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Bridging the design strategies that underlie learning experiences and entertainment games is difficult. A year and a half ago, Will Wright (the developer of the Sims) spoke at a conference held at Stanford University on education and entertainment. His games based on “sims” (simulated agents) are widely considered educationally oriented video games. Wright, talking about his development process, basically said – We built something on instinct. We put it into focus groups to see what people like and don’t like, threw out the stuff they didn’t like, and put in more of the stuff they liked. Then we had another focus group. The latest version of the Sims went through 12 stages of this, and in the end we had something that is a market bestseller. But our instinct wasn’t very good, and we had to go through 12 iterations. What we ended with wasn’t anything like what we started with.

To me, what was missing in this description was an attempt to simulate anything real. Will did not say that his group begins with a model of how a city runs, or how human relationships work, or how ecological systems function and then attempt to make that model entertaining. Instead he said, We just kept tweaking the entertainment part until we got that to the maximum level.


	We need to publicize exemplary illustrations that help us get from the old vocabulary to new vocabulary.

From a game perspective, that makes sense., and Will is not selling his products by saying this is how you learn to be a city planner or this is how you learn about human relationships. But it was a disillusioning talk from an educational perspective. There is an enormous gulf between design based researchers who start with an important educational problem, apply principles from learning theory, are faithful to the underlying model of reality, and work to make the result highly engaging -- and people who are designing fantasies for entertainment purposes without any underlying model, societal problem, or learning theory. For the entertainment game creators, the most important design principle is the 10 minute question (at this moment in the game, how do I keep people playing for 10 more minutes?”) rather than what participants are learning.

simSchool: A theme I am hearing that has come up in other contexts, particularly the serious games group, is that serious games are anything made not with entertainment as its primary focus.

So if we say that video games by the fact that they use the word “games” puts entertainment and sales as it’s number one focus, then a demarcation line could be the purpose for which teams come into this field. This speaks to your point that we need to have a nuanced language. Today’s language about games makes a barrier to the public’s understanding. Most people think that games are too violent and not worth anything, creating a barrier for serious games. This leads to our next question –

simSchool: What do we need to do to help people understand the value of games for education so that they can be mined for educational purposes?

Chris: We as designers struggle with the same challenges that all relatively new fields face. Even though games for learning are not new, our media now are so much more powerful that the genre has completely altered. Unfortunately, attempting to capture this difference by using the term “game” conjures up in the minds of the public, funders, and educators an unfortunate image, because entertainment oriented videogames are so prevalent. The public hears “game” and thinks of products such as the Grand Theft Auto series. Even if Grand Theft Auto games were redesigned to teach how to steal a car, educational designers are not describing this type of product. However, when most people hear the term “simulation,” they think of a relatively uninteresting experience involving tweaking controls to watch a phenomenon change. So descriptors based on prior media or on entertainment products don’t work well.


	Even though games for learning are not new, our media now are so much more powerful that the genre has completely altered.

New terms like “Multi-User Virtual Environment” suffer from a different problem; when you try to use it, somebody invariably asks, “What the heck is that?” How we bootstrap a new vocabulary to have widespread meaning is not easy; this takes some kind of universal, widely visible example to which everyone can refer. For example, because SimCity was so popular, we could refer to SimCity, and people would get a sense of a virtual environment populated by agents. We need to publicize exemplary illustrations that help us get from the old vocabulary to new vocabulary. ...to be contiuned in the next
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