Kevin Corti, CEO of PIXELearning, has written an impassioned, provocative piece on the blog at seriousgames.ning.com. He's quite concerned that the past 5 years have brought increasing divisiveness and decreasing support within the community of folks living under the "serious games" umbrella. It's well worth a read - and a lot of consideration.
In some ways, Kevin's concerns and frustrations echo my own. But we need to look deeper.
Web 2.0 has been a disrupting innovation for the learning world, just as were the internet, multimedia, interactive video, television, and the printing press. Among the 2.0 options, serious games are being viewed with interest by many, thanks to the not-yet-understood tipping point that occurred Spring '06, give or take (remember? - every major news outlet had a general-interest piece on SG, it seemed).
As interest grows, more people see opportunities to make money. And that breeds competition - and division. The division isn't so much between technologies or because of disagreements over nomenclature. The division is market-driven.
Mark Prensky once noted (and I'm paraphrasing), if you want to suck the fun out of training bring an instructional designer into the room. In fact, educators have employed games and play (I make no representation of fun-quotient here) as a means of learning since time immemorial.
What's new about serious games IS technology, and a pre-existing videogame industry. The surge of interest in serious games is due, of course, to corporate, academic and v.c. intrigue. It is also the result of:
1) the phenomenal success of recent videogame releases
2) the desire of independent game developers to get in on the AAA game action converging with their need to eat, and
3) the contract opportunities they see for developing serious games as a way to pay for the real work they want to do.
Now, we have serious game "old-timers" with industry tenure in the double-digits who have been designing technology-delivered games as part of overall learning designs bumping into game design geniuses bumping into technology gurus. The clash is cultural, philosophical, economic, and seismic. It needs to be terraforming.
For serious games to deliver on their promise, those who build them and those who sell them must not just assert SG's value. These claims must be substantiated by empirical research that has been subjected to peer review. As we wait for a body of evidence to emerge, we can look to existing literature to understand the significance of solid learning design in the effective serious game. The videogame market performance lends weight to the assertions.
The call now is for a head-butting mashup of learning design and videogame design. This includes vocabulary, motivation, methodology, process, technology, roles and responsibilities... - and appreciation. (Flowers might be nice.) In so doing, we make a big move from being a community of interest to becoming an industry.
I'm serious,
Anne
