Sealund’s Serious Games Blog

How cool is this – Speaking at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas about Serious Games!! We had the honor of being asked by Lectora™ to speak at their conference. Our topic was “Lectora Wins With Serious Game Development.” As the conference attendees rolled into our session, one attendee asked me if the session was on games-based learning. I had to smile because it never really dawned on me until then that we were in Las Vegas – the GAME CAPITAL of the world. She was asking a great question!

We were blessed to have a significant attendance for our session. I guess the word was out that we were going to play games, (the learning kind) and that the prizes included NASCAR racecars for the winners.

A special client and friend Stephanie Bullard from USAF presented a few of the Serious Games that Sealund had created for its clients. Stephanie did a fine job as a game show host and in presenting how Serious Games work in the real world environment. Stephanie shared the value of the Serious Games for USAF clients and the fact that the clients are asking for more. The positive learning impact of Serious Games for USAF clients includes immediate engagement into the learning experience and a greater retention of the content.

Devonna Grimes and Stephanie Bullard in Las Vegas

Our audience was dynamic and competitive as we separated the attendees into two teams—the Blue Team headed up by Joe Koller, and the Red Team headed by Sandy Fritz. The game is on. We began the 3D Racetrack game for IT Security. Armed with their player’s cards, each team captain polled their respective teams for the correct answer and the hope to go home with a NASCAR racecar! The blue and red teams were neck and neck as they correctly answered the questions. To increase the competition and ensure a winning team (a tie just wouldn’t be acceptable for this wit to wit battle), a time limit was imposed for each question. The victor was the red team which crossed the finish line and won the prize!

Discussion ensued about the value of Serious Games and ways to get started to deploy at various organizations. We shared how Lectora can be used to develop Serious Games. In addition, we shared Serious Games that have been integrated into eLearning course-built in Lectora.

The Lectora conference hosted by Trivantis enabled us to release our newest Serious Games, “How to Play The Perfect Round of Business Golf.” This Serious Game was developed totally in Lectora and enables a single player to move around the golf course while learning how to conduct a business meeting. The player receives a score that can be communicated to any SCORM-conformant LMS. As we played this game, once again with our blue & red teams, we learned quickly that the blue team had a few good business golfers as they quickly won the prize for business golf.

We learned a great deal at the Lectora 2008 Conference and recommend this event for any Lectora user, or even those organizations considering the Trivantis’ Lectora tool. We appreciated the professional way in which the Lectora Company organized this event. We came home with more wisdom, less cards, and several new friends.

Serious Games = Serious Learning!™

For more information about Sealund’s Serious Games, please visit our website at www.sealund.com

As a producer of Serious Games, Sealund’s management team is grateful every day for our development team members’ combination of creativity and common sense, their people skills and technical pragmatism. Because Sealund managers value employees so highly, one of our goals is to support their life balance. We’ve learned that one way to do that is to enable working from home using virtual office technology.

The Virtual Key to Collaboration

Our leaders are always eager for suggestions that will make the Serious Games better, particularly through best-practices in Instructional Systems Design. We also invite ideas for making our team’s work-lives better. Long experience teaches us that most people’s ideas flow freely in creative meetings with everyone around the conference table, drawing on Smart Boards or projecting graphics or text from their computer onto the wall for all to see. That kind of collaboration gets the best ideas from everybody. It builds strong teams and products with sound instructional design and easy-to-play games that engage learners and ensure maximum retention.

Those outcomes are still the purpose of our creative meetings, but “how we get there” has changed. In fact, some of us don’t get to the same physical “conference table” at all. While the virtual office may not be for everyone, it works well for many professionals. Some of our teams work in their home offices only 1, 2 or 3 days a week; others the entire week. On any given day, people may be working from home, in the airport between flights, or in one of our remote offices. The conference table has become virtual. We see each other’s faces via webcams. We talk via Skype. We share our desktops. We can collaborate freely whenever we need to.

In fact, we have a dress code for our virtual offices – from the waist up.

Working in a Virtual Office offers a spin to the definition of “Business Casual.”

Research Proves Virtual Office Benefits

BNET reports that the virtual office improves efficiency and serves as a recruiting tool. According to author Phil Zinkewicz’s sources, it’s a “quality shop, a ‘best practices’ service model … and just as important, it’s a fun place to work.” The Telework Consortium chartered Wainhouse Research to explore benefits of the virtual office, and researcher Ira M. Weinstein found that the virtual office “provides the basis for effective, widespread collaboration throughout an enterprise” and “the soft benefits are much more valuable than the direct financial payback. Virtual office solutions bring remotely-deployed resources together in an easy-to-use, collaboration-friendly environment. More than just a meeting support tool, these offerings help people effectively balance the demands of work and home, and allow organizations to more effectively leverage their most important investment: their employees.”

Sealund’s Evolution in Virtual Technology

The virtual office approach is something we eased into at Sealund & Associates Corp., so beginning with teleconferences and faxes when those were state of the art. As the technology grew more sophisticated, the Sealund team grew closer in the virtual office even when farther apart geographically. We can wait for the cable guy while connecting with the work team from our home offices. We can share the joy of work with our colleagues, or take an hour’s break to share the joy of a child’s school program. New ideas start to flow, and we return to the job brimming with energy.

The old barriers of distance evaporate, and we can bring the best talent available into our teams, wherever they may be in the world. The virtual office approach benefits not only each team member, it raises the bar for our teams as a whole and ensures that Sealund’s Serious Games deeply engage learners for optimum knowledge and skill transfer to their work.

What do you think about the virtual office approach? Please share your comments.

Serious Games = Serious Learning!™

For more information about Sealund’s Serious Games, please visit our website at www.sealund.com

Why do we remember what we experience while playing Serious Games?

Neurology explains the effects Serious Games have on players’ knowledge and skill retention and transfer to the job. Emotion encodes experience in memory. It’s like the adrenaline rush people feel during any excitement – especially during competition. Ask any athlete or coach. Repetition—including the actions that demonstrate new learning—builds kinesthetic memory. Our very muscles seem to remember what to do in much-practiced situations.

But our muscles don’t just “remember.” Our brains orchestrate that memory and send the right messages to our muscles more quickly and more precisely; the more we repeat the action – even if we repeat it only “virtually” through imagination or visualization. This is as true for the muscles that point the cursor to the correct icon on a system window as for the muscles that swing the bat and hit one out of the ballpark. It works the same whether we’re learning labor negotiation tactics around a meeting table or nimble negotiation of an array of defensive linemen on the football field.
What adrenaline is to the muscles, neurotransmitters are to our brains – the thalamus, amygdale and hippocampus, in particular.

Competitive Emotion (the “Rush”) = Better Retention

The Training & Development Journal article, Emotion and Learning – implications of new neurological research for training techniques, is discussed on BNet. Author Ruth Palumbo Weiss briefly explains, “If we look at what happens physiologically, everything we absorb is passed first through a kind of switchboard called the thalamus, located at the base of the brain. That information is then routed automatically to different sections of the brain. At first, the information goes through the brain’s emotion-arousal systems for evaluation, to determine whether the information is perceived as benign or a threat. That evaluation involves a number of feedback loops originating in long-term memory. If we perceive the incoming information as threatening, we automatically engage in a series of reactions (which sometimes remain unconscious) to help us process the information.” She cites experts whose findings bear on improved memory of material learned in Serious Games. Neurologist Antonio Damasio observes: “Emotions are inseparable from the ideas of reward and punishment, pleasure and pain, approach and withdrawal, personal advantage and disadvantage.” Serious Games certainly contain those elements. “‘Emotions and bodily sensations are intricately intertwined in a bi-directional network in which each can alter the other,’ says neurologist Candace Pert. Pert views the brain as a mechanism not only for filtering and storing sensory input, but also for associating that input with other events or stimuli occurring simultaneously at any synapse or receptor along the way.” That associative behavior explains the transfer of behaviors learned during gaming directly to the work environment. Other researchers’ conclusions further support these findings. “Says educator Eric Jensen: ‘The design of those feedback circuits, as well as emotion-sensitive structures such as the amygdala and nucleus basalis, ensures that what we are feeling at the time of learning will be coded with the content and context of our experience.’” That works on the job the same way it works in the rest of our lives.

Serious Games stimulate many avenues of the brain.

Scientific and academic resources describe the brain structures that link emotion to memory. A Brain Tour article on PsychEducation.org, Memory, Learning, and Emotion: the Hippocampus, advises us “Emotion and memory are very closely related. … [A] portion of the emotion system of the brain (the “limbic system”) is in charge of transferring information into memory. From years of experiments and surgical experience, we now know that the main location for this transfer is a portion of the temporal lobe called the hippocampus. … this part of the brain appears to be absolutely necessary for making new memories.”

The amygdala and chemical interactions also play a role how emotional engagement enhances memory. New York University’s Center for Neural Sciences presents professor Joseph E. LeDoux’s article, Memory and Emotion which reports on danger’s effect on learning. Danger, of course, is an element of gaming. Serious Gaming puts the player in at least the danger of losing based on points scored or length of time to complete a level or the entire game (course). “[The] neural plasticity underlying fear conditioning has been shown to involve elevation of calcium in amygdala cells through NMDA receptors and L-type voltage gated calcium channels. The elevated calcium activates protein kinases, which initiate gene expression and protein synthesis, leading to the consolidation of the memory, and its reconsolidation after retrieval.”

Instructional Designers’ understanding of the effect of emotional engagement on learning informs how we construct the situations in Serious Games – the challenges, difficulty levels, scoring and other competitive elements. In this way, hard Neuroscience contributes to the “ease” people attribute to learning through Serious Games. We can thank our brains for making the learning of complex decision-making strategies easy as long as we design Serious Games to work with the way our brains work.

What do think? Please share your comments.

Serious Games = Serious Learning!™

For more information about Sealund’s Serious Games, please visit our website at www.sealund.com

What comes first – the game or the learning?

Consider the Zen of fun. Watch people of any age engaged in having fun, playing any type of game, and you can see how engaged they truly are, full present in that moment, that behavior. We know that engagement enhances learning accuracy and retention. The perspective from which Serious Games developers approach the “engagement factor” depends on what we have done (what habits of thought we have learned) previously – developed purely entertainment experiences or engaged-learning experiences. From either perspective, the development teams had to follow a certain logical path to create effective Serious Games.

The logical path is this: Games are great fun. Fun is one aspect of a pleasurable experience. The pleasure centers in the brain stimulate us to want more of the pleasure they register. The brain’s pleasure centers connect closely with the brain’s emotion centers. We remember longer and more clearly experiences linked with emotions. So the “rush” of gaming (see previous blog: Game-play Rush & Retention) becomes a component of instructional design for Serious Games.

The answer to the question of whether the entertainment or the learning comes first is: the learning. Learned behavioral outcomes are the “beef” of business requirements for Serious Games. The game is one technique—a powerful one—for achieving those requirements.

Purpose Directs Priority

Job performance improvement is job one for Serious Games. The results of Serious Games are measured at least twice – once in the scoring of the game, and again at least once on the job with performance measurements. Best practices suggest that post-training performance be measured shortly after the training and then at several-month intervals until full mastery is demonstrated consistently (which may require re-training if the employee hits a below-mastery plateau). These measures are important for employee performance rewards and, before the rewards, for coaching by supervisors. (For a classic consideration of job performance measurement purposes and strategies, peruse the International Society for Performance Improvement’s Measurement Counts! series of articles.) Entertainment game developers don’t—and shouldn’t have to—consider these Serious Games purposes, even when they’re developing Serious Games.

Serious Games open the door to exploration, competition, and achievement

That’s what the instructional designers are for: to ensure that the learning-driven architecture (design) is strong within the game. This means that the game’s adrenaline rush reinforces those behaviors the business demands, the business-required behaviors are scored, and the relevant outcomes are measured. Instructional designers do the architecture, indicate where the doors (into the learners’ memories) go, and perform effectiveness inspections. Game developers make the world of the game so engaging that the learners are eager to go through those doors – explore, take risks, compete, win! Game developers and learning game developers can learn from one another and jointly bring value to Serious Games.

Differentiators Between Entertainment and Serious Games

How can you tell a soundly designed Serious Game from one primarily for entertainment? Both have engagement, challenge, competition and rewards. Serious Games, however, demonstrate their purposes in the players’ paths to the rewards – and in the nature of the rewards themselves. The paths take players through challenges related to their work, either directly or metaphorically. And the rewards may go beyond the satisfaction of a high score to actual workplace rewards. It’s the instructional designer’s job to make sure the game puts the emotion-tickling challenges at the crucial learning points and that rewards reflect business values.

It takes a village to create Serious Games. The collaborators include business analysts, instructional designers, game developers, systems engineers, 3D animators, quality assurance specialists and project managers. Each has their role and the roles overlap into teams. It is imperative that the architecture of instructional design is the framework for learning. The development teams win the “game” only when they hit the business requirements squarely on target by following sound instructional design principles and best practices for Serious Games.

What do you think? Please share your comments.

Serious Games = Serious Learning!™

For more information about Sealund’s Serious Games, please visit our website at www.sealund.com