Learning From Game Designers

“Several reviews of the literature on gaming over the last forty years, ... have consistently found that games promote learning and/or reduce instructional time across multiple disciplines”

Incentivising Learning

Game designers are really, really good at motivating players to continue to improve. A lot of the literature focuses on how games reward players for improving their gameplay – e.g. leaderboards; virtual trophies; progressing to higher/further levels of gameplay etc. There are clearly ways in which such reward systems could be adapted to learning activities but, perhaps more importantly for us as learning designers, it’s important to consider how good game designs set objectives and skill development targets.

Game designers often take a more granular approach to setting objectives or encouraging skill development than most learning designers. Games often provide stretch objectives and activities which are just in advance of where the players’ skills lie to encourage them to make small adjustments and/or build on previous in-game learning and improvements in their “practice” which accumulate in effect as they progress.

Failure As A Learning Tool

As learners, we are at our most receptive to try something new when we have failed at a task. At the point of failure, it becomes clear to us that success doesn't lie in repeating our previous actions. Therefore, we need to change our approach and try something new in order to succeed. In formal, certificated learning, failure has negative connotations and is seen as something to be avoided rather than embraced. But, in game environments, failure is used to encourage the player to try a something new - and to keep trying until they learn/ develop the strategy they need to adopt for success. Furthermore, even though most of us wouldn’t fear failure in the game environment, we are most likely the very people who would fear failure in a learning environment. The lesson for us here is to make failure an accepted and valued part of the learning process, just as it is in game play.

"In game based learning making a mistake - or trial and error - is a primary way to learn and is considered the motivation for players to keep on trying.”

“a key part of games is that you get to fail. Games should give you contexts to practice failure and recovery safely ... this willingness to take risks and learn through failure is a characteristic trait of the gamer generation”

So, it’s not a matter of whether we should engineer situations where learners might fail, but rather how can we create situations where learners can fail ... and benefit from the experience? Given the learning context, it’s important that it’s clear that we separate the learning process from the assessment process and make it clear to learners that failure is an expected and potentially valuable part of the learning process.

Immediacy of Application

One of the key features of learning how to succeed in a game environment is that you apply what you learn immediately, and the results of that application are immediately apparent (i.e. you move on to the next challenge or level up or ...). This application of learning acts as a reinforcer and is actually something we in learning and development have researched extensively (see ‘Situated Learning’ section above re. the importance of context in learning).

“e-Learning ... has focused on content, getting out the content, but they leave out the context.”

“games are much more powerful; they provide situated experiences in which players are immersed in complex, problem solving tasks.”

This immersion in complex scenarios and environments ultimately removes the time delay between knowledge acquisition and potential for application, thus game players are provided with opportunities to reinforce their learning in the game environment much more effectively than is the case in most learning designs. Game design in effect, takes account of and incorporates the key messages from research in situated learning/situated cognition (see above) and creates environments to exploit this to allow players to develop and progress. Clearly this has relevance to us in our consideration of developing effective learning designs.

Feedback

In most formal learning environments, there is usually a delay between learner action (e.g. submitting an assessment) and feedback on that action (e.g. grades and comments on work submitted). This can run anywhere from a few days to a few weeks and crucially it may be beyond the point where the learner can apply it to their next assessment. In this scenario, the feedback becomes a ‘historical’ record rather than being something which can influence future learner activity. In the corporate learning world there is frequently no feedback on individuals’ application of learning in practice at all. Staff go on training courses, learn something new and return to the workplace where it is hoped they will apply their learning – with no further contact with the course facilitator and therefore, no access to expert feedback on their performance. Both these scenarios make it difficult for the learners to gauge the quality of their work and modify their approach to attain improved performance.

By contrast, in game environments, feedback is most often instant and requires the player's immediate action to address that feedback or loops the player back through the experience they’ve just completed to try alternative approaches to completing the task at hand. The challenge for us in learning and development is, how can we move closer to the game design scenario where we can offer timely, useful, applicable feedback to learners at scale and what are the benefits of doing so?