Games for Learning
As IBM announces plans to work on a universal avatar to represent gamers in any online environment, Donald H Taylor asks whether ‘serious games’ for learning are here to stay
‘Serious games’ are suddenly the subject of conferences, research studies and a great deal of hype. According to one recent study, computer-based games will be used for training in most organisations within 5 years. As always at times like these, nobody seems to agree very much about ‘serious games’, including whether that is even the right term to use for games for learning.
Games-based learning has existed at least since Prussian officers trained with war games in the early nineteenth century, but Army Battlezone is generally considered the first ‘serious game’. Atari’s 1980 abortive adaptation of its Battlezone Game for the US Army was too low-tech to be a success, unlike today’s America’s Army , which currently claims over eight million registered players.
What changed between Army Battlezone and America’s Army? The technology caught up with the vision. This happened sometime around the turn of the millennium, with the pivotal Serious Games Initiative founded in 2002. Since then, the concepts behind serious games have been widening as the technological power underpinning them has grown. Modern internet-based platforms and increased processing power now make possible rapid interaction and detail-rich simulation – in particular in massive multiplayer online games.
Earlier this year, Vaughan Waller of Waller Hart, and Martine Parry of the Apply Group attempted to shed some light on serious games in a 12-month-long survey.
Corporate Learning Games in Europe polled views from games developers, the learning industry and the corporate marketplace. The corporate respondents apparently predicted a rosy future for games in learning: 100 per cent agreed with the question ‘Do you see great potential for using games in organisational learning?’ A further 66 per cent predicted mainstream adoption within five years. Over 40 per cent though, thought the perception of games at management level would prevent short-term adoption.
So are these gaming enthusiasts the same sorts of neophiles who predicted in 1999 that e-learning would lead to the death of the classroom in a few short years? Waller and Parry are more circumspect. They say that, by 2012, between 100 and 135 of the Global Fortune 500 will have adopted gaming for learning, with the USA, UK and Germany leading the way.
Waller and Parry’s’ survey is supported by the real-world experience of at least one leading vendor.
Graeme Duncan of Caspian Learning has been a vendor in the field since 2002, and says there is substance behind the hype, with organisations ready to reach into their pockets: ‘We are starting to see a real budgeted appetite for the use of games approaches and technologies.’
These newly developed games-for-learning are unlikely to be related to arcade shoot-’em-ups. Titles such as Darfur is Dying and World Without Oil show that games playing has already developed well beyond the interests of the stereotype geek boy teenager.
But do users believe that any games or simulation should naturally have high-quality, rapidly rendered graphics, and a great deal of interaction? Not always. According to Duncan and others, most users of corporate games-for-learning compare their experience not with Grand Theft Auto or Gears of War, but with other learning packages they’ve used. It’s a comparison that the game almost always wins.
Even if games needn’t reach these levels of visual sophistication, those looking for serious games are more likely to go to a specialist software house than to develop them in-house. Alternatively, they may lease an existing multi-player game platform and populate it with their own content. They could also use Second Life for meeting and training, as IBM did until recently (trailing big blue’s October announcement of joint development with Second Life owners Linden Labs). As Eliane Alhadeff points out on her Future-Making blog , the commercial models for producing serious games have expanded as gaming goes mainstream.
It seems, then, that serious games are here to stay, and can offer an engaging experience that, in some cases, justifies the investment required in development. Does that mean that gaming will sweep all before it? Of course not. As Graeme Duncan of Caspian cautions, games are only part of the learning mix: ‘We should be focussing on what games do well that might have pedagogical relevance. This includes motivation, engagement, interactivity, providing rewards and reinforcement for skill improvement.’
