships

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In our compost example, my goal is a thriving ecosystem, so I might choose a variation of SimCity or Roller Coaster Tycoon. I might use quality of life, cost, and environmental impact as some core metrics the player tries to optimize. I might create a house area, a compost area, a garden area, and a garbage area, and have people be able to move stuff between the four.

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

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

Synchronize and Repeat

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

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

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

The Balanced Scorecard for Assessing Sims

clark.aldrich@gmail.com (Clark Aldrich) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 11:25:00 +0000

Sims work better than traditional educational media. In fact, they work in places where traditional media doesn't work at all. But that is not enough. Simulations have to meet an entire balanced scorecard to be adopted in most organizations. Here are the most important criteria.

Learning Goals

Simulations still have to work, of course. They have to rigorously and predictably develop learning objectives in students. But the learning objectives take on a different form. I like to think in terms of:

Actions: Students can use appropriate actions in a situation.
Conviction: Students have a passionate belief in a typically invisible or counter-intuitive system. This belief is enduring and flexible. If a student learns conviction, they will improvise. They cannot be easily dissuaded. They have commitment to the ideals, not just compliance. Teaching conviction is so much more powerful than other learning objectives, but it is very hard to measure objectively, and it sure falls through the cracks of traditional Kirkpatrick methodology.

Program Goals

It is in the program goals, however, that most otehrwise great sims get caught up. Here they are:

Engagement: Sims have to be engaging to students. To many people, that is their "reason for being." I would not argue they have to be fun, but they do have to be fun enough. More than fun, they have to be immersive. Students can't be looking at the clock.
Convenient: The work around accessing a sim has to be less than 5% of the total participation time for a student. They increasingly have to be accessed completely online. And they have to be short - about an hour for corporate employees, although easily ten or fifteen hours for academic environments. And they have to be well chunked.
Acceptable cost per student: The cost per student has to be reasonable for the learning objectives, typically around $100 per corporate student and $45 per academic student.
Acceptable time to creation and delivery: The time from approval to deliverable has to be around 4 months for a corporate environment, although up to one year for other (wiser) environments. For corporations, this requires a bit of a sacrifice of customization in order to get proven models. Having said that, what drives me crazy is when a corporation takes nine months to make a decision, and then wants something built from scratch in three months.
Comfort level of implementers and sponsors: Finally, and most amorphously, the sponsors and the implementers have to be comfortable with the material. They have to support it, understand it, and push for it. They have to believe in the material so completely that they will not accept failure.

The uptick so far in sim use has come from meeting not just the learning goals, but more from meeting the program goals. And I suspect that trend will continue as long as all needs are balanced.

Interview (Part 2) with Clark Aldrich, author of Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games

clark.aldrich@gmail.com (Clark Aldrich) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 23:07:00 +0000

Here is the second part of the interview series I did with Jon Aleckson. We dig into the pieces of simulation models and how to rethink interviewing subject matter experts. The second part of this interview gets to one of my favorite topics, that of the invisible systems that connect actions and results. Enjoy!

The Change In The Eight C's of Formal Learning: (Content * Curricula * Coaching * Certification * Community * Calling * day Care) / Cost

clark.aldrich@gmail.com (Clark Aldrich) — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 10:47:00 +0000

One could argue that at the end of this Age of Linear Content (roughly spanning from Gutenberg to Google), the value of traditional content has plummeted. Almost anything, in theory, I could learn at Brown University (or more specifically, on which I could be tested at Brown), I could "pick up" on my own, probably on the web or maybe a book.

On almost any subject, the collection of videos, podcasts, and blogs provide access to a wealth of content richer than the content in any single formal learning experience. And that trend will only continue. So as the value of linear content declines, where does that leave schools and other formal learning programs?

Of course, content is only one part of the value proposition of formal learning programs. The full equation looks something like: (Content * Curricula * Coaching * Certification * Community * Calling *day Care) / Cost, where:

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

Today, in the short run, schools will have to either lower their own costs dramatically or increase the value of the other components to maintain the same value proposition. But that is only a short term step, as more services such as social networking sites eat away at other C's.

In the long run, schools will have to re-invent content. Schools will have to stop their addiction to linear "learning to know" content, and think more of "learning to do." This dynamic content is not only more powerful and relevant, but it also requires and benefits from the other C's more than linear.

Interview (Part 1) with Clark Aldrich, author of Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games

clark.aldrich@gmail.com (Clark Aldrich) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 00:14:00 +0000

Here is the first of a series of podcast interviews I am doing with Jon Aleckson. Highlighted Jon from the interview:

I was intrigued with Clark’s views on how the book could help build communication loops and collaboration between game sponsors, subject matter experts, and designers/ developers. As Clark notes, his new book should provide a basis for “common ground.”

Given how much of my life I spend writing prose, design documents, and code, to be able to talk about my favorite topic is quite a treat. I hope, if you listen to it, you enjoy it as well.

10 Weeks to The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games

clark.aldrich@gmail.com (Clark Aldrich) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 13:10:00 +0000

It is now officially ten weeks until Amazon will have The Complete Guide available. I am, to put it mildly, excited. This book is my magnum opus, the capstone of all of my thinking, and the intellectual product of which I am the most proud.

My other books, including Simulations and the Future of Learning to Learning By Doing, nipped around the edges of this transformation that simulations and serious games represents. Now The Complete Guide finally gets to the heart of this topic. It hits everything, from the big ideas to the comprehensive cataloging of the mechanics.

These ideas are the DNA to change how we all record and develop wisdom through media. It contains the path to change schools, research, libraries, and so, civilization. Anyone who delves into this book will not be able to look at any other media, from books to computer games to research reports to movies, the same way again.

So thank you for your continued comments and support. And please forgive my own unbridled exuberance! Having said that, if you are interested in education, including making much more effective programs now and its long range evolution and manifest destiny, you are going to love this too. And it will be something that you may find useful to share with your community, be it co-workers, students, fellow teachers and professors, sponsors, customers, deans, commanding officers, headmasters, and/or investors.

Here are some comments so far:

“Yes, this is an encyclopedic overview of the simulations and serious gaming world, but it’s far more important than a ‘how-to’ book. Aldrich is signaling the end of the age of Gutenberg. Aldrich takes direct aim at why the K-12 and higher education system are failing—myopically trapped in a nineteenth-century world of ‘learning to know’ in a twenty-first century world that requires the judgment and skills of ‘learning to do.’ Aldrich’s revolution transforms the way we learn.”—Jeff Sandefer, founder, the Acton School of Business

“Clark Aldrich provides his clear vision of how ‘learning to do’ will liberate us from our industrial education legacy that has for too long been shaped by outdated, linear, passive instruction.”—Don Williams, manager, global learning research, Microsoft Corporation

“This exhaustive guide to computer gaming and simulation points the way to a new, more powerful way of learning by doing. It is a must-read—a must-read and study—for those involved in education.”—Bill Kovach, former Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, and former editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"It manages to blend deep insights, entertainment, light-hearted humor, and literary virtuosity." - Dr. Michael Allen, Michael Allen's Guide to E-Learning

Is fifteen minutes the new hour of corporate training?

clark.aldrich@gmail.com (Clark Aldrich) — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 12:46:00 +0000

It used to be that formal learning programs in a corporate environment could be a week long. People would pack up and spend an intensive five days in a dedicated facility and immerse themselves in a new skill set.

Then the tolerance by employees and middle managers for a formal learning program shifted to two days. Then one day. Then half a day. Then one hour. Now it is probably about fifteen minutes.

This has a bunch of implications. Courses have to be immediately available whenever the student wants a break. Students can't be bogged down with passwords and long loading times. This signing in and hunting for courses as a percent of an hour course was acceptable but of fifteen minutes is not.

Then, because there still has to be an intellectual pay-off for engaging a program, so the content also has to be rich. Very rich. We have to, as designers, deliver more content in fifteen minutes than could be delivered in a four hours by instructional designers twenty years ago. We have to use motion capture, rich interaction, interesting systems, dense feedback (all techniques covered in this blog, in fact). The production values of courses have to be very high.

We as designers also have to get smarter about linking these fifteen minute windows together. We have to think more about seamless chapters and prerequisites. One fifteen-minute easy course could lead to three fifteen-minute intermediate courses.

If we do this right (and denser content and better linking are just two example), this approach has a lot of advantages over the old model.

First, learning truly becomes integrated into life. I can take a mini-sim on negotiating, and then pick up the phone and actually practice the skills the moment the course is over, rather than returning to my office after two days away. Over time, designers will think more about creating an immediate payoff, using first person, action centric content.

Second, students can actually look forward to formal learning content as breaks from their work. A bouncy, engaging sim that requires both mind and actions can easily be a valued change of pace after an hour of filling out expense reports.

Third, through the intelligent use of linking, students could, over weeks and months, acquire a huge amount of productivity enriching content. Without realizing it, students could cover the equivalent of an MBA, but more flexibly and in a way that is more relevant to their work-life. Meanwhile the decay of learning inherent in the old model of big events could be replaced by a gradual increase in knowledge honed against real-life.

Shorter attention spans present a huge challenge to traditional training models. But they may just be the context for evolving the next great model of formal learning.