How Did You Get Interested in Games for Learning?

One question I am frequently asked is “How did you get interested in games for learning?”

When did you notice that games could play a role in corporate learning?

There are a number of incidents that eventually lead to my study of the subject. Some involve watching a poker tournament and learning that online poker was used as a way of practicing for real poker play. But here is a progression over time of my thinking.

I noticed that games could play a role in corporate learning on my first internship out of college. It was the summer of 1989 but wasn’t sure where to go with the concept. I was working for an instructional design company and one of the employees was working on a radical idea of a paper-based game to teach people negotiation skills. He needed some people to test the game and I volunteered. As we were playing the game, I realized how impactful it was in terms of helping me to understand the negotiation skills he was trying to teach, in terms of my being comfortable applying those skills and in terms of gaining a perspective about negotiation skills that I did not have before.

From that moment forward, I was convinced that instructional games could be invaluable within a corporate setting but wasn’t really sure where to go with it but started studying the concept. At that company, I was involved in some small scale efforts after that time. Then I began to study them more in-depth in the late 1990s and early 2000’s and wrote about using games for instruction within corporate environments in my 2007 book, “Gadgets, Games and Gizmos for Learning.” After that book was published, I was also able to help design some corporate games and see the impact they had within organizations and see how to apply game-elements as a new method of designing instruction within the corporate environment but up until just a few years ago, games were not seen as something appropriate for corporate settings. There is still some stigma remaining but it seems to be subsiding now that people are beginning to understand the interactive nature of games and how game elements such as challenge, story, interactivity and feedback encourage learning.

After writing “Gadgets, Games and Gizmos for Learning” I realized that not every company could afford large scale game efforts but I did realize that certain elements of games could be applied to traditional e-learning and classroom instructional design. I started thinking how could elements of games be used to enhance typical learning events without building a full fledged game. So I was starting to play with some ideas and do some research when I came across the term “Gamification.” When I was that term I immediate thought to myself, “yes, that is what I want to do. I don’t really want to create a full-scale Halo-type game but I do want elements from Halo like, characters, challenge, story, feedback in my instruction.” So, when I first heard the term “gamification” it captured what I was thinking and trying to accomplish.

So then, I took some time to research games and gamification and I needed a place to capture all my thoughts so I started writing about the concept on my blog and those blog entries eventually became “The Gamification of Learning and Instruction.”