Learning Leaders: Sue Bohle on the Growth of Serious Games in Corporate eLearning

One of the first mediaprofessionals to recognize the potential of serious games in eLearning, SueBohle is a pioneer and industry leader. She is executive director of the SeriousGames Association and produces the Serious Play Conference, an annual gatheringof thought leaders who share information and mentor eLearning professionals to advancethe industry. I recently spoke with Sue about the tremendous growth andpotential of serious games in corporate training and eLearning. The interviewhas been edited for clarity and length.

Pamela S. Hogle: Where’s theimpetus coming from to bring serious games into corporate eLearning?

Sue Bohle: Seriousgames are moving toward adoption in all industries, and therefore everydiscipline of learning is looking at whether or not games can be used to make trainingmore productive, more efficient, as well as more engaging.

In the corporate space, I wouldsay that interest is coming from youth and new employees. They might be inalmost any position within the company, but sales, marketing, or humanresources are the main three entry points. They may have played games as achild, and they see how the challenges and reward system relates to learning anything. They may start talking about atopic within the company, and someone asks, “How did you learn all of that?”and they say, “It was from a game.” Traditional video games, like role-playinggames—or World of Warcraft, for thatmatter—develop certain knowledge bases or skills that may bring a student whowas not interested in school back to learning; another, more serious, youngperson may see that what they learned playing a game is applicable to their businesslife.

There’s some resistance—thehigher-ups don’t yet understand the value, but some business professors thinkthat the CEOs of the future should understand that a lot of future trainingwill be done with games.

A really interestingapplication of serious games is to differentiate between young managers, tryingto figure out which ones are really savvy and should be moved up in theorganization, which ones are better strategists, and which ones are willing totake risks.

PH: Within a corporate environment,if there’s resistance to serious games from the senior management, is therealso resistance among older employees? Or is incorporating serious games intoeLearning a strategy that works across the board?

SB: I thinkit is a strategy that gets better with age—in a reverse way: Younger employeesare less resistant.

The first core gamers startedplaying games in the ’80s. Anyone who was a teenager then represents someonewho might have a good understanding of games. If you were a teenager beforethat decade, it’s new to you, and you need to be convinced—and you are probablymore resistant than employees who are younger. Every one of my speakers fromthe corporate space talks about the fact that they have trouble getting peopleto understand the value.

As a matter of fact, the term“gamification” emerged and is more acceptable in the business environmentbecause older employees and officers and professionals kept hearing the term“games” and were resistant. Then, more and more understanding occurred—moreclear explanation that the training based on games was not all just “fun,” but thatgame-based learning addressed the fact that games were addictive in the sameway as video games and therefore could engage employees in learning sometimesvery dull things.

The first uses for games in thecorporate environment were for training situations like compliance training—trainingthat is often boring because it is so repetitive and requires more memorizationthan anything else.

PH: Is the appeal differentamong different demographics? We talked about age; what about gender ordifferent cultural backgrounds—do some employees resist more?

SB: Theappeal of games has not proved to be age-related. It seems to be more based on exposure.

The less-engaging material oftraining, such as topics requiring memorization, benefits from using gamemechanics by making that training more engaging. It usually embraces the moresimple game mechanics to do that, such as achievements and awards, or usingranking to allow those in the class to feel like they have bested otheremployees; it also could involve the opportunity to work with a team toward agoal.

In other words, a compliancetraining could be gamified with the kind of activity that engages players, notonly in a face-to-face situation but in a digital product. Gamification cameout of that simple application; demonstrating that it was successful madepeople believe that it could be used for other kinds of training.

PH: Soyou’re saying that adding a layer of game mechanics makes the traininginteresting enough that people keep doing it.

SB: Not onlymakes it interesting so they do it, but the degree to which there has beenlearning can be assessed; it can be measured to show that the level of learningwas actually higher.

That leads into discussing thedifference between gamification and games. When I first entered the industry, “gamification”was a bad term! It was dismissed as only being rankings and competition andawards or badges, with no serious learning about why players made choices orwhy they learned or how it could be improved. It just took training that was inplace and awarded badges to the winners.

There were some who felt thatthe term “serious games” had to be used for higher purposes, even somethinglike a game for compliance—that the outcome should not be just simple ranking orbadges, but there should be an assessment, for instance, of who emerged as theleader in the team play in some kind of basic training. That gamificationwasn’t truly where the power of serious games was.

What has been accepted by theserious games professionals, not necessarily happily, is that the term “gamification”at least gets the attention of a disbeliever, of someone in the corporateenvironment who doesn’t really understand what amazing information can bederived from every type of training involving game play. When that person willaccept our appointment, we can go and talk to them and bring them over to theside of learning that serious games involve a much more complex structure andresult.

Serious games require a wholereconstruction of the objective for a type of training or education and thendevelopment of a product that not only addresses the material to be learned butprovides a much higher-level understanding of the player, his reasons forsuccess or failure, and how to improve the training or provide furtherdevelopment for that employee, so the outcome produces better results and has alonger-term effect.

PH: Where do you see seriousgames heading? Are there any trends or technologies that you have your eye on?

SB: In 2016,having seen such an emphasis on the problems of ethnic diversity, I would guessthat there will be a spate of games developed in this year and next year forcorporations to use to make sure that a culture of diversity is understood tobe a tenet of that company and to help employees who, for instance, do not evenunderstand where they are acting in a way that is contrary to a culture ofacceptance of all people of all types.

Soft skills are veryimportant and a very “hot” area in serious games.

One of the things thatlearning games have identified is that the classical order of teachingsomething does not have to be based on the age of a person or previousexposure. It can be adaptive.

Algebra was taught—when I wasin high school—at the seventh-grade level. The point is, it was taught at acertain age of a child. Now there are games that are called adaptive learningthat allow a person from the age of two to 20 to be introduced to the principlesof algebra and allow them to start at the level they are. So a second-gradercan get started with the principles of algebra and progress faster than someoneelse in the class because he understands the relationship between figures.

In a corporate environment, Ciscowas one of the earliest companies to embrace serious games. At Cisco, computerprogramming was taught through games, which just fascinated me. Programmingcould be taught to a new employee, whether he was 50 or 20, starting him into alearning process. A 50-year-old would not necessarily be any better than a20-year-old, but let’s say he had an aptitude for math, vs. someone coming inwho’s going to be, ultimately, in marketing or sales and might not have muchaptitude in math. They would start at the level they were and they would learnprogramming.

The principle here is thatgames allow people of different education or background, and different ages andinterests, to examine a challenge and to be branched in different ways to thenext step in their education.

Therefore, a serious gameapplication allows the company to take employees of different backgrounds andskills and guide each of them on an individual path to the learning goal; eachemployee is steadily moved toward the ultimate skill level that is required forhis job.

PH: What can smaller companiesdo to bring in serious games to their eLearning—companies that have smalltraining budgets and limited resources?

SB: From thetime that I started looking at serious games, about eight or 10 years ago, onlythe larger companies were making their own games. The biggest movement now isthe development of platforms that take someone with a basic understanding of curriculumdevelopment, instructional design, or programming through what they need tocreate games for their work environment. There is a do-it-yourself movement inacademia, for example, at the community college level, where there is not themoney to invest that the universities have.

We are entering a phase wheredo-it-yourself platforms and guidance in using available, free resources can beused by companies and educators and others and then shared. I think we are alsoin an era where the emphasis is still on sharing and not just on “buy my gameand make me rich.”

PH: Do you have anything elseto share with our readers?

SB: Educationand training professionals need to explore and learn; they should look atdifferent conferences and find which ones are more interested in providinglearning than in selling product, and go and try it themselves: try games fortheir own reaction, and try building games. I recently met a young math teacherexploring how to use games in her own classroom, and she is now re-energizedabout her chosen career. I think the same can apply to an internal corporateperson who would like to be more effective at improving the skill level ofemployees and also the attachment of employees to a company, promotinglong-term retention of employees and their connection with the company.

The serious games industry isgrowing at about 20 percent per year worldwide; it’s growing fastest in thecorporate sector, interestingly enough, at about 33 percent per year [accordingto “The 2016-2021 Global Game-based Learning Market”; see References]. Thecorporate market was the slowest to adopt games, but it’s starting to rev up.

A few years ago, peoplebecame excited about games because they felt their students were engaged andthey seemed to be learning more, but there was no formal research. Academicshave now started producing pedagogical research that proves that using gameplay and making learning fun does not only engage people—employees, people whoare looking for training—it also produces longer-term retention and culturechange.

We should continue to look atthe potential, because it’s now proven that playful learning is both a way tomake training more enjoyable and produces better results. I’m very hopeful andoptimistic.

References