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To my family
Special Thanks
This book would not have been possible without Drew Davidson, Denis Saulnier, Scott Perrin, Chester Cooke, Mark Biscoe, and The Chewonki Foundation
By Jeff Sandefer
Don’t let the title The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games fool you. Yes, this is an encyclopedic overview of the simulations and serious gaming world, a complete lexicon for those who want to build the next generation of simulations for advanced learning. But it’s far more important than a comprehensive “how to” book about simulations.
Clark Aldrich makes his call to action clear. The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games is “nothing less than a manifesto intended to overthrow the intellectual legacy of civilization to date.” Aldrich is signaling the end of the age of Gutenberg, a time of great learning, no doubt, but of linear learning—learning “how to know” rather than “how to do” or “how to be” in a complex, interactive world.
Why should you care? If you are an education reformer, Aldrich’s revolution could transform the way we learn. If you are a CEO, this is the way the next generation will want to be addressed. And if you are an entrepreneur, the intersection of serious games and simulations may signal one of the greatest investment opportunities in a generation.
For far too long there’s been a divide between the gaming community and educators. The gamers have dismissed educational simulations as boring and irrelevant; the educators have dismissed gaming as trivial. Both have a point, but in their squabbling over turf, both have missed how serious games and engaging simulations can change the world of education.
Aldrich takes direct aim at why the K-12 and higher education systems are failing, myopically trapped in a nineteenth-century world of “learning by knowing” in a twenty-first-century world that requires the judgment and skills of “learning by doing” and the individualized attention to “learning by being.”
If this doesn’t strike a nerve—if you are satisfied with the antiquated assembly-line process that passes for education in the United States—then you really need to read this book. Particularly if you are a parent.
So why listen to Clark Aldrich? Because he is the Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan of the serious gaming and simulation world, all rolled into one. He’s one of the few people who not only see the big picture of how simulations and gaming will transform education and can walk you step-by-step through what does and does not work in simulation design, but he also can create leading-edge games and write first-rate code.
Not many people in any industry can see where future trends are leading and get the details right. In The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games, Aldrich moves from genres—the ways you classify games—through the elements that separate the great simulations from those that don’t work. He explains why the “big skills”—those that really count, like leadership, negotiation, and stewardship—and the “middle skills” like directing people, probing, and procurement cannot be learned from a book or lecture, but only through simulations, or through the much more difficult school of hard knocks in real life.
Then, having clearly established why linear content (meaning books) is the “white bread” of learning, and why the academic intelligentsia have failed us, Aldrich shows how formal learning programs, properly understood, can use simulations and serious games to create real learning, and how formal learning programs in the hands of educrats or corporate learning officers can destroy them.
So why am I so sure that Aldrich is right that today’s “classrooms, curricula, term papers, corporate training programs, business plans, and linear analysis should be banished to the intellectual slums and backwaters”? Because I have seen the future firsthand, or at least a glimpse of it.
As a pilot, I’ve experienced how the most sophisticated flight simulators instill the skills, judgment, and coolness under pressure needed to safely land a crippled Airbus on the Hudson River.
As a parent, I’ve watched my six-, seven-, and twelve-year-old children have fun playing Zoo Tycoon and Sim City, while absorbing sophisticated business pattern recognition skills that took me years to learn at Harvard Business School.
Finally, as an education reformer at the award-winning Acton School of Business, I’ve spent over a million dollars of my own money designing six interactive Sims on customer acquisition, production processes, pricing, working capital, and bootstrapping. Our games aren’t perfect, but they are engaging enough that my children want to play them, and challenging enough that an Acton, Harvard, or Stanford MBA cannot master them.
Yes, I’ve seen firsthand how much more powerful—and engaging—serious games and simulations can be than books and lectures. By the end of this book, I’m confident you’ll not only have a glimpse of the future too, but even better, a blueprint for how you can get started creating that future.
Jeff Sandefer runs an energy investment firm, Sandefer Capital Partners, that holds over a $1 billion in assets. For the last sixteen years, he has also taught entrepreneurship at the graduate level. Four years ago Sandefer and a band of successful entrepreneurs left a nationally recognized program they had built at the University of Texas to start the Acton School of Business. For two consecutive years, Acton was rated among the top MBA programs in the country by the Princeton Review, which called its students the “most competitive” MBAs in America and rated the faculty in the top three in the nation. While at the University of Texas, Sandefer was voted by the students as UT’s Outstanding Teacher five separate times and was named by Business Week as one of the top entrepreneurship professors in the United States. He has served for over a decade on Harvard University’s visiting committee and as chair of the university’s academic research committee. He is a director of National Review magazine, formerly served as chairman of the Acton Institute of Religion and Liberty, and was a member of Texas Governor Rick Perry’s 21st Century Commission on Higher Education.
This book, with its definitions of the structures of simulations and serious games, presents itself as a helpful guide for Sim authors and sponsors who wish to better ply their craft in both stand-alone environments and in virtual worlds. I hope, incidentally, that it is.
But underneath that pleasant veneer, this book is a challenge to everyone in all of the educational and knowledge industries, from instructors to publishers to business analysts. Identifying successful design patterns from computer games, academic study, business analysis, and military and corporate learning programs, this book is nothing less than a manifesto intended to cast off the intellectual chains of civilization to date.
These elements of interactivity challenge all the traditional linear content models, putting a new focus on actions, systems, and results. The book recommends augmenting or even replacing the traditional passive presentation of content with an active “learning by doing” approach. Having said that, here are some caveats.
This book is not complete. I have attempted to include enough terms in each of the various categories not to exhaust a topic but to define it. But many individual entries refer to subject areas whose full treatment would fill entire books.
Second, as any good Sim designer would hope, this book is as nonlinear as a book can be. It is organized as a virtual world might be, meticulously, logically, but not assuming any prescribed path. You can go through it from beginning to end, but you can also bounce around. When you get sick of a section, skip to the next. Or dig into a term and its context that interests you, following the references to related topics. Or go to the index at the back. You can scan or dig in, zoom out or zoom in. I have tried to create the best of both worlds, but some people, when reading this, will be frustrated by the lack of traditional structure. This book is about learning by practicing, which will involve reexamining the same content, often from different perspectives, not just learning by seeing how much ground is covered. You might return to the same entry several times, each time seeing more in the same words. In this regard, using this book is similar in part to the user experience in a simulation. This book will reward your effort, not displace it. Your role is participant, not audience.
Finally, this book deals with concepts and constructs, not programming. This is because many different technologies are available, and while the constructs are universal, the implementation changes dramatically from one toolset to another. People might use this approach in video editing, Adobe Flash, a PlayStation 3 game, a research paper, an iPhone app, or an island in Second Life. The technical techniques are different, and fast moving. The philosophy is the same, and I suspect timeless.
Imagine you and I are by the pool at a nice hotel in Lyon, France. We are negotiating some business deal, perhaps the creation of a new company or a piece of intellectual property.
Now imagine that a twenty-five-year veteran of hospitality management walked by. What would she see? Maybe that our coffee is old, and that the table’s umbrella should be positioned to block the sun. She might notice the water in the pool is a little green, suggesting not enough chlorine. She might wonder, because we are people of business, how to pitch the new virtual conference service. She might note that we need new towels.
In contrast, what if an expert in negotiation saw us? He might read my body language as tense, yours as relaxed. He might notice that we are on the verge of coming to agreement, and we are both committed to success.
How about a nutritionist? He might look with disgust at the white bread in our rolls, and the processed sugars in our jams. He might approve of your orange juice, but not my Coke, and then look for any pallor in our faces. He might look around for the buffet table and evaluate the contents. Or maybe even look for a snack machine, and see whether there are any peanuts or other protein sources.
How about a lawyer? She might look at the documents on the table. She might try to find a nondisclosure agreement. She might be curious to see exactly what notes I am taking. How binding is what we are saying? Are we each revealing too much at this stage of the conversation?
The big point here: People at the top of their game see things when they encounter a situation that others do not.
For example:
These are all issues of situational awareness. Let me define the term formally:
Situational awareness: The ability to filter out certain details and highlight and extrapolate others, to better understand and control the outcome. Different people with different domain expertise bring different situational awareness to the same situation.
Seeing the world as experts do is the hallmark of any domain expertise, and makes problems and appropriate actions more obvious. Given that, how is situational awareness developed in an individual? How is multiple situational awareness developed and then balanced?
In most formal learning programs to date, using classrooms and traditional media such as books and movies, situational awareness has not been rigorously developed in students. This is for two pretty big reasons. First, it has not been documented and analyzed from the point of view of many experts, including historical leaders and contemporary experts, in any meaningful way. Second, and almost inevitably given the first reason, few environments have been designed to help students and other interested parties learn the skills.
Situational awareness is a good example of content that has fallen through the cracks of linear structures. Other major instances include awareness of patterns, use of actions, and many other types of knowledge. But there are even simpler and broader examples to understand how big our blind spots really are.
Let me ask you, what are the most important skills a person can have, across professions or ages and even in technical fields such as engineering or medicine? Many people would at least consider that the list of “big skills” would include leadership, project management, stewardship, relationship management, innovation, security, and many others. But your own list may be better.
Now, how many of these are taught in schools or corporations? Almost none. How many are taught in a way that actually works? Absolutely none.
Why is it that we as a civilization have failed to record from experts and then rigorously develop in others the most valued skills? The reasons for this stem from what can only be called a technological fluke.
Let me back up a bit. Imagine the time in our pre-Paleolithic history (in a time before consistent writing) when formal learning consisted of two balanced parts:
During the day, people with skills would show others how to do something. “Grab the spear here,” the teacher might say, taking the hands of the apprentice and putting them in the right spots. “Go over there in that veld where you won’t hurt anybody and throw your spear at trees until you can hit the smallest tree every time.”
At night, people around the campfire might tell of great adventures, including myths and legends. People would share rules, and help their community expand their thinking. The audience would learn to know something. The best storytellers would gain bigger audiences and develop their own craft of narrative and suspense.
Then came the technology of writing. And suddenly the balance shifted. Written work scaled well, where the work of one village could impact villages all around it. Communities were able to build on the “open source” written work of the past. The discipline of drama evolved geometrically.
Meanwhile, practicing in the veld didn’t change much. It was still a one-to-one activity.
Since the introduction of the technology of writing, many subsequent discoveries have further augmented the learning-to-know skills. Paintings, theaters, printing presses and books, photographs, schools, universities, sound recordings, movies, scanners, and Google all gave our culture mastery of linear content, enabling great artists and building an exquisite vocabulary around plot devices, antagonists, suspense, and the hero’s journey, just to name a few. We can watch a Spielberg movie, a piece of campfire-style intellectual property that is the recipient of cumulatively trillions of dollars of investment and R&D, and evaluate it at a level of cultural sophistication that would awe citizens from a even a hundred years ago.
And yet, in the learning-to-do area, most of us are little better than our hunter-gatherer ancestors. For teaching the simplest skills, we mirror our ancestors (“put your hands here”), and for the more complicated skills, we don’t have a clue. Ask a top business school professor to develop leadership (or any of the big skills) in a student and she will go into campfire mode with PowerPoint slides of grids and graphs, case studies, and so-called inspirational stories.
The advent of flight simulators and computer games, however, has finally introduced technology and examples of media around learning to do that can scale. Today, a robust if nascent set of veld tools is receiving a significant intellectual investment. Today’s authors, often in the form of game and simulation designers, are creating virtual velds where participants can repeatedly practice skills, instead of just hearing about them.
And, correspondingly, an entirely new language is being developed. Gamers now effortlessly talk about simulation content, such as mapping actions to interfaces, and the attributes of units on maps, as well as broader Sim elements such as end-of-level bosses and what constitutes good or bad level design.
During the next twenty years, the veld technologies (the learning-to-do skills built through games and simulations) will successfully challenge the campfire institutions of universities, movies, and books not only for the discretionary time of the community (which we have already seen), but for help in improving people’s quality of life.
Glimpses of the latter are already available through both serious games such as Carmen Sandiego, The Oregon Trail, Age of Empires, America’s Army, and Brain Age, and educational simulations such as flight simulators, Full Spectrum Warrior, and Virtual Leader. Will Wright, the creator of SimCity, The Sims, and Spore, is the first Shakespeare or Beethoven of this medium.
In other words, people will engage Sims not to play a superhero but to actually become more like one. And the balance between learning to do and learning to know may finally be restored.
This book is for anyone who creates or manages content. It begins with pure simulation content models—how to record and model knowledge beyond the linear. If you are in the business of research, including researching business, this is what you should focus on. It goes on to discuss how to build interactive environments to turn that pure simulation model into experiences to be engaged. It is a good opportunity for game designers, a challenge and framework for corporate, academic, and military educational designers, and a glimpse into the all-too-possible future for traditional media publishers, analysts, and researchers. The Appendix discusses several successful simulation projects, including metrics.
This book defines key terms and concepts necessary for Sim design. At its heart, it is essentially a glossary, although broken up into topic chapters to provide enough connecting tissue to make it easy to read. Each chapter has an introductory section that introduces the concepts and highlights some key terms. The chapter then contains entries. Each entry is a definition, usually one or two paragraphs, and includes references to other entries or even complete topics. There are also conclusions and author’s notes spread out, with a bit more context and notes from the field.
The narrative underlying and connecting the topic chapters is as follows:
First, traditional linear content—books, movies, and lectures—while leveraging brilliant technologies and capturing brilliant thoughts, has been limited in capturing and sharing the world. Linear media focus on the passive content of learning-to-know, rather than the active content of learning-to-do.
For example, linear content cannot develop in people big skills (also called “21st century skills,” “soft skills” or “thinking skills”) such as leadership or stewardship, nor capture the intellectual property needed for dynamic planning and execution, nor create an accurate representation of time and place. This is why most research that has been created to drive intelligent actions does not do so.
Second, the creation of any research-based intellectual property, be it academic or corporate, should focus on simulation elements, including actions, system content, and desired results, not just linear content.
Third, those simulation elements can further be processed for education and entertainment to make them “practiceable” (through the addition of game elements and pedagogical elements and being shaped into tasks and levels). Given that, just as books have styles such as paragraphs, appendixes, bullet points, and bold fonts, so to do Sims have styles that are just as critical, well-defined, and meaningful, such as sandbox levels and balanced scorecards.
Finally, to simplify the task, just as books come in genres such as dictionaries and mystery novels, so too do Sims come in genres such as first-person shooter and branching stories, and matching up the right Sim to the right task is just as important as selecting the right book genre.
As noted, the focus of this book is to present common definitions of concepts and terms that apply to Sims. The lack of common terms is a huge problem, and it has substantially hindered the development of the simulation space. Sponsors, developers, and students have not been able to communicate intelligently.
Perhaps the most salient example of this is the total lack of a universal name for the space (as in, “For our next program, we will use a___ approach,” or “I am going to a conference to learn more about___ ”).
Here are the top ten candidates:
Serious games? In eLearning Guild’s 2008-2009 landmark survey of corporate, military, and academic practitioners, most suggested not using the “serious games” name.
Source: The eLearning Guild Research. © The eLearning Guild. All rights reserved.
Some of the other names include action learning simulations, performance simulations, interactive strategies, and activities-based training.
Overlap with Virtual Worlds?
And then there is the question of whether to include virtual worlds or not. Most people lump Second Life and World of Warcraft into this area on their own. But it’s not that simple. Virtual worlds can be a platform for Sims, much as Flash or commercial game engines can. If used for that purpose, they both increase the speed of development and shape the content of the product. But accessing a virtual world does not give one a Sim for free.
One reason for the lack of common terminology is that Sims represent a rethinking of content itself: they cast traditional content from Gutenberg to Google as a tiny subsection of all possible captured knowledge. To embrace simulations ultimately means ushering in a new era of history and awareness—and accepting some major limitations in what we know and what we have studied. As a result, each current term focuses on one small part of the total shift.
Seeing the world (and modeling it and presenting it) through the approximation of a simulation rather than a book will require new tools and even a new syntax and corresponding style guide, but will mint a new generation of scholars—and a new generation of leaders.