I'm Serious.net

Oh Talent, where art thou?

  In the 1970s and 1980s, the Pentagon, other government agencies, and the relatively fledgling semiconductor industry recognized that America needed trained talent if it hoped to achieve success and even dominance in the semiconductor marketplace. It was critically important, in the mindset of American defense leadership, that America train its own “patriots” to help build the semiconductor industry into the giant it is today. The country’s secrets could not be entrusted to aliens from other nations.

To that end, the semiconductor industry, with a big helping hand from the US Government and the Pentagon, launched a research and education arm that was designed to foster the development of University grant programs that would lead semiconductor research and train graduate students in the field. This was a very successful initiative that has led our country to a leadership position in cutting-edge technology development in chip design and manufacturing.

In the serious computer games arena, we are at a similar crossroads. We have a fair amount of garage- and basement-based designers who are working to build a brand new game or design the next, most awesome raceway scenario. How do we interest this burgeoning talent in serious games? Is it important that we help to convert this talent pool to the serious side of the equation? How is formal education and training built into their experience so that we have properly trained and effective designers ready for the employment ranks of serious games companies?

The good news is that several universities are already building curricula and laboratories that train our next generational talent pool. At the University of Central Florida, the University of Maryland, the Universities of Birmingham City and Coventry in the U.K., and Full Sail for example, programs are in place already, and both undergraduate and graduate students are in the learning phase while they are doing hands-on development of important projects using 3D immersive learning simulations at their core.

Quite a few other universities are designing programs and have a bit more work to do before they start turning out fresh, talented, and capable designers for the serious games arena. There is money to be made by this talent pool, and they are the future of our industry. Equally important, more talent means more opportunity to accelerate the serious games industry, fueling an important economic engine that needs all the resources we can pour into it! We run the risk that demand for serious games cannot be met without a larger pool of talent, and we need to be thinking about strategies that will foster the development of these educational programs at universities large and small!

I’d like to hear from folks at colleges and universities who are engaged in all levels of this important curriculum and learning development.

I’m Serious!

Michael

Wording is Everything!

Those of us who are immersed in the serious games arena find it fairly easy to articulate our goals, strategy, and dreams about serious games. To the uninitiated, however, getting your head around such innovative technology can be a real challenge. One of the important aspects of development of the serious games industry, including penetration into the marketplace, is how we articulate to potential buyers and future disciples the features and benefits of serious games. The “elevator message” is critical to capturing their attention in short order.

As our industry seeks funding from all kinds of sources and as we market 3D Immersive Learning Simulations to corporate America and beyond, it will be necessary to define serious games in laymen’s terms. If we expect to “sell” a project or an educational or marketing opportunity, we must define it sensibly to the buyer; be they a grantor, venture capitalist, or corporate executive. This constituency is broad and diverse, and making it simple and logical will greatly enhance our success in growing our business.

Forterra Systems, Inc, provider of a virtual world platform called OLIVE, has just unveiled its new website, crafting excellent language that can be beneficial to all of us who try to educate the marketplace, never mind our friends and families, about the significant opportunities that come with the implementation of 3D Immersive Learning Simulations. I encourage you to check out Forterra’s new website and take a moment to admire their articulation of the rationale for serious games in the 21st century!

I’m Serious!
Michael

Could it be?

Is someone at SOE reading this blog? Today, and in the wake of my post about the enormous gap between the number of male game developers and the number of their female counterparts, Sony Online Entertainment has announced a new competitive scholarship aimed at female developers. The competition is part of their new "Gamers in Real Life (G.I.R.L.)" program. The winner will be awarded a $10,000 scholarship to The Art Institutes. Way to go, SOE!

I'm serious,
Anne

You Know You Wanna

We just finished up with the ILS Report webinar. If you were unable to join us, a recording of it is available here. You can also download the report at the eLearning Guild's site. Great stuff in each!

I'm serious,
Anne

White Men Rule

Greetings from San Francisco and the Game Developers Conference. It's rainy and cold here, so staying indoors talking to and learning from some of the best and brightest in our industry is exactly the right thing to be doing.

The past two days have been dedicated to, among other things, the Serious Games Summit. Each day has been filled with presentations about the work being done around the world. Did you know that in Japan there are some 300 (!) commercial serious games on the market? Canadian national, regional and provincial governments are investing heavily in serious games. The West Midlands region of England has recently launched the Serious Games Institute, which includes an incubator of sorts for small SG development houses at the University of Coventry. The French Minister of Culture recently announced the French government's intention to promote certain regions of France as game development centers for the European Community.

And yet, with all this activity, I'm face-to-face with the stark truth that this industry is fueled by young(ish), white men. From my non-scientific observation, women represent less than 15% of conference attendees. Other than a sizable representation from the Asian community, many of whom are here from their homelands, there are very few people of color here. And, as you might expect, the over-50 crowd is quite poorly represented.

This troubles me. Until the designer/developer community reflects the audience/consumer community, serious games will have a hard time hitting their mark. Why? Because a closed system RARELY provides opportunities for true innovation.

More importantly, the effectiveness of a serious game rests in large measure on the development team's ability to penetrate the psyche of the target audience on an individual and collective basis. When the team's demographics do not correspond to those of the audience, a deep understanding of who the audience is and what motivates them becomes far harder to access. This potential disconnect can lead to disenfranchisement of the audience - the kiss of death for learner/player engagement and serious learning.

While this may be a "chicken and egg" problem, the fact is that this situation must change. Employers and team leaders must pay close attention to team demographics even while focusing on team skills. As development teams better reflect the characteristics of the audiences they are trying to touch, buyers will have greater confidence in the team's ability to touch the minds - and hearts - of the learners.

I'm serious,
Anne

"...opportunity for All"

I'm starting to get wind of upcoming serious game projects. As I learn of interesting opportunities, I will post them on the new Opportunities page. Today's entries include two US federal contracts being let. New and interesting work is being done all over!

I'm serious,
Anne

Generation G - The Gaming Generation

Richard van Eck has developed one of the best presentations I've seen on why serious games meet the needs of the current generation. He calls this demographic category "Generation G" - the Gaming Generation. I've included both the slides and the audio files on my del.icio.us site - along with some other gems I've found along the way.

I'm serious,
Anne

Rant: Are We Here to Work or Play? -Wrong Question!

I have heard many Worforce Learning and Productivity Professionals, as I've been chastised to call corporate training folk, complain that they can't possibly consider a serious game in their work environment, where - after all - people work, not play. In addition to all the reasons (but sadly little data) that I would offer, a couple of interesting pieces have been written recently that come at this debate from a completely different direction.

In Julian Dibbell's post to Network Performance (a fascinating blog, by the way), "Online Games, Virtual Economies ... Distinction between Play and Production", he asserts: "Work is play and play is work." His interesting "theory of ludocapitalism" stems from "the increasingly elusive distinction between play and production in the digitally networked world," for which he largely credits online games and virtual economies. He bases his comments on his year-long devotion to developing a livelihood (one hesitates to say "career") playing an MMORPG. My crude synopsis might make his assertion seem a bit silly, but his observations are, in fact, unignorable.

Rex Sorgatz has made similar observations in his essay, "The Game of Life," in Wired-15.11. For him, the blurring is between games and the gaming mindset, and life itself.

"Of course, the basics of gameplay - competing against opponents, setting records, winning prizes -- are as old as human civilization. But the gaming mindset has now become pervasive. We use game models to motivate ourselves, to answer questions, to find creative solutions. For many, life itself has turned into a game. Our online lives are just twists on the videogame leaderboards, where we jockey to get our blog a higher rank on Technorati and compete to acquire more friend-adds on MySpace than the next guy."

And who's the "we" to whom Sorgatz refers? "Those of us who grew up playing videogames in arcades." In other words, people in their 40s and younger. In other words, the vast majority of the world's population needing or seeking education, training, and workforce learning and productivity.

The point isn't whether we want work, life, and the world to go this direction. The point is that it IS going this direction, and we have to accept it and address it - most particularly in our places of learning and places of work. Every learning designer worth her stripes knows that reaching the learner means understanding who the learner is, not just what the learner needs to know.

If the gaming mindset dominates the worker-under-45 set, and work and play are all mushed together, doesn't it just make sense to meet these learners where they are, even just a little bit?

I think the next time someone gives me this objection to serious games, I'm going to ask, "Where are you from, Azeroth?" I think the answer would say a lot.

I'm serious,
Anne

Rant: To become an industry, we need a mashup!

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

Monetizing the game

So you have a great idea for a commercial serious game, but can't figure out how to monetize it? You might want to take a page from Sony's game division. They've created a business unit focused strictly on in-game advertising.

In-game advertising is expected to be a huge revenue opportunity for commercial developers of online games. As subscription-based business models are waning in popularity, developers are exploring alternative revenue strategies. And, as the online game movement looks for a sustainable business model, serious game developers should be paying close attention for business intelligence, ideas, and lessons learned.

A client recently asked me what is preventing mass adoption of serious games. My answer? Developers don't know how to make money yet. Until we figure out business models that enable multiple revenue opportunities from the same development effort, serious games will be simply the playground of large, well-funded organizations.

Over the next several months, I will be examining several monetization schemes for serious games. Of course I'll share.

I'm serious,

Anne