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To order reprints of any article in its original format, visit Scoopreprintsource.com FeatureGaming: Let Yourself Fail Forward ASSOCIATIONS NOW, October 2006 Don't kid yourself. Online games, once the province of the young, could soon change the way your association delivers education and certification programs. In this interview, two virtual characters explore the potential of gaming for associations. By: Elliott Masie Today's videogames are far more than just shoot 'em ups or Pac Man-style chase-and-collect mindless diversions. They could be a bold new way to deliver education and more--if associations are brave enough to pick up the controller and press "start," that is.
When I was asked to write an article about gaming, I had a moment of extreme anxiety. Sure, it would be easy as a 56-year-old learning analyst to write thousands of words about the power of the Next Generation phenomenon of gaming and expound on how it may become one of the engagement tools of the future for associations. But that would be so traditional. Why not actually enter into the virtual world of gaming to explore the potential of gaming? It took a few logins and fly-arounds, but I finally identified two virtual characters in the gaming world who agreed to be interviewed. They are NextGen Opus, a 26-year-old female character, and Silver Merit, a 56-year-old male with graying hair and a unique attitude. They live in Second Life, a massive, multiplayer gaming environment on the island of LearnLand, a virtual island where Fortune 500 companies such as American Express and Intel are experimenting with gaming. Masie: Why should association executives be concerned about gaming? Isn't that just something that kids do? NextGen: No way. Gaming is a human experience and is universal by both geography and age. As you walk down the aisle on your next airplane ride, look at the most popular book in the hands of passengers: Sudoku Puzzles. Our most senior folks (like my buddy Silver) love to play games. They like to be challenged, to try things, even to fail with a smile. I am meeting more and more of the older generation online in gaming and other social networking environments. Sure, digital games are more familiar to Digital Natives, the younger generation who grew up with computers and the Internet. Remember, they are your next generation of members and will expect to have a digital experience with your association that matches the rest of their online lives. What is a day in the life of a virtual character all about? Silver: First of all, I never sleep. One of my responsibilities as a virtual character in an online game is to be available 24/7, 365 days a year. You can find me online no matter what time of day you log in or what time zone in the world you are in. In fact, many of your members are likely to visit me after work, after the kids are asleep, or before they start their workdays. Personally, I live in an online world called Second Life. A member of your association can get a free ID and password to explore this world. They will have to choose a character's name and even choose the body shape, color, clothing, and attitude elements. I live on an island in Second Life that is a gated community. This means that only members of a specific association can enter it, which allows us to have safe and appropriate conversations and activities. Your association could create a space that represents the focus of your members and populate it with buildings, activities, media, and other elements. For example, on my island, LearnLand, since members are interested in corporate training, we have office and industrial settings that can be used to practice and discuss learning activities. How do people interact with your characters? NextGen: Depending on the game, people can interact with us using text, gestures, or sometimes with voice, using a headset. Often, players are interacting with objects such as a billboard that contains video, text, and even a quiz. Some games use a treasure-hunt model, where members have to explore a piece of virtual land to find designated items, such as an article, chart, artifact, or video segment. In a virtual land, you can do cool tricks that are not so easy in real life, such as flying (the ability to soar above and look down), hyperleaping (jumping to another part of the virtual world in a single bound), or leaving behind a virtual copy (a version of yourself that indicates when you might be back online). Games also include instant messenger, chat room, bulletin boards, and other social-networking functions. In some games and virtual worlds, people are interacting with other humans but through their virtual characters. How does gaming help the learning process? Silver: In three distinct ways. First of all, it engages people. Look at someone playing a game, and you will usually see a human who is concentrating, focusing, and using many of his or her senses and most of his or her brain. Watch a person playing chess, doing a crossword puzzle, or playing a complex videogame, and you will see a highly engaged person. Engagement can lead learners to have almost full-body involvement in the training process. Compare the body language of people sitting in a class, often passively watching PowerPoint slides, with a human highly engaged in a game. Gaming can stimulate the learner with visual effects, with a faster pace, and with the desire to win vs. lose. What else? NextGen: Our generation loves to fail on the way to success. That may not make sense to some parents, but we don't think of intermediate failure as something bad--rather, it's a step on the way to winning. For example, if we play a videogame, we don't want to win the first time through. If we do, the game is probably way too lame. We want to try and try and fail--and then succeed. This has huge implications for learning. If you are learning how to fly an airplane, you can crash the plane in a simulation game several times. Each time, you may be sad you failed, but other than the momentary emotion, you won't face any negative consequences. You can fail forward. In other words, you can fail until you succeed. In fact, if you were flying in an airplane, don't you want to have a pilot who has crashed many times in the simulator, followed by accountable, successful tests? Allowing failure in a game pushes learners to appreciate the far edges of their skills and competencies. And it doesn't have to be limited to flying airplanes or complicated machinery. Imagine using the same model to teach people how to offer great customer service, submit travel expense forms, or plan their retirements. Gaming allows us to fail our way to success. What's the third way that gaming helps learning? Silver: Let's face it: Humans love to compete. They like knowing that they did a bit better than the next person. Of course, you know that. Didn't you set up a videogame for the partners in a law firm who had to take yearly tests mandated by their profession? Yes. We placed a plasma screen in the firm's break room that continuously scrolled the top-20 high scores, along with their made-up names, such as Tort King. For the first time, lawyers who passed the exam asked if they could take it a second or third time to get a higher placement on the Leader Board. Silver: Typical. Gaming allows players to compete with gusto. Suppose an executive is interested in adding gaming to the association's offerings. What do you recommend? NextGen: My first suggestion would be to experiment with Easter eggs on their Web sites. A simple technique that came out of the DVD industry, Easter eggs are small, hidden links on the menu screen that link to special segments. There are complete bulletin boards dedicated to helping DVD buyers find the Easter eggs that link to a bloopers section or to a set of factoids about the cast. Ask your Web designers to add a few Easter eggs to the front and subsection screens of your site. They may be photos that have unexpected links in them or even a small Easter egg that floats on some screens. Link them to a page with some good stuff for members, then announce that your site contains 14 Easter eggs. Look at your Web logs, and you'll see members going to sections that were rarely visited before. You get two benefits: Members get the info on the Easter eggs, and you get them at least glancing at other sections. Silver: Hey, I'm a Jewish virtual character, so you might consider making them Digital matzos instead of Easter eggs. Actually, it is a good point that our need to be global and multicultural extends to the virtual gaming world. Another suggestion: Try adding preconference meetings in a virtual world. Build a few characters that resemble your keynoters or association president. Go to a public space, like Second Life, or design your own virtual world. Invite your members to attend a preconference set of sessions. You can even extend this to a marketplace that resembles your trade show floor. Invite your members to roam and interact and even build their conference agendas. Let the virtual characters you build have more "attitude" to push the themes and conversations that are key to your annual meeting. You could also set up competitions among chapters or regions to see how well and quickly they do on key quizzes or certifications--like you did at the law firm. NextGen: One other aspect of the changing Web is social networking. Think of spaces such as Facebook or MySpace, which my generation loves to use to do "me publishing" of its profiles, needs, talents, and resumes. You can use a more game-based front end of member profiles to see graphics that represent other members. Imagine if you could see icons and even characters of all members who are currently visiting your Web site. Click on one and you could see a member profile and launch a permission-based conversation with a new colleague. Can associations typically build these virtual environments, or do they need to use third-party developers? NextGen: There will be more easy-to-use gaming and virtual world spaces coming onto the market in 2007. As these mature, it should be a matter of dropping graphics, logos, characters, and content into these frameworks. Until then, there are online communities of developers and designers who will work for you. Be prepared--they might be quite young and live half a globe away. Silver: You can also take a more traditional approach and turn to your current Web designer or online education developer to add gaming components to your sites. They can hard code these from scratch or can license a variety of gaming toolkits or modules. Which online games leverage this approach effectively? NextGen: I love Food Force. It was developed by the United Nations as a free, downloadable game to build awareness of the challenges of battling hunger and starvation in the Third World. It combines challenge, navigation, and education. You really feel as though you are flying in a helicopter over clusters of people who are starving. The issues become very real and personal. Go to www.food-force.com. Silver: I am also impressed with the use of gaming and activity-focused Web sites that are aimed at school-age children. Check out www.bbc.co.uk/schools/citizenx, which was created by the BBC in the United Kingdom to teach about democracy. Even though it is aimed at teenagers and younger students, I find it fascinating and a great example for associations. What is the future for gaming? NextGen: Watch for gaming to migrate to telephones. This is really popular in Asia and is making its way to the United States. Games are perfect for the smaller screens and portable nature of phones. Add GPS and location services to games, and you can imagine a member of an association playing a game from his or her phone that would indicate if another member were close by--say, at the airport. We will also see education and certification programs get more interactive. I see virtual project spaces where members could work on committees and complex planning processes in an online fashion. Members could even watch the next year's conference evolve over the months rather then seeing the final program as a completed deed. It could open up the decision-making process to much wider participation. Silver: I can see the marketplace elements of gaming evolving. We might see games used for predictive processes. Imagine giving each member 100 virtual dollars to predict the future in very specific areas. They could vote for outcomes with their online dollars and win if their predictions came true. We are already seeing predictive marketplaces used by medical-device and pharmaceutical companies to gather and process physicians' views of significant trends. Any recommendations for association executives? NextGen: Build an advisory board of young scouts to help you monitor the changing nature of gaming and virtual worlds. And remember, let yourself fail forward. Label each innovation as an experiment or beta edition that will give you coverage when some of it fails before it succeeds. Silver: Have fun with gaming. It's a natural part of our human experience and does not deserve to be excluded from our association lives. NextGen and I look forward to seeing you online. Elliott Masie is president and CEO of The MASIE Center and The Learning CONSORTIUM, a coalition of 235 organizations focused on corporate learning. He is the host of "Learning 2006," November 5-8, Orlando, and a new member of The Center for Association Leadership Board of Directors. He runs a learning lab in Saratoga Springs, New York. E-mail: emasie@masie.com Related Sidebar: Who Wants to Play?
More Articles From Associations Now, October 2006
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