The Learning & Development podcast is hosted by our Chief Learning Officer David James. Featuring L&D leaders from across the globe, each conversation focuses on hot topics in the profession. This transcript is from the conversation between David and Deborah Baird on learning game design.

Listen to episode 54 of the Learning & Development podcast here.

David James: Debbie, welcome to The Learning & Development Podcast.

Deborah Baird: Thank you. Thank you very much. Great to be here.

David: Now, first things first, how are you in the context of coronavirus, lockdown, and now easing of restrictions?

Deborah: I found myself going from my family home with my two 9 and 10-year-old boys who were mostly at school, with a husband that was out of work as a teacher, commuting to London and back every week, to being trapped at home, which has been fun. I think that probably the only thing that they’ve gained over the last six or seven weeks is about 10 levels on Fortnite and Minecraft. It’s been an experience, and one that, hopefully, we’ll look back on with some fondness and some absolute desire to get back to some normality. It’s been an interesting but not unpleasant experience.

David: That’s good. Yes, you’re right; we’ll look back and hopefully, in the not too distant future, and see, as you say, this as a landmark event, but no damage done.

Deborah: No damage done. Absolutely. I’m sure they’ll go back to school and pick it up as easily as they left it.

David: Now, Debbie, I’m not going to lie. I’m a skeptic when it comes to games and learning, because I’ve seen far too many bad examples that, I’ve got to say, are more of a distraction than a help. Is it just me, or is there a problem in L&D and its perception of game-based learning?

Deborah: No, it’s not just you. I’m a huge skeptic as well. I’ve seen things done incredibly badly over the years. Gamification, it’s currently in the trough of disillusionment, if you look at any of the Gartner’s curves, etc.

I don’t think there’s so much of a problem of games in L&D, necessarily. I think what you’ve got is you’ve got expectations on consumers, learners, players, however you want to call them, that the disparity between what you get served up in a Learning & Development environment as a game or a gamified learning experience is so vastly different to what people are used to seeing.

In learning game terms, we’re still in the Pong era. We really are where things are very basic, or they’re not user-centric, and not learner-centric. They’re not even game-centric, which is quite the worry. The temptation, when you see a commercial off-the-shelf game learning product, is to rush and get it because it’s different, and it’ll give our learners something new, it’ll give our learners something exciting.

Actually, it won’t because unless it’s a triple A game, then people are just going to look at it and think, “Well, that was rubbish.” You won’t have achieved any learning. You won’t have achieved business outcomes, and you won’t have achieved any really fun gameplay. Chucking a few leaderboards at something or expecting people to accept a mini quiz as a game element within a SCORM package or within a learning object, it’s just not going to cut it, really. I do genuinely share your skepticism. It’s something I fight against daily.

Having an Interest in Games is Important for Knowing What Works and What Doesn’t

David: My skepticism isn’t just born from within L&D. I joined Disney in 2006. At the time, the games division of Disney, certainly in Europe, was outsourced to third parties.

During the first couple of years or so, that was brought in-house because whilst Angry Birds and other games gained prominence and, of course, a huge amount of revenue, Disney was behind the curve. They brought it in-house and thought, “Right, we’re going to build some games.” A few years later, it was outsourced again, and Disney still didn’t have a hit.

You can think with the might of Disney behind it, it’s still really, really hard to build a game that can gain any kind of traction. We’re just talking about the popularity of a game, not necessarily the purpose of game-based learning. My skepticism is born from experience, not of wanting to build a learning game and successfully have launched one. It’s in the realities of it’s just really hard.

Deborah: It is really hard. Who knows what people are going to want today, tomorrow, or at some point in the future?

One of the things that I did quite a lot when I was working at Plymouth University with the games team there and the students coming through, we would see 30 to 70 students a term that each had individual ideas for games, each using different formats; potential indie developers of games, always new, cool, creative, interesting things that were never ever going to see the light of day because knowing what the consumer wants today and tomorrow, it’s a black art, really.

There are some things that you can do and do well in games. There are some great games that have used traditional tropes that have that longevity. Again, they tend to be games which are iterative, so that they listen really hard to their user base. They take a lot of direction from expert players, so those players who play at the top end of the game who are genuinely interested in games in general.

Those people feed back into the game., “It would be so much better if this monster did this. It would be so much more interesting if this NPC was part of this.” They genuinely listen to their players, who quite often have far more experience than the devs staff behind the keyboard.

That’s where my passion for games comes from, when I was playing and learning the algorithms to Pac Man when I was eight.

David: Oh, really?

Deborah: Yes, yes. I’ve always been interested in games, always. I am, at heart, a gamer. A great deal of my time is spent, out of work, playing lots of different types of games. I’ve got thousands in my Steam library. I play probably two to three hours per day, every day. Knowing what works and knowing what doesn’t work as an expert user is something that’s really, really important. Listening to those people is really important

David: Debbie, I’m going to quiz you in a bit on some of your approach and its application in learning. Some of us, like myself, took an interest in learning BASIC in the 1980s, and having a ZX Spectrum 48K.

Deborah: Oh yes, I’m with you there.

David: I was a keen gamer back then. For many of us, that interest tails off. Where did you go from there, being a keen gamer, who would quite liked to look under the hood of games as a child, to where you are now? What’s your progress been?

Deborah: I’ve got two real passions. One of them is learning, and one of them is gaming. For me, everything I’ve ever done in learning, I’ve always tried to bring a game-type element into it, or I’ve tried to use elements of learning from games.

I think at the time, certainly, back when I started professionally working in learning, which is over 20 years ago now, I didn’t even realise I was doing it. It was really unconscious. I came back to university fairly late in life. I was almost 40 by the time I actually did my degree, and I did an education theory degree. It was really fascinating for me to go through that degree process and think, “Oh my God, that’s why I do that. That was interesting. I never knew that I did that because of that particular theory.”

What the degree allowed me to do was to understand that a lot of the things that I’d been doing and combining and melding together actually had a solid theoretical base, which I think, whenever you do a degree in your life, it’s great for having those aha moments where you think, “Right. Now, I know I’ve been doing that, and I know, it’s worked and it’s been very successful.” Or, “It hasn’t worked and I don’t know why it didn’t work.” Having that really solid theoretical base to actually knit all that together was really helpful.

Listen to episode 54 of the Learning & Development podcast here.

David: I was just going to say, how did you go from there into where you are now?

Deborah: I’ve been in the alternative education side. I’ve been doing a lot of things with young people and adults outside of the formal education and formal training environment for quite a long time, and have been deploying a lot of these tactics and having some really interesting and very successful projects based on experiential learning and based on gameplay and doing things differently.

When I was doing my degree, I got offered the opportunity to come and work with Plymouth University on their digital arts and technologies course, which also had a game course that was running alongside it. One of the things that they were interested in was my experience in entrepreneurship, so turning projects or products into small businesses. I got invited to come and lecture on the entrepreneurship modules on both of those courses.

It was because I was doing a degree in education theory and I was talking about the business end of games and digital arts and those sorts of things. For me, it just sparked a really keen interest in how all of these things knitted together. Where do you go with business objectives? How do you make business objectives fun and interesting? What is it that’s happening in the games field? What are they doing over there? How can you then develop this into a learning product?

I was looking at virtual reality, I was looking at augmented reality. I was looking at mini-games. I was looking at all different things. At all those points in time, although the courses weren’t set up to develop learning games, all the time that I was watching these really bright young students develop these cool products, these cool games, I was thinking, “How could we make that into learning? How could that particular game influence how somebody learns? How is it that in games we are able to teach people how to play the game really effectively? What learning theories do game makers use to advance player’s skills and advance player’s knowledge within games?”

I’ve got this real weird, curious brain that likes to try and figure out these connections. I just spent a lot of time thinking about the overlaps between all of those three over a period of about four or five years. Then I moved outside of the university back into a learning design company, where I was asked to come and put some of that thinking to the test and see whether or not there were opportunities for businesses to advance business aims and objectives and learning aims and objectives through the use of game and game technology.

You Can’t Expect to Find a Solution Before Understanding What Business Problem You’re Trying to Solve

David: I imagine there are pitfalls to this as well, though, Debbie. I can imagine that once stakeholders are familiar with your work, you get a lot of requests to build a game. What’s your approach, then, from a request like that?

Deborah: One of my pet hates is being brought a project and being told that this is a game because 9 times out of 10, or I would say probably actually even 99 times out of 100, it won’t be.

You need to get back to the business objectives. What business problem are you trying to solve? Until you really understand that, or the client or the customer understands what it is they’re trying to fix, not only what it is they’re trying to fix, but what was the problem in the first place, and how do they know that’s a problem? What evidence, what data have you got to support that’s a problem?

You’ve identified it’s a problem. You validated that with learners, with business partners, with your market, then what does success look like? Tell me what success looks like? In five years’ time, what is it that you want your learners to be doing differently? Where do you want the business to have moved? What do you want your consumers, your customers to be doing differently as a result of that?

I need to have that real base starting point and the imagineering. What does good actually look like? What will you be sitting there doing in five years’ time?

Coming to me and telling me that you need a game to move you from A to B, most times I’ll say, “No. Talk to me about A and talk to me about B. What is it about that journey that you think would make a game the right solution?” Most of the time I will convince them that it probably isn’t.

If it is, then it will only ever be part of a blended solution. In every single case of me recommending or producing a game, it’s always been part of a blended solution. Always. Games are not a silver bullet, unless you’ve got millions, and millions, and millions of pounds, and you’ve got a user base that goes into the hundreds of thousands globally, then a serious game is usually not the silver bullet you’re looking for.

David: All you need to do is transfer the word game and training, and you’ve got the perennial problem of Learning & Development, where stakeholders already come to you with the solution because they’ve already sold it to their team. They’ve already said, “Hey, would you like some training for that? I think we should get some training.” It’s almost the icing on the cake, then, to go and speak to the learning team and request said training. In this case, it is said game.

You mentioned data, there. On a previous episode of the podcast with Trish Uhl, she mentioned that Learning & Development have been familiar with summative data for quite some time. Looking back and asking the question, “Did our intervention work?” There’s always been something missing around formative data, which is what is the problem, the specific problem, that we’re seeking to solve? How do we know it’s a problem, and how will we know when it’s resolved?

This is bonkers, really. I think that we’ve been in the solution business. The language around what we do and what we provide gives clues. When we say we have an offering, when we have a provision and all of this stuff, it suggests that we’ve just got this library that we can wheel out and there’s loads in here. We’re bound to have something. We’ve invested in all of this stuff.

Going back to your point around data, what type of data is it that you’re looking for? Can you give us any examples?

Deborah: Yes, certainly. The data I’m looking for, I refer back to what I said earlier, is how do I know that there’s a problem? Show me. Prove to me. I need you to prove to me that there is a problem. Are your sales low? Are your people making mistakes? What evidence do you have to substantiate that that’s an issue?

Then I want to have a look at that problem and see whether or not learning’s even the solution to it. Quite often, it won’t even be learning that’s the solution to it. It’ll be new structures and processes. It’ll be staffing changes, or it’ll be a piece of new technology or something like that. I need to understand, first, where the issue is, and the data that there is to prove that there’s a problem.

Then I need to have a look at that data, really with a fine-tooth comb, and see where there are knowledge, skills, or obstacles. What are each of those elements of that problem that you show me? If they’re things that people don’t know, then that’s something that perhaps learning can intervene on. If there are skills that people don’t have and they need, again, that’s perhaps something that a learning programme, or training programme, or something, could have an impact on.

If there are obstacles, then those things that the business needs to address before we even start to look at whether or not learning or training, or even going as far as a game-based training is something that’s even relevant for that.

I always have a design for success approach, so look at the clear rationale. Why are we looking at learning? Is learning absolutely the right thing? What can we do, if it is the right thing, to design in some real innovation? How can we deal with that problem in a way which is innovative, which is interesting, which is different, which is going to help move the learner from one place to another?

Then, defining those really, really clear learning outcomes; what do you want people to do differently as a result of this? How do you articulate that using business data? How do you articulate that using learner behaviour? How do you articulate that using data from the actual solution, so looking at game metrics, telemetrics, those kinds of things. What is it about that data that gives you that picture?

I do a lot of hypothesis testing. I will look at that picture that I’ve created where we’ve decided that the business has an issue, it’s been able to prove that there’s an issue. Here are the metrics and the data behind that. What are my assumptions, when I’m looking at the solution? My assumptions are X, Y and Z. Then I will go through an iterative design process and test all of those hypotheses to ensure that the problem is as it says it is because quite often, data is only part of that picture.

Most of my time and my thinking is done in the upfront part of it. It’s only at that point when I’ve really identified what the learning outcomes are that I will start looking at the solution.

David: That’s key too. You’ve mentioned there that the data, in itself, can be open to interpretation and misinterpretation. It’s the evidence that backs that up, which is what is the experience of the people that you’re seeking to influence that helps to bring that to life? You mentioned there that you do all of this work upfront, which is so different from the traditional learning needs analysis whereby you’re looking for clues to recognise which programmes to apply to set problems.

I keep on saying the same thing on this podcast, but the misalignment of L&D and the business is usually in that very first conversation when a true performance, challenge or situation is skewed into a learning need, which is then aggregated based on others’ needs before standardised solutions are brought down. This is why we get people on programmes who look and say, “I don’t know why I’m here,” because they don’t recognise it.

Deborah: Why on earth am I here?

David: Yes.

Deborah: This isn’t my problem.

Listen to episode 54 of the Learning & Development podcast here.

Making Big Bets, and Trying to Solve Problems Without Fully Understanding What the Actual Problems are Won’t Work

David: They don’t recognise the performance need against the solution. I’m completely with you there. The amount of upfront work is critical. Then you mentioned that you experiment.

Deborah: Yes.

David: What are you experimenting with?

Deborah: If we accept the fact that the data is there and we accept the fact that a game has been identified as a potential solution, then I will pay to prototype that. I will have a look at that particular training need. As I’ve said previously, games are only ever really used as part of a blended solution, so what I will look at is what type of game mechanical, what type of game intervention would be a good solution for that identified problem.

I will test it and I will test it in a very, very basic form with Post-it notes. I’ll get a group of people around the table and I’ll say to you, “If we did this and we did that and we did that and we followed this algorithm–” I tend to think in patterns. That’s probably one of the reasons why I love things like Pac Man because I was able to learn the algorithm really quickly and get really high scores.

I tend to think of things in that way. How is that flow? What does that flow look like? What does the player do? Then I let people do it, and then I watch them and I say, “Actually, they could do what I thought they were going to do. They were off in a completely different direction.”

There’s all of that user testing, all of that user acceptance testing, and then stopping yourself even at a particularly early point and saying, “They just didn’t do what I thought they were going to do at that point. All the theories, all the data says that at that point they should have done that, but they didn’t, so back to the drawing board.”

I haven’t even, at this point, done anything as far as writing up a spec. I’m literally with Post-it notes with an idea with some hypothesis about some theories that I’ve had and some games that I’ve played or some learning that I’ve seen or something that I’ve read, and I’ve just tried it out.

We just keep going through that process until people and the potential users, or I’ve had the chance to read something else, or listen to something else, and to find an intervention for the reason why people did that, or I’ve gone back to the drawing board again and come up with a new type of prototype. There’s an awful lot of thinking.

By the time you even get to the point where you’ve put pen to paper– it’s not pen to paper these days, you’ve started typing something down in Word, you’ve already got a really good core game loop, so something where you know that people aren’t falling off, they’re not getting trapped in a hole, they’re not wondering why they are there, that they’ve understood that they’ve got it and that you’ve watched and you’ve seen the smiles.

Watching for people smiling is something that I really like doing. I love that enthusiasm when people are going through that process and they get to the aha moment, or they get to the point where they go, “Yes, this has really helped, since I didn’t understand this and now, I do.” I’m consistently looking for those types of behaviours in this really intense pre-test period.

David: You’ve reminded me of something I read from Seth Godin once. It was in the context of creating a digital business or a digital platform.

Many years ago, I was doing my research and being inspired because I had a great idea too. I was willing to spend an enormous amount of money on a great, big builder-enabled platform. Seth Godin said, and this was before I put any money into it, he said, “If you can’t make it work with a pencil and paper, you won’t make it work.” I thought, “No, you’re wrong there, because if I make this pretty enough or alluring enough, then people will come.”

Do you know what, Debbie, this is? Again, it’s a problem with Learning & Development. If we make this great big bet, and we try to solve everyone’s problems, without fully understanding what the actual problems are, then it will be successful. Said launch will be a great success and it will solve a hell of a lot of problems, but what you’ve just reinforced there is if you can’t make this work without spending that money, and with just experimenting with the bare minimum, the chances are it’s not going to work. Is that fair?

Deborah: That’s completely fair. People need to get the mechanic. They need to learn on paper first. If you aren’t teaching people when you’ve got them together in a room, face to face, hands down, when you have that one on one and they still don’t get it, then how on earth are people going to get it when it’s disbursed? They’ve got no support. They’ve got a platform that they just let loose with. If it requires that much explanation and you’re face to face, then it’s already failed.

People need to be able to move through that flow in a really intuitive, natural progression, that it’s something that feels right, something that gives them pleasure, something that makes them want to explore further. It’s so important. You cannot miss that phase out.

David: How do you connect their need to the game element?

Deborah: Do you know? That’s one of the most difficult things. I think where most people go wrong is in this particular element. I’ve looked around, and I’m sure lots of people in the L&D world have looked around at silver-bullet solutions where they sign up, get a hundred licenses, go through this, click next game which looks pretty but is literally a branch scenario set in a game world, and everything will be fine. What you actually need to do is you need to have a really good understanding of game mechanics.

As I said earlier, games do a really good job of teaching people how to play their own games. There are certain tools and tricks and methods that games use, particularly in some of your bigger games. Your AAA games or your role-playing games or your MMOs, your multiplayer online games, where they use really clear scaffolding, really clear sign-pointing, really clear skills progression that a lot of stuff is locked behind skill barriers and things like that. What you really need to do is to determine the tiny, tiny bit that you want to focus on, and then you need to look at what that bit actually represents.

I think it’s easier to give you an example of something that I did perhaps, which is in the learning context, which is if you look at GDPR, when GDPR came in, there were a multitude of ways in which people were going to be forced to learn these new things.

The key issue for most companies, though, wasn’t that they needed everybody to remember what date GDPR came in on, and how much impact it was going to have, and what the company was going to have to do to maintain these new regulations. It was breach prevention. They wanted to stop people who were on the frontlines sending stupid emails or giving out information that they shouldn’t give.

When I was looking at designing a game for GDPR, what I didn’t try and do was fit all of the GDPR learning into a GDPR game. It would have been either a massively expensive game, or it would have been completely ineffective because people would have just been dished up with more and more on screen text.

What I did was I looked and I thought, “If the main issues for companies is going to be breach prevention, i.e., they don’t want to spend 20% of their global turnover or 20 million on somebody who picked up the phone, who’s on minimum wage who, all of a sudden, just gives away somebody’s data, then breach prevention is the need.”

That will be the need for the majority of companies, for the majority of the bulk training that they’re going to do. There will always be specialised stuff, but the majority of companies just want people not to make stupid mistakes, and to be consistent, and to understand that these things constitute those mistakes.

I built a game mechanic which in games, is a very common one. It’s a straightforward repetition. There’s nothing clever about it. It’s well-tried and tested. “Is this correct? Is this not correct? Is this correct? Is this not correct? Is this the type of information I should give away, or is this the type of information I should now give away?” and present enough of those so that people on the frontlines who may or may not come across a data issue every day in their life, came across 60, 70, 80, 100 over the course of the game.

If I’m on a phone and somebody’s asking, “Can you give me that person’s email?” That may be the one and only time in a period of my employment that I ever get asked that. If I’ve not practiced that, if I’m not sure how to deal with that, then that puts me as an individual in a place of nervousness, in a place of uncertainty.

Building a game which literally served up hundreds of these and made people decide, “Yes or no. Yes or no. Yes or no,” embedded that into their brain, so that they couldn’t progress through the game unless they could demonstrate real competence in understanding what was positive and what was good data that they could share, and what was bad data that they couldn’t share. It gave them that safe space to practice. It gave them the opportunity to fail and for that failure not to cost 20 million. It meant that they didn’t get three stars.

That mechanic worked particularly well for that one particular need. That’s what I always look for. What is it? As part of that tiny piece of massive training around GDPR, what was it that was the key issue? How could a game mechanic solve and support the need to help somebody not make that really crucial business mistake?

Measurement Isn’t Just What Happens When People Finish a Game. Measurement is About Continually Revisiting

David: Debbie, how do you measure the effectiveness of your work? Would you say that it is in the successful completion of a game, the successful identification of, say, those data breaches? Do you hold yourself accountable for, in real life, there being fewer or no data breaches?

Deborah: I think what you’re always aiming for is you’re trying to solve a business problem, so therefore, the outcome should always be business-related. It’s great to be able to say, “I’ve had 200,000 people go through a game, and they’ve all done really well,” but if they’re still costing you 20 million a time, every time they make a mistake, then you haven’t achieved your objective.

I would always want to be measured, and I would always design my measurements based on the business problem I was trying to solve, and therefore what do my outcomes look like? Did that piece of Imagineering work that I did with the business owners come to fruition? Did we get close? Did we not get anywhere at all? In which point do we say, “We need to stop this because this is actually having a detrimental effect”?

Measurement is not just about what happens when people finish a game. Measurement is about continually going back and revisiting, looking at that data that you set up at the very beginning, and saying, “Well, we’ve had 100,000 people go through this game, but we’re still at 16% breaches. We need to look again. We need to think again.” If you’re using data to measure success it should always be based on how successful that business need has been fulfilled.

David: Again, it goes back to that upfront conversation about understanding the performance context, doing enough investigation to recognise that there is actually a real problem, and it isn’t just through minimal observation or from somebody else’s gut feeling that something needs to be done, or simply because they want to entertain a team or create a problem.

Deborah: I want to make it fun.

David: Yes, exactly.

Listen to episode 54 of the Learning & Development podcast here.

Deborah: I hate that so much. That’s one of my absolute pet hates, is that we’ll make it a game because that’ll be fun. Inevitably it won’t be. It’ll just be something that wastes people’s time and irritates them and puts them off game-learning. Game-learning is incredibly effective when done well, but unfortunately, I don’t see a lot of it.

David: Same here. In your experience, Debbie, what are games good for in the work setting, and what are they not good for?

Deborah: They are not a silver bullet; absolutely, fundamentally not. If anybody is trying to tell you that their game will fix all of your woes, then they’re lying. It’s as simple as that. They won’t. Games help with specific needs, and games help in a really targeted way.

Yes, they can be entertaining, and I would always advocate for an entertaining game. I think if you’re going to spend the money to train a large body of people, which again is the only reason I would advocate using a game, is when you have a dispersed global audience, and you have a quorum of people that could not be trained in any other way.

If games are going to be effective, it needs to be on mass. It needs to be something that’s distributed. It needs to be preferably asynchronous. It needs to be something that people can pick up, they can do, and the measurements that you’ve got, the data that you get will be able to help and support that, although synchronous campaigns are actually really, really effective with game learning.

You need to invest in ensuring that the game is of good quality, even if the mechanic you’re using is incredibly simple. We just jokingly said, “Make it look great and people will come,” but it’s really important to focus on that small element of learning, but packaged in a way which feels premium. A badly-designed game, it won’t necessarily detract from the ability of the game to do its job, but a well-designed game will certainly enhance that.

You’ll get word of mouth. You’ll get people talking about it. You’ll get people enthusiastic about it. You may get people looking for other things that they can learn as a result. It will spark curiosity. Having invested in a cool game mechanic to solve a core business problem, don’t skimp on what it looks like and how it plays. If you’re going to serve up a game to somebody, they’re going to have high expectations.

What I would advocate for is small needs analysis, solid learning theory, and solid game mechanic theory, and a high level of design and playability, so it doesn’t take four hours to load, you haven’t got screens full of text that you’re not clicking, you’re not having to scroll, and that you’re using bings and bongs, and prizes, and gamification, and leaderboards in a way that’s appropriate to the learning, if you use them at all. I tend not to use leaderboards. That’s a personal choice.

David: What’s your rationale behind that? I know leaderboards are pretty popular in Learning & Development.

Deborah: They are. If I’m advocating for globally dispersed and large groups, which is where games are most effective, then having a leaderboard where you’ve got 20,000 people on it, it matters not whether you’re 19,984th. It does not produce that level of incentivisation for people to crawl up from the bottom up. It actually just de-incentivises them, if that’s the word.

I guess in the context that I’m talking about, leaderboards are not a great way of helping people to progress through the game. I think we tend to use individual metrics within games, or team metrics. Looking at things like, if your scores, or you’re answering things that you were better at than yesterday, that you got more rewards than yesterday, that you’ve got a Gold Award; things that are more personally achievement-based rather than pitting people against each other.

We’re getting people to learn here. There is no best learner. We just want people to learn and the business to change. I don’t really see the need for that on a globally-dispersed basis.

David: What I’m hearing loud and clear in the context of L&D here, Debbie, is that whilst a lot of L&D budgets are notoriously low, it’s not good enough to produce something, and then when someone says, “It’s not quite consumer-grade,” it’s not good enough to be saying, “Well, it’s all we could afford.”

There is no, “It’s okay, because that’s all we’ve got.” It has actually got to meet expectations. Myles Runham, again, on an earlier podcast, he said that people’s digital expectations are based on their last digital experience, which is likely to have been on their phone or personal–

Deborah: –Yes, on their PlayStation. It is hard. That’s why I would only advocate for small games done well, small metrics. There are a number of large companies out there delivering these games that supposedly look like Fortnite. They have the avatars, they have those custom things, but when you dig into them, the gameplay is awful. It’s truly dreadful. No amount of making an avatar look cool will translate well into a learning experience if actually, the learning is rubbish. People will just see it for what it is, and you won’t be able to con them.

There are some great indie games developers out there, absolutely amazing people who are truly creative. If you can work with them and help them understand from a learning perspective what you’re trying to get, and you have this true partnership between the game-maker, the learning professional, and the business owner, or the person that owns the problem, that is a genuine three-way partnership, where no one or the other is going well, “Learning has to be top up here,” or, “Game has to be top,” or, “Business has to be top.”

You have to go toe to toe in some of those meetings with those other people to say, “Actually, no.” Some of the best things I’ve ever done have come out of massive arguments.

Absolute standups where we’ve had these really heated debates about, “If we do that, that’s going to compromise that. If we do that, that’ll do that.” We’ve always managed to reach, not even a compromise. Compromise is the wrong word, but we’ve managed to reach a solution which is better than any of the ones three of us individually were ever presenting. That real equity and respect between each of those people’s knowledge and understanding and expertise without one person feeling that they don’t bring as much to the table as the other is really important.

If You Want to be Good in the Learning Games Markets, You Have to be Equally as Good as Those in the Games Industry

David: As we come to the end of the conversation, Debbie, I think it’s a reality that L&D people are creative. They like to try new stuff. They like to create stuff and may be drawn towards creating games. You’ve described some of them already. What should the listener know before they do get involved in building a game? What are some of the pitfalls that you would advise, perhaps, to more of a novice before they get involved?

Deborah: A lot of the advice I would give goes back to the earlier part of this conversation, which is about making sure that you are not being just asked to deliver a game, that you genuinely understand what that game needs to do. Very, very early on, engage with your learners. To present to them, even after looking at the business objectives, you think it could be a game, you want to get a game, sit down with them and go, “What do you think about this? Anybody got any ideas?” Have that real early engagement.

Then test that hypothesis. Is a game the only way of dealing with this effectively? Could you do it in another way which was more cost-effective, better for the learner, something that you’ve already done before, something that you can reuse, something you can remodel?

I’m not saying that games should be your last resort. I don’t want you to think that that’s what I’m trying to say. What I am trying to say is that games only service a particular need. You have to be certain that that need is something that you’ve actually got, or that it’s something you want to invest in because, quite frankly, they take a lot more time than an ordinary piece of learning, particularly if they’re custom built.

It’s very tempting to go and think that you’ve identified a need, and that you can go and pick something off the shelf that somebody’s already produced, but what I would say is that nobody knows your learners like your own learners. What might be right for one group of learners in one particular company environment may not be right for another.

Getting that user-learner-player profile right from the start, looking at personas, what do you expect if 65-year-old John who’s retiring is being forced to learn GDPR, what’s he going to want to know versus what’s 19-year-old Beverley who’s sat on a phone going to want to know? Have a look at those personas and test your idea. Test your game against those personas.

The pitfalls are trying to solutioneer too early. The pitfalls are buying off the shelf if you’re not entirely convinced that the off-the-shelf offering will deliver on the majority of your needs, and don’t let people who don’t play games go buying stuff. People think they know games. Games are incredibly complex; incredibly complex and very cleverly written.

The games industry is so far ahead of the learning designing industry in terms of technology, approach, psychometrics, all of that. They know their players, and they engage with their players. If you want to be good in the learning games markets, you have to be equally as good, if not better, than then they are, because otherwise the playing experience will just not be great.

David: I think you’ve also got to look out for the IKEA effect as well, which is when you’re involved in building something, you see it in rose-tinted glasses. I have been shown some less than desirable examples of games from people who are incredibly proud to have got their hands dirty in building them, but they were not good examples of games or learning. The IKEA effect, like that dodgy cupboard that you built and you’re very proud of, is perhaps not the best example of said furniture.

Deborah: One other thing that games do that we don’t tend to do in learning is that they iterate and improve. Games regularly release what they call patches. They will be things that people have identified through playing that don’t work, don’t work as expected, could be done better. Within two or three months, a game releases a patch, which fixes all of those. We don’t do that in learning. We build it, we send it out, people use it, people don’t use it, we take it in.

That constant measurement, that constant iteration that’s looking at the data that’s coming up, what’s the drop off rate? Are people playing it for three days and then never touch it again? Are they playing it on Saturday nights because it’s so engaging that they actually want to do it when they get home? Looking at that data and going, “Okay, why are people not paying after day three? What was happening on day three? Everybody went home for the day. That’s why.” So actually, looking at that data really intelligently in real-time.

I always build real-time data into any of the games that I build. I can go in at any point in time and look at my dashboard and go, “What’s happening today? Why is no one playing it? Why is everybody playing it in the afternoon?”

Then to release those patches, to listen to your learners and go, “Okay, that didn’t quite work as expected, but this one’s better. This one will help.” It’s a constant issue to factor. This is not a SCORM file. Do not just upload this and walk away and say, “Yes, my job here is done.” It’s a real investment from a learner’s perspective and from a company’s perspective, which is why I’d probably only advocate it for large companies.

David: What you’ve described just sounds like digital competence. Again, there’s a bit of naivety in Learning & Development around buy and launch approaches, but having digital competence isn’t about that. It’s about everything we discussed. It’s about data. It’s about understanding people, what it is that they’re trying to do and all of this stuff. It’s not a provision. It’s not an offering. It’s not delivery. It is much more sophisticated and has a much bigger impact.

Going back to game learning. If people do want to know more about game design, where would you recommend they go?

Deborah: That’s a really tricky one. There are some great people out there. There are some really good academic sources. I come from an academic background. I’d always advocate going and looking first at the theory, so why do games work?

Karl Kapp is a very, very well-known games guru, for want of a better word. He’s got some great ideas, some really interesting ideas and some things that can be really quickly implemented if you want to dabble. I would always say, “Look at Karl’s stuff and have a dabble.” Really know your stuff and play some games. Go play some games.

If you have to sit over your nine-year-old’s shoulder and watch what he does when he’s playing Fortnite, watch why he stays there for nine hours playing Fortnite, then do it. Get yourself into something that’s outside of your comfort zone. Go and play Final Fantasy XIV online. Go and have a look at how it works. Look at how you’re taught to learn in the game. Really understand it.

Or go and find yourself a great indie games company. If you are a learning professional, you can’t expect everybody to have this weird dual passion that I’ve got, which is around games and learning. If learning is your passion, go and find somebody whose passion is games, and spend time talking to them. There are some amazing indie games companies out there.

The one that I’ve just spent my time working with recently has been incredible. They understand business. They understand games. They understand game mechanics really well. Having those stand-up toe-to-toe debates with them about how the two things can meld is really interesting.

David: Brilliant. Debbie, finally, if the listener wants to connect with you, perhaps on social, how can they do so?

Deborah: I’m very, very easily searchable on LinkedIn. Always happy to talk games with anybody. Always happy to talk learning with anybody. Please don’t hesitate. Don’t feel that any approach will not be welcome because it absolutely will. If anything I’ve said makes you want to want to pick up the phone or talk to me about it further, then please, please just do so because I would love to talk to you.

David: Fabulous. I’m sure that there’ll be many who take you up on that side. For now, Debbie, thank you very much for being a guest on The Learning & Development Podcast.

Deborah: Thank you very much. I really enjoyed myself.

Listen to episode 54 of the Learning & Development podcast here or book a free demo to find out more about the future of L&D.

About Deborah Baird

Deborah Baird is Learning Design Lead at Philip Morris International as well as a Game Learning Producer and Lecturer. A self-confessed game fanatic, Deborah combines her passion for Learning and Gaming to produce solutions that solve real business problems.

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