Kevin Corti is Managing Director of PIXELearning which specialises in using games-based learning for business and management skills development. He has 8 years of eLearning development experience and has played computer games for 27 years. Kevin was a featured presenter at the NASAGA Online Conference in 2004.
Chris: Kevin, when did you get started with simulations and how long have you been working with them?
Kevin: From a professional point of view the answer to is “since 2002” when I established PIXELearning with my business partner Suraj Rana. We had been working together in the eLearning space for a number of years, most recently at a TV & media company. We couldn’t get much internal support for simulation and games and finally decided to go it alone.
Chris: What do you like in a simulation or game?
When assessing a simulation or game that is designed for non-entertainment purposes I am look for excellent support and feedback mechanisms. I also want to know upfront why I should use it.
On-screen fidelity is not essential. One of the most compelling games I ever played that was ‘Lemonade Stand’ on the Commodore Vic 20. It was a very simple (text-based) game where you tried to make as much money as possible selling lemonade. The fidelity was in my head --the game sparked my imagination.
Technical feats in modern games, such as stunning graphics, are an initial draw but unless the game play is sufficiently compelling then all the cutting edge technology becomes largely decoration.
I got into the online games just a few years ago when broadband was finally arrived in my village. Since then I found that the competitive and collaborative aspects of multiplayer games offer significantly more reward than single player games. Real people are far more unpredictable and clever than any in-game AI characters. Given that we are attempting to use games to enable people to succeed in the real world I’m convinced that we need to use multiplayer techniques in games for learning purposes.
Chris: How do people respond to your simulations? How do you know?
The honest answer is that we get a very mixed response. It depends upon people’s expectations, familiarity with gaming and previous exposure to games and technology-based learning. We’ve had responses from “It’s the best thing I’ve ever seen” to “We expected it to look like a PlayStation game”.
The key is achieving a balance between delivering an effective learning solution (what the organization wants to accomplish) and an engaging experience (what the learner responds best to).
We always seek feedback and monitor how learners are making use of the games and how well they are doing through the system logs. We have just decided to give two games away for free in order to get a much wider perspective on what different organisations need and expect from Serious Games.
Chris: What advice do you have for beginning designers?
Kevin: As a kid I designed a lot of paper-based games (mainly involving soccer and warfare). Since deciding that there was potential in games for learning on a mass scale I have immersed myself in all things game industry and tried to understand how to pull that into a training and education context. Budding designers need to do the same. Don’t concentrate on the technical skills. You can learn them later, employ people or subcontract that aspect out.
You need to understand how people learn and how to design solutions to achieve this. Conventional instructional design will only take you so far in this space. Game design is a different beast when compared to most ID processes. Games are by nature very open-ended and largely non-linear. This can be a challenge to traditional instructional designers.
Serious Games will not be about creating hi-fidelity simulation in the near future. The economics of the industry just won’t allow this. You need to become an expert in maximising the quality and effectiveness of the learning experience within a shoe-string budget and timeframe. Try as many entertainment games as possible, compare them to eLearning, CBT and edutainment offerings and get a handle on what the games industry does well that the technology-based learning arena does not. Then be very creative about how you mimic the power of good entertainment games to enable great learning experiences.
Chris: Do you have a favourite simulation or game designer?
At risk of sounding like a groupie, I’m in awe of Will Wright of Sim City and The Sims fame. I saw him do a head to head session with Professor Henry Jenkins at MIT’s Education Arcade in LA last spring and I was blown away by Will’s ability to relate game design to learning applications even though his field is entertainment.
Chris: Do you play computer games in your free time?
I certainly do. My father built a pong emulator from a kit in the late 1970’s and I have been hooked ever since. Various distractions have come into play over the years but I still fire up the PC, and XBOX for several hours a week. I used to play a lot of strategy, management and simulation games but these days I find myself playing somewhat less cerebral ‘twitch’ games. I see this pattern of change in preferences for game genres in other people as they get older and their lives change. I think that it is an important area of research if we are truly to understand which game types are right for what purposes and which audiences.
Chris: What do you predict about the future of simulation and games?
Games and simulations will offer huge potential for training and education in the 21st Century. The big question is how do we will take what the entertainment games industry does with huge budgets and deliver effective learning experiences to many different audiences the world over with a fraction of the resources?
I don’t see custom design for an audience-specific game working if we are to be able to achieve a global reach. The development costs are too high. Neither do I see commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) games being able to deliver anything other than a highly generic learning experience.
I believe that the answer is in middleware: tools to enable learning professionals to create and deploy Serious Games that fit for their purpose. The games might not look like Halo 2 or The Sims but they will be a darned site more effective than what eLearning has managed to offer.
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