Podcast 35: What makes a great learning game?
Welcome to this week's, a question of gamification. This week, I'm talking about what makes a great learning game. My name is An Coppens. I'm the chief game changer at Gamification Nation, and also the show host for this show.
Serious games must still be fun
We are working a lot on learning related games, HR related games, and games for all kinds of marketing related business purposes. One of the key things we focus in is both gamification and serious games for business usage. We don't just make games for fun, we want to make games that are fun, but also have a serious objective.
The definition of a serious game is a game designed with a serious objective in mind, in our case that is typically a business related scenario.
I want to make clear, when we say serious games, usually people think, they're boring. To be honest, a learning game should still be fun to play. If it's not fun to play, you are immediately causing a barrier for someone to make the most out of their learning experience. First things first, learning games should still be fun.
How do you make a game fun? There are many ways of doing that. Interaction is definitely a requirement. It differs very much from a training setup for eLearning, for example, where you just click next. A learning game should be making you think, making you realize that maybe I don't know everything here and I need to explore, I need to find out, I need to discover what else there is to learn. Encouraging curiosity to delve deeper into the topic.
Learning by experiencing
What makes a great learning game? In my view, there are a couple of things. I believe a good learning game creates an experience where you are learning by doing, whether that's the doing of whatever it is you need them to learn mimicked in a digital space or in a board game space where you go through the same motions and emotions of what a real scenario would be like.
For example, we made a cybersecurity board game where the players have to defend the company when a cyber attack happens. The game was created to help salespeople to sell more cybersecurity insurance and understand why a business owner should have such insurance. It's a very specific objective. We created an experience, there was emotion in the game because people could lose their business, they could be fined a lot of money, they could lose a lot of money based on cyber attacks that happened. You couldn't control the attack, but you could control your chosen response as a team sitting around the board trying to collaboratively defend the business. We mimicked real life scenarios.
Life like experiences work best for adults
With adult learners, in my opinion, the more closely it is linked to real life experiences, the more chance you have of it being a great learning game. Because you immediately provide the context that they need in order to have the ability to make sense of learning. If you think of our brain as a sense-making device, making sense of something is linking it to things that we can relate to, things that we understand. Complex topics for example, cybersecurity to a laymans person could result in responses like: I don't know nothing about cyber and it may make them run the other way. No matter how well you explain it in your learning. Experiencing what happens, experiencing what can be done is one thing. Actually going through the emotions and experiencing an attack in a game from the same perspective as the prospective client. Also gives the same kind of feedback as if you would, have expereinced it first hand in reality. It may not be as extreme as what would happen in real life in case you were the owner of a business under cyber attack. Creating an experience that resembles real life, with similar choices and consequences, is one of the key ingredients in my view for a good learning game.
Appeal to the intrinsic motivation of the learner
The other aspects of good learning game,
Serious games must still be fun
We are working a lot on learning related games, HR related games, and games for all kinds of marketing related business purposes. One of the key things we focus in is both gamification and serious games for business usage. We don't just make games for fun, we want to make games that are fun, but also have a serious objective.
The definition of a serious game is a game designed with a serious objective in mind, in our case that is typically a business related scenario.
I want to make clear, when we say serious games, usually people think, they're boring. To be honest, a learning game should still be fun to play. If it's not fun to play, you are immediately causing a barrier for someone to make the most out of their learning experience. First things first, learning games should still be fun.
How do you make a game fun? There are many ways of doing that. Interaction is definitely a requirement. It differs very much from a training setup for eLearning, for example, where you just click next. A learning game should be making you think, making you realize that maybe I don't know everything here and I need to explore, I need to find out, I need to discover what else there is to learn. Encouraging curiosity to delve deeper into the topic.
Learning by experiencing
What makes a great learning game? In my view, there are a couple of things. I believe a good learning game creates an experience where you are learning by doing, whether that's the doing of whatever it is you need them to learn mimicked in a digital space or in a board game space where you go through the same motions and emotions of what a real scenario would be like.
For example, we made a cybersecurity board game where the players have to defend the company when a cyber attack happens. The game was created to help salespeople to sell more cybersecurity insurance and understand why a business owner should have such insurance. It's a very specific objective. We created an experience, there was emotion in the game because people could lose their business, they could be fined a lot of money, they could lose a lot of money based on cyber attacks that happened. You couldn't control the attack, but you could control your chosen response as a team sitting around the board trying to collaboratively defend the business. We mimicked real life scenarios.
Life like experiences work best for adults
With adult learners, in my opinion, the more closely it is linked to real life experiences, the more chance you have of it being a great learning game. Because you immediately provide the context that they need in order to have the ability to make sense of learning. If you think of our brain as a sense-making device, making sense of something is linking it to things that we can relate to, things that we understand. Complex topics for example, cybersecurity to a laymans person could result in responses like: I don't know nothing about cyber and it may make them run the other way. No matter how well you explain it in your learning. Experiencing what happens, experiencing what can be done is one thing. Actually going through the emotions and experiencing an attack in a game from the same perspective as the prospective client. Also gives the same kind of feedback as if you would, have expereinced it first hand in reality. It may not be as extreme as what would happen in real life in case you were the owner of a business under cyber attack. Creating an experience that resembles real life, with similar choices and consequences, is one of the key ingredients in my view for a good learning game.
Appeal to the intrinsic motivation of the learner
The other aspects of good learning game,
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