gaming,elearning,xbox,xbox live,xbox marketplace,adobe captivate
Let’s look into the eLearning concept of Technical Communication in our XBox example. eLearning teams are more familiarly known as Instructional Design in some corporations.
eLearning and Gaming: made for each other
Game-like learning was one important pillar of the Game Developer’s Conference in March 2007. I attended the GDC this year, and learned that Gaming is always something to watch closely for new inspiration in eLearning. Integrating gameplay into learning simply makes it more attractive for your audience.
Dance Dance Revolution (multi-platform) has quickly become a standard in schools for physical education class and for use during free time.
For anyone remotely interested in eLearning, gaming concepts are hot and becoming mainstream. Education through gaming – that’s really become the crown jewel of interactive entertainment. It’s a value add when a successful brand of product (game) can be used to actually improve someone’s education and/or lifestyle.
eLearning and Gaming: Adobe Captivate
Captivate Product Marketing Manager Silke Fleischer has constantly advocated the ‘soft skills’ potential of her product. The roleplaying elements of soft skills constantly remind me of the old text-based adventures / MUDs or that groundbreaking text game Zork.
The main question in Instructional Design (ID) and any training syllabus is how fast can someone learn, how well will they retain what they learn and how much will it cost.
Captivate went a long way in giving people a quick method to create these ‘choose your own adventure’ types of soft skills training scenarios.
Building up training scenarios within a program like Captivate teaches your potential Customer Service rep audience those face to face skills that everyone needs to learn without the time intensive one on one instruction.
Make demos for the software tutorials – Captivate has some good competition with Camtasia and MadCap’s Mimic – and your GUI-based learning is covered. Soft skills are more in the eLearning realm, and some Learning Management Systems (LMS) address this but Captivate makes it easier, IMHO.
XBox Live: Achievements – LMS for Gamers?!?
In order to fully understand and grasp the potential of the soft skills training that Captivate offers and cross reference that with our latest thread, one has to understand the potential of the XBox Live profiles and the Achievements.
Economists always talk about incentives, and incentivizing something. XBox Live does this with the Achievements.
As an aside, the book Freakanomics is the quickest and most entertaining way I’ve found to learn basic economic principles by the way – I have it on ipod and in book form and have used it as a gift two years ago.
Back to the Xbox Halo 3 article:
Since Halo 3 launched, gamers have unlocked more than 30 million achievements. In its first week alone, Halo 3 drove a record number of Xbox LIVE Gold Memberships as hundreds of thousands of new members gathered online to collectively compete and complete the game.
The concept is simple: You play the games, you have fun. You play the games and achieve objectives, you get Achievements. But if you play the games well with others, you get Achievements worth more points than single play.
Why are the XBox Achievements so appealing?
I think the appeal is that it breaks down goals into smaller bits. There are lessons learned there for ID teams everywhere. Gaming is fine, goals need to be defined clearly and as simply as possible (single sentence works within the Achievement section), and team-based learning within the right framework can build stronger teams along with completion of the objective.
Bottom line: If you can incentivize learning past the traditional and obvious reasons of self improvement, people will work together in ad hoc teams and problem solve their ways out of just about anything.
Community Incentives: Achievements
Microsoft is incentivizing its gaming community to become a community. Play single player games all you like, you take those earned Achievement points with you when you (MSFT hopes) inevitably go online with Xbox Live Gold. Xbox Live Silver is something everyone gets – a way to get your updates online, check your friends out, etc. Basic service vs premium service.
Recently I watched four thirtysomethings and two fortysomethings work for an entire four hour stretch to finish objectives in a one hour mission get 40 Achievement points in GRAW2 – Ghost Recon Adv Warfare 2.
For those gamers out there, this was for the Ultimate Defender achievement, meaning you have to face impossible odds for exactly sixty minutes and defend an objective.
As a test study for the Achievement segment of this blog post, I tried to get the Ultimate Defender.
OT: I’ve got an entire help file written for a squad based game under my belt from five years ago, so the tactics were easy for me to grasp. Communicating those tactics… well, I left that to the other more ’seasoned’ players who had rank on me.
My objectives I communicated to those who wanted to listen were simple, one sentence in nature.
So the failure rate was pretty high; imagine having to coordinate up to sixteen diverse players aged twelve to fifty to do what the Army or Marines do every day – but without the discipline and tactics they have instilled with their core basic training.
Hence the study on who actually achieved it, and how they did it. The teamwork however… Hey, I was there right alongside them. With a lousy DSL connection and everything. Of course I have yet to break a thousand points but then again, I have a family and this blog and that construction project so I’ve been more than a little busy.
How do you incentivize users to work well together with virtually no common training?
This was for 40 points. One of the gamers had 21,000 points already. Two others were in the 11,000 range. But you get a cool little badge icon in your profile and bragging rights. I have to say, given the data available I’m guessing the 40 points were the icing on top of an already very rewarding game.
Basically the Achievements still work to incentivize retention and gameplay. Of course it should go without saying that the content of the games are still paramount; but with competition like the Wii and PS3 Xbox has its niche well defended.
The achievements also made operating within the system more fun than, say, shooting all your teammates less than five minutes before the end of the game. Player Killing – PK’ing in game terms. Clearly antisocial behavior can’t be rewarded. For a really funny example of PK’ing, SouthPark has an episode featuring World of Warcraft which… well, even if you don’t like SouthPark it explains it all far better than I could.
XBox has a way to handle potential PK’ers also. Feedback. Hmm. Sounds like just about everyone’s interested in Feedback which leaves me wondering if the Cluetrain has left the station at Adobe. Microsoft gets it…
Software design does have to keep up though.
