Game-based learning and simplicity

Thanks to Chris Brannigan of Caspian (and Kevin Corti of brand new Soshi Games) for pointing this simple little "mini-sim" in my direction.

Playing it clarified one of the challenges we've got as designers of learning games. One of the objections to gaming that I've stumbled across from prospective clients - once they've got past the much bigger hurdle of accepting that "play" is relevant in their organisation - is that of the perceived difficulty of playing games.

If you're a black belt, 24 carat gamer whose life revolves around the PS3, you'll readily accept that a typical console game may have hundreds or even thousands of functions and manipulations that you'll happily learn over an extended period. But if you're not a keen gamer you'll need to be drawn into the game play immediately through an interface that requires little or no "learning overhead". This is particularly important for clients in large organisations to whom the attraction of gaming is that it is "more engaging". But engagement is quickly undermined if there's any learning curve in terms of game-play.

One thing I'm finding exciting at the moment is that games designers are learning how to create compelling gaming experiences with starkly simply game mechanics - thanks largely thanks to the boom in casual and mobile games. Try Canabalt for instance. Last week I was on a train and was amused to see four people in the same carriage all playing Angry Birds on the iphone.

In the e-learning mainstream, the core mechanic of page-turning has rightly been widely criticised. But games designers are increasingly showing us that a very simple core mechanic can be used to create absorbing experiences if you get everything else right.

Comments

[Simon Bostock]

There's a great paper from 1994 on intuitive interfaces:
http://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html

The basic argument is that there are no intuitive interfaces, merely familiar.

I'm guessing this is true of games too - often a complex interface is necessary for an involving game. The simplicity of the eLearning interface is as much due to the simplicity of the content as anything else.