| |July 20199To do better, we have to acknowledge an awkward fact: Instructional designers have spent too long focusing on the demands of the institutions for whom we work to "deliver content," while game designers have had to sink or swim in a marketplace in which their games will fail if they are not highly effective learning experiences. The end result, as Papert observed, is that "game designers have a better take on the nature of learning than curriculum designers." To make a great educational game, we need to think not about how a learning designer would design a game, but rather about how a game designer would design a learning experience.Here, in particular, are five critical things that designers know, and learning designers need to learn:1. It's good for an educational experience to be difficult. As Papert said, "Learning is essentially hard; it happens best when one is engaged in difficult and challenging activities." Game designers understand this instinctively--challenge is what makes games fun. The learning community--corporate training especially--has largely embraced the opposite concept--the idea that learning should be easy.2. It's okay for learners to fail.The first time playing any new game is usually a series of spectacular failures. In instructional design, it is axiomatic that you do not want your learners to fail, and if they do you want to treat them gently. Game designers know failures are all part of the excitement, and they dramatize rather than down playing them.3. Emotions drive engagement. Games are full of high-stakes situations and dramatic consequences, often wrapped in a compelling, detailed backstory. In education we tend to downplay emotional responses and edit out gritty, realistic details. Game designers, in contrast, embrace and put to good use what three millennia of accumulated wisdom about storytelling have taught us how to grab and hold an audience.4. Showing is better than telling.Doing is better than being shown. Game designers know that no game player ever wants to read instructions. If something can be learned by experience in a game, it will be, even though it may take considerable cleverness to engineer this. If there is no way for the user to get the knowledge they need from their own experience, they will be shown it--often in cinematic "cut scenes" that are more like watching a movie than like receiving instruction. In traditional learning design, again, this formula is almost inverted. The main event in learning has historically been the lecture, while letting the learners try things out for themselves has happened only they've been told everything there is to say about the subject--if it happens at all.5. You only learn what you can remember.In the end this basic truth about learning has been fully grasped by game designers, and largely missed by learning designers. Instructional design tends to focus on delivering the maximum amount of "content" possible, despite research that shows the learners generally retain only a small fraction of this material. Game designers know how to make things memorable, and they know that what isn't remembered doesn't help their users play the game.It will change the culture of learning almost entirely if learning designers start thinking like game designers. But it will change it for the better, and the result will be games that teach real-world skills rapidly and effectively, yet have learners begging to play them. Gregg Collins
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