This book is a great place to start learning about digital games for education and training. Visit Marc's personal web siteto read chapters from the book or games2train to play some actual games.

Prensky, Mark (2001). Digital game-based learning. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Premise

Computer games have engagement but little content. Academia and business have lots of content but little engagement. Why not put the two together? The key premise of this book is that by combining content and engagement, one can fundamentally improve the nature of education and training.

Prediction

Why Will Digital Game-Based Learning (DGBL) be big in the future?

• It meets the learning styles of new and future generations
• It’s motivating because it’s fun
• It’s versatile (adaptable to almost any subject, information or skill) and effective

Size

The games business is BIG---at $7.5 billion dollars per year, it’s about the same size as the movie business). So is the learning business (an estimated $2 trillion dollars).

Convergence

While there’s talk about the "convergence" of movies and games, there’s little talk about the convergence of games and education.

CH. 1: THE DIGITAL GAME-BASED LEARNING REVOLUTION

From the sheer size of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles, it’s apparent that digital gaming is a big business ($7.5B per year in the U.S. alone).

Contrast this huge expo with the American Society of Trainers and Developers’ conference, which is less than one tenth as big.

• Who Are E3 Attendees? They’re today’s trainees and students.
• Who are ASTD Attendees? They’re today’s trainers.

See a problem?

People Hate Training

Many people seem to hate training. It’s common to sign up but not show up. The tongue-in-cheek motto of a lot of training and education seems to be "Don’t worry----be crappy!"

Prediction

The "games generation" will someday start to demand training and education that is not boring. And it will get to the point that teachers, trainers, and administrators can no longer afford to resist them.

Two Premises

• Learners have changed in some important ways.
• For the first time, a generation is growing up deeply experienced with computer and video games

Quote

Back in 1988, Dr. Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said "only 20 to 25 percent of students currently in school can learn effectively from traditional methods of teaching."

Prensky’s Goals

• What DGBL is
• Why it is different and better
• Where it can be effective
• How you can create and use it

Games have been used for awhile, mostly for review and reinforcement. But they can be used for much more: boring material, difficult subject matter, difficult audiences, complex processes, "what-if" analyses, and strategy development.

The Promise of DGBL

• Provides motivation to learn boring or complicated material
• Small development teams working together can create materials useful to thousands
• The free market will accelerate development of better games
• Eventually, game creation tools will be even simpler and more powerful, allowing nearly any teacher or trainer to create his/her own games
• Recognizable "brands" will emerge
• The movement will grow to be worldwide
• The Internet will migrate from being a conduit to deliver boring training in isolation to a competitive interactive forum.
• An industry similar to that for the existing game industry (e.g., magazines, conferences, reviews) could emerge

• Sesame Street, one of the first means of making learning entertaining as well as educational, is over 30 years old.
• Pong, the first computer game, appeared over twenty five years ago in 1974.
• Half of all corporate employees were born after 1961. This means that even the oldest of this 50% cohort (ages 30-41) have been playing video games since their junior high-school days, and an increasing number never knew a world without video games. Many of this new generation have never known a world of rotary dial phones, network-only television, or analog music.
• MTV began in 1981, over twenty years ago.
• The IBM PC also was introduced in 1981.

The Average Teenager Today:

• Watches over 3 hours of TV per day
• Surfs the Internet 10 minutes to 1 hour per day
• Plays 1 and ½ hours of video games per day

By the time they become our corporate workers, they will have nearly as much experience with electronic entertainment as they do with school.

Quote

• "Technology is only technology if it was invented before you were born."
• --Alan Kay

Rewiring the Brain

Scientists used to think that physical changes in the brain ("brain rewiring") didn’t occur after about age three. They were wrong. True, adult brains aren’t as "plastic" as kid brains, but rewiring apparently goes on throughout our lives.

However, rewriting adult brains is not easy: it takes an estimated 100 minutes a day, five days a week, for 5-10 weeks (i.e., 2500 to 5000 hours) of sustained attention to accomplish significant rewiring. Do those statistics remind you of anything? Right---the amount of time the average teenager spends playing video games! Just as television rewired our brains, video games are rewiring theirs.

Researcher Barbara Greenfield of UCLA believes that video games:

• Build spatial skills in interpreting images in 3d space and in mental rotation and folding
• Enhance the process of "rule discovery" through observation, trial and error, and hypothesis testing.
• Augment comprehension of scientific simulations
• Enhance skill at "dividing attention"

A Second Language?

Some say that for today’s young people, computers have become a "second language." By analogy, learning a second language in later life is harder, one tends to be less proficient in it, and one usually speaks it with a pronounced accent.

Different From TV

TV is for passive watching; games are for active manipulating. Older generations, weaned on TV, became accustomed to passive educational experiences because they mirrored their experiences with entertainment. Today’s young people, weaned on interactivity in their entertainment, increasingly expect the same from education.

Short Attention Spans

Older trainers often accuse today’s students of having short attention spans. "Sure they have short attention spans," says Edward Westhead of U Mass at Amherst, "---for the old ways of learning."

Question

How is it that the growing avalanche of kids with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) can play video games for hours with rapt attention?

The Negative Side of Rewiring

What has been lost in this brain rewiring? Many teachers lament their students’ dearth of skills in reflection—the process of replaying past experiences in order to generalize and create and adapt our mental models. Modern games might have to address how to encourage and develop our capacity for reflection.

Ten Ways the Games Generation is Different

• Twitch speed vs. conventional speed
• Parallel processing vs. linear processing
• Graphics first vs. text first
• Random access vs. step-by-step
• Connected vs. standalone
• Active vs. passive
• Play vs. work
• Payoff vs. patience
• Fantasy vs. reality
• Technology-as friend vs. Technology-as-foe

CH. 3: WHY EDUCATION AND TRAINING HAVE NOT CHANGED

Our learning and training systems are broken. Witness:

• Declining reading and math scores
• High dropout rates
• The increasing number of students who require remediative courses
• >45% of American adults scored at 1 or 2 in the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey

Most training and education today is BORING---but it doesn’t have to be.

Content

Most learning today is focused on content rather than learners. Most debates in education focus on what to teach, not how to teach it or how it can be learned.

AFTRB

Most training classes are also focused on content, each one yielding "Another F&%#ing Three-Ring Binder".

Tell/Test

A distressingly high percentage of modern corporate "training" consists of trainers reading every bullet point from PowerPoint presentations. We tell them, then we test them. Why?

• Inexperience
• Love of storytelling
• We don’t know how to do anything else
• The entrenched technologies of printing and reading

Quote

• "Why, in spite of the face that teaching by pouring in, learning by passive absorption, are universally condemned, that they are still so entrenched in practice?"
• --John Dewey, 1918

A Brief History of Learning and Technology

1) In the beginning: an apprenticeship model where teachers demonstrated and learners practiced

2) At some point, schematics composed of pictures and symbols were added.

3) Spoken language was developed, allowing teachers to describe to trainees how to do something without the learners actually doing it,

4) The Socratic method used dialogues that interspersed description with questions.

5) The invention of written language allowed learning via books, albeit for a privileged few (books had to be hand copied and few people could read or write)

6) The printing press was invented, disseminating books more widely and spurring more people to learn to read and write. Mass education evolved as a product of the printing press. Learners are divided into groups, knowledge is divided into disciplines and textbooks.

7) The Industrial Revolution applies concepts such as standardization and assembly lines to education.

8) Standardized testing grew out of WWI.

Now all the ingredients are in place for our "tell-test" system of teaching, which has been around for the past 300 years.

Technology and Schools

Many new technologies arose after tell-test, but they failed to replace tell-test. Will multimedia computing follow likewise, or is it truly a revolutionary technology?

Revolutionary

We have seen changes that suggest it’s revolutionary

• written language has become less dominant
• linear organization has declined in favor of random access (hypertext) organization
• passive media like books and TV are being supplemented with active ones
• speed continues to increase, providing even less time for reflection

Blank Slates

In times past, learners were often viewed as tabula rasas (blank slates), who, knowing nothing about the topic, wait to be filled with information. But people today are immersed in a media sea, with more varied backgrounds and experiences, so they only rarely come to the classroom knowing nothing about the topic. The challenge is to find out what each of them knows, since it’s likely to be different. That challenge is so difficult that we usually give up and continue to tell everyone everything, virtually guaranteeing that everyone will be bored at least some of the time.

Point

We have to stop telling, because almost nobody’s listening.

The Great "How People Learn" Debate

Learning is a highly complex phenomenon involving a huge number of variables. Thus, asking how to learn is like asking "what is the one true religion?" It’s not going to resolve itself soon because less than 1% of school budgets are spent on research.

Different Definitions of Learning

Not only are there myriad theories of learning, there are literally dozens of different definitions of learning.

Quite a bit of research is already available. However, it needs to be:

• Collated
• Presented in an accessible (rather than academic) style

"Cuts"

A lot of discussion goes on about learning styles. Prensky thinks it more important to "cut" or delineate the question of how to learn according to the type of thing that is to be learned.

• How do people learn facts?
• How do people learn skills?
• How do people learn judgment?
• How do people learn processes?

And so on.

Here’s his list:

We learn:

• Facts: through questions, memorization, association, and drill.
• Skills: though imitation, feedback, continuous practice, and increasing challenge.
• Judgment: through hearing stories, asking questions, making choices, and getting feedback and coaching.
• Behaviors: though imitation, feedback, and practice.
• Processes: explanation and practice.
• Theories: logical explanation and questioning.
• Theory Creation & Testing: through experimentation and questioning.
• Reasoning: through puzzles and examples.
• Procedures: through imitation and practice.
• Creativity: through playing.
• Language: through imitation, practice, and immersion.
• Programming: through principles and graduated tasks.
• Observation: through examples, doing, and feedback.
• Speech & Performance: through memorization, practice, and coaching.
• Dynamic Systems: through observation and experimentation.

The Role of Practice

Notice how many of the above include practice? Most school and training doesn’t provide much in the way of practice. Since it’s necessary, however, it’s left to the students.

A lot of practice is necessary but boring. How can we make it more interesting? With games.

Does Instructional Design Help or Hurt?

Instructional Design is logical, but it often isn’t creative.

Back to Tell-Test

Other reasons we continue to use tell-test even though we know it doesn’t work:

• Money: tell-test is the cost effective, allowing us to teach many people at a minimal level of acceptance.
• We don’t know what learners want and need
• Even is we have some idea of what it is, we don’t know how to do it.
• It’s a big, fragmented system.
• The reformers are fragmented as well.
• We need to get the infrastructure built first.
• It might mess with the system.
• It (the existing system) sort of works.
• Retraining trainers and teachers is hard.
• Accountability is harder.

CH. 4: DIGITAL GAME-BASED LEARNING

Learner-Centered Education

What, instead of tell-test, education began with the learner’s experience—combining what he/she knows with what they need to know and finding out how it can be learned quickly and in an engaging fashion.

• Current and Recent Approaches to Learner-Centered Education
• Learn at your own pace
• Learn in your own learning style
• Learn according to your Intelligences
• Select only the learning objects you need or want
• Work on problems you find relevant
• Devise your own path through the material
• Let the system adapt to your input

Learning Technologies are a Double-Edged Sword

• Computers have progressed amazingly fast. Learning software has not.
• Many learning technologies aid the teacher, not the students
• The web has actually brought us backwards as far as engaging, non-shovelware content is concerned.

Enormous Potential

If little progress has been made on the learning software side, enormous progress has been made on the entertainment software side---in less than 30 years, they’ve produced a new technology that most youths (and many adults) are addicted to.

As entertainment goes, gaming is cost-efficient:

• The average movie now costs $50 million and utilizes a team of >100 persons.
• The average game title costs $3.4 million and uses a small development team.

If We Combine Training and Games:

• People will want to do it
• It will take a wide variety of forms
• For given content, it will offer choices in game styles
• It will be "stealth learning"
• It will be combined with other types of learning

What If the Training and Education World Was Like the Game World?

The game world is totally user-centered. If you’re a game player, a lot of people cater to you: "buzz" for upcoming releases, free demos, interesting ads, good packaging, dozens of game-related magazines, hundreds of game-related web sites---in short, everything you need to know to make an informed choice. And you expect a lot for your money---continual improvement, networking, good interface, easy to learn, engaging, upgrades and patches, new games in the series…What if this were true for education?

If you’re a game designer, you’re constantly thinking about your audience.: "How can I engage them for hour after hour?" You think a lot about the types of interaction your users will have. You consider how to get information across with a minimum of "telling". You have a real passion for your job--- you want to be clever and innovative, and you don’t want to just be good, you want people raving about your work.

If you’re a game seller, you find out what your audience likes, what they want, how your products can be improved, how your games can incorporate the latest technologies, how you can draw in new audiences, what’s the next big thing, and how to build a recognizable brand that keeps consumers loyal.

Motivating Today’s Learners

Learning is hard. It takes effort. Traditionally, teachers motivate students, and they should continue to do so. But wouldn’t it be nice if they have some help---i.e., if the learning method itself could motivate learners?

Potential Motivators

• Self-motivation
• Fear
• Approval
• Greed
• Power
• Lust
• Self-actualization
• Ego Gratification
• Winning
• Pleasure
• Fun

PART TWO: HOW GAMES TEACH AND WHY THEY WORK

CH. 5: FUN, PLAY, AND GAMES

Chart: Why Games Engage Us

• Games are a form of fun. That gives us enjoyment and pleasure.
• Games are a form of play. That gives us intense and passionate involvement.
• Games have rules. That gives us structure.
• Games have goals. That gives us motivation.
• Games have outcomes and feedback. That gives us learning.
• Games are adaptive. That gives is flow.
• Games have win states. That gives us ego gratification.
• Games have conflict/competition/challenge/opposition. That gives is adrenaline.
• Games have problem-solving. That sparks our creativity.
• Games have interaction. That gives is social groups.
• Games have representation and story. That gives us emotion.

Nothing else provides all of these.

Games provide amusement, but they also provide us with enjoyment and pleasure, and those latter two characteristics aren’t frivolous---quite the contrary, we take enjoyment and pleasure at some of the most serious things in life.

Why the Resistance to Games?

• The word "fun" can be positive (enjoyment and pleasure) or negative (frivolity or ridicule). Perhaps the negative connotations are the reason why the training and educational establishments have been resistant to game-based learning.
• Many people equate training with pain, even want it ("no pain, no gain"). The flip side is the assumption that if it’s actually fun, it can’t be useful.
• Religion may play a role. Of which tree did Adam and Eve partake? The tree of knowledge. Therefore, knowledge can be construed as the cause of human suffering.
• Remember that for thousands of years, the Church controlled education, and very little of it involved fun.
• The "Madonna/Whore Complex" may extend to education: i.e., education is serious, games are fun, and just as a woman can’t be both Madonna and whore, games can’t be fun and educational.

Fun and Learning

The principle roles of fun in the learning process seem to be to create relaxation and motivation.

Play

Play has nearly 40 definitions and has been the subject of several influential books (e.g., Homo Ludens; Man, Play, and Games). Here are some of their points:

• Play is something one chooses to do.
• Play is intensely and utterly absorbing.
• Play promotes the formation of social groupings.

Play is a cultural and mammalian universal. Some scientists think it’s our brains’ favorite way of learning.

Of course children play, but so do adults: they play with their kids, they play games. However, most adults tend to view work and play as separate. There are exceptions: musicians, actors, some scientists, and many successful people who say they think of their work as playing..

Quote

• "If A is success in life, A equals x plus y plus z. X is work, y is play, and z is keeping your mouth shut."
• --Albert Einstein

The Media Lab

The Media Lab at MIT has a group called The Epistemology and Learning Group. Don’t let the name fool you: funded by gaming companies, they study play and learning. They brought us terms like hard fun and lifelong kindergarten.

Starbuck & Webster (1991) found that play boils down to two common elements: games elicit involvement and give pleasure. They also found that players concentrate more, are persistent, become absorbed, learn better, and were more creative.

Games

Fun and play are rather abstract and unstructured. However, games, as organized play, harness the power of fun and play while adding structure.

Games have:

• rules
• goals and objectives
• outcomes and feedback
• conflict/competition/challenge/opposition
• interaction
• representation or story

Flow

Researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi characterizes "flow" as a state where:

• You’re utterly absorbed
• You get distortions of your sense of time
• You lose your sense of self during the flow state but it reemerges even stronger afterwards

Games seem to encourage flow states.

Other Types of Interactions

Toys

Toys are interactions that lack rules, goals, and objectives. The identity of toys has more to do with the physical qualities of the object. However, it’s easy to turn toys into games---just add a goal.

Stories

Narratives involve storytelling, an ancient and powerful human force. Stories are especially good at engaging emotions. However, it’s turned out to be difficult to combine storytelling and interactivity.

Tools

In the computer sense, tools are interactive programs (e.g., work processors, spreadsheets, authoring systems) that are used to make other things. Tools can be included as part of games or as a way to customize games.

Simulations

Simulations are complex beasts, and can be stories, games, or toys.

What’s So Special About Computer Games?

Computer games deliver an Enhanced "Play Experience":

• Computers take care of the boring stuff like outlawing illegal moves, computing outcomes of actions, etc.
• Computer games are generally faster and more responsive
• Computer games can simulate things impractical or impossible in real life.
• Computer games have good graphics.
• Computer games can be played against real people or computer-generated opponents.
• With networked computer games, anyone in the world is a potential player.
• Computer games allow for a huge number of options.
• Computer games can accommodate a vast amount of content.
• Computer games can adapt to different levels of proficiency.
• Computer games can be instantly updated.
• Computer games can be easily modified, extended or customized

Two Older Game Taxonomies

• Man, Play, and Games: competition, chance, simulation, and movement.
• The Art of Computer Game Design: board, card, athletic, children’s, computers.

Prensky’s Game Taxonomy

Action

a. Twitch arcade

b. Side scrollers

c. Platform jumping

d. Maze

e. Third-person shooters

• Adventure: Explore a world, pick up stuff, solve puzzzes (E.g., Zork Zelda, Myst, Riven)
• Fighting: E.g., Mortal Kombat, Virtua Fighter
• Puzzle: E.g., Tetris
• Role-Playing: "Dungeons & Dragon"-like games (e.g., Ultima, EverQuest)
• Simulation: E.g., Sim City, The Sims
• Sports: E.g., NFL Football
• Strategy: E.g., Civilization, Roller Coaster Tycoon

Principles of Good Computer Game Design

• Balance: challenging but fair, neither too hard nor too easy
• Creative rather than formulaic.
• Character: a game’s depth and richness
• Tension: the player wants the goal, but it’s hard to achieve
• Energy: movement, momentum, and pacing.

Other Elements

• A clear overall vision
• A constant focus on the player experience
• A strong structure
• Highly adaptive
• Easy to learn, hard to master
• Stays in "flow"
• Provides frequent rewards rather than penalties
• Includes exploration and discovery
• Provides mutual assistance (one thing helps to solve another)
• Has a useful interface
• Can save games

"Eye Candy"

There’s a distinction between how a game looks vs. how it plays. While great graphics ("eye candy") enhances games, it also has increased development costs.

Violence

Violent games get a lot of press, s it’s easy to overlook that outside the fighting and 3d shooter genres, the games usually aren’t violent.

Gender

While computer games were initially "boy toys", more and more girls and women are playing them.

The "Language" of Digital Games

Every medium has its own language: film has close-ups, two-shots, etc. Here are some elements of the language of computer games:

• all things can be clicked on
• you can click and drag
• you move people by selecting them and clicking where you want them to go
• hidden combinations of keys do interesting things
• "Easter Eggs" are hidden surprises
• Many games have "cheat codes"
• Games can be saved and reloaded
• There’s almost always more than one way to do something.

Why DGBL Works (Prensky)

• Engagement
• Interactivity
• The way the first two are put together to form an individual context

Why DGBL Works (Ahlers & Garris)

• Opportunities for success lead to a sense of purpose
• Curiosity appeal leads to fascination
• Simulated danger leads to stimulation
• Social reinforcement leads to a sense of accomplishment

How do these Occur?

• Opportunities for Success: game goal & rules, control of one’s destiny
• Curiosity: surprise, complexity, mystery, humor
• Simulated Danger: conflict, sounds, graphics, pace
• Social reinforcement: real (conversations with other players) and simulated (scoreboards, game interactions, bots)

How Do You Combine Computer Games and Learning?

Think of a 2 x 2 contingency table, with low and high learning and low and hgh engagement.

Selecting a Game Style

• Challenge
• Fantasy
• Curiosity

Critical Characteristics for Fun Learning and Game Play (Ahlers & Garris)

• Imaginary situation
• Rule-governed
• Goals specified
• Competitive/Cooperative
• Progressive Difficulty
• Sounds Effects
• Dynamic Graphics
• User Control
• Uncertain Outcome
• Simulated Danger
• Performance Feedback
• High Response Rates
• Informational Complexity

Audience Analysis

• Age
• Gender
• Competitiveness
• Previous experience with games

Techniques Used in Interactive Learning

• Practice and feedback
• Learning by doing
• Learning from mistakes
• Goal-oriented learning
• Discovery learning
• Task-based learning
• Question-led learning
• Role playing
• Coaching
• Constructivist learning
• Multisensory learning
• Selecting from learning objects
• Intelligent tutoring

Categories of Digital Learning Games

• Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic: in intrinsic games, the content is an integral part of the game structure; in extrinsic games, it’s not.
• Hard-wired vs. "engines", "templates", or "shells": Hard-wired games are programmed for one purpose, while template, shells, and engines can be modified to suit different domains.
• Tightly- vs. loosely-linked games: tightly-linked games are constructed around fixed sets of content, whereas in a loosely-linked game the content is essentially separate from the game and is linked only by "hooks"
• Reflective vs. action games: Action ("twitch") games offer little opportunity for reflection, while puzzle, role-playing, and some other types of games have a slower pace that encourages reflection.
• Synchronous vs. asynchronous games: synchronous games take place in "real time", whereas asynchronous games are turn-based.
• Single-player vs. Multiplayer games
• Session-based vs. persistent state games: in persistent state games, games states can be saved.
• Video-based vs. animation-based games
• Narrative-based vs. Reflex-based games: narrative games emphasize story development, while reflex-based games emphasize reacting quickly to stimuli.

Notes About Interfaces

• They don’t have to be simple (e.g., the piano keyboard is not a simple interface, but is nonetheless effective)
• Many existing processes (e.g., spreadsheets) can become DGBL with the simple addition of an interface.
• Grafting game-like elements onto content doesn’t necessarily make it a game.

Questions

• Is this game fun enough that someone who is not in its target audience would want to play it (and would learn from it)?
• Do people think of themselves as "players" or as "trainees/students"?
• Is the experience addictive?
• Are the players skills and knowledge improving at a rapid rate?
• Does the game encourage reflection on what has been learned?
  

Hopefully, that's enough to give you the flavor of this recommended book. Here are the other chapters:

PART THREE: WHAT LEADING ORGANIZATIONS ARE DOING

CH. 9: DIGITAL GAME-BASED LEARNING IN BUSINESS

(41 examples and case studies)

CH. 10: DIGITAL GAME-BASED LEARNING IN THE MILITARY

PART FOUR: IMPLEMENTATION

CH 11: BRINGING DIGITAL GAME-BASED LEARNING INTO YOUR ORGANIZATION