Serious Games Moving Training Into A Gameplay Environment

by on 7 December, 2007 - 18:25

Serious Games help bring tacit knowledge to the surface

Via: Next Generation - When Work Becomes A Game

and Boxes and Arrows - The Design Behind The Design

TruSim,
formed in 2005, is a division of leading European independent developer
Blitz Games that was established to create products that tap the
burgeoning Serious Games market.

TruSim is developing prototypes, in conjunction
with commercial and specialist partners, as well as leading educational
institutions, that aim to demonstrate the potential of Serious Games as
engaging visualization and training tools.

“The
games industry is naturally broadening its horizons,” says Mary
Matthews, strategy and business development director at Blitz Games. “It’s
moving from being a niche entertainment medium into a mass market
entertainment medium in the same way that film and TV matured to look
at serious subjects.”

Currently TruSim is trialing a proof-of-concept prototype called Triage Trainer.
The game is set at the scene of a high-street explosion and designed
for use during Major Incident Medical Management and Support (MIMMS)
courses. It is being used to train clinicians, medical workers,
paramedics and first responders to the scene of a major incident in a
process called triage fifth, Mathews explains, which is when people
arrive at the scene of an incident and need to prioritize casualties
for order of treatment.

A scene from the Triage Serious Game created by TruSim

“Learning
through play is, after all, a well established educational concept, and
the kind of generation that's now learning is very, very familiar with
game play."

The automatic next step is to move training into a game play environment.

"Role play in corporate training is well established, well understood and effective. Role
playing in a virtual environment, however, has the advantage of time
saving because you don’t have to travel to one meeting place."

Private Virtual Worlds using Forterra's Olive Platform

"You
can also role [multi]play online, you can do it time and again, in
slightly different scenarios, or using different interfaces, or playing
from different perspectives, which you can’t do in a traditional role
playing exercise in a corporate environment.”

Legal Games

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Medical Games

University of Florida Project: Medical students to interview DIANA, a virtual patient

Pulse!! The Virtual Clinical Learning Lab created by BreakAway Ltd.

Game-like Activities Help Bring Tacit Knowledge To The SurfaceGames
create conceptual touchstones—shared references that bridge different
points of view and provide a common platform for conversation. That’s
what most design deliverables try to do, with varying degrees of
success.Games are participatory. Instead of the design team
holing up to produce some artifact for approval, games can involve a
broad spectrum of players, and that creates buy-in as well as common
ground for conversations. The accessibility of gameplay means that it’s
not just a team of specialists involved, and the diversity of
viewpoints from a broader group makes for better insight and innovation.Finally,
games tap into different ways of articulating ideas that help bring
tacit knowledge to the surface. Tacit knowledge is often the key to
successful requirements, and yet design teams often miss the implicit
assumptions and elements that people can’t articulate on demand: asking
people what they really need is likely to give anything but.Games can help surface this missing understanding.Original post: http://elianealhadeff.blogspot.com/2007/12/serious-games-moving-training-into.html