A recent article in GamePro discusses the continuing disconnect between gamers and game studios: gamers say they want more challenging games, game studios produce challenging games, and then those games often don’t perform as well on the market as they should. The idea is summed up here:
The problem is, the vast majority of gamers don’t really behave the way they say they do. How do we know this? Because an increasing number of games incorporate telemetry systems that track our every action. They measure the time we play, they watch where we get stuck, and they broadcast our behavior back to the people that make the games so they can tune the experience accordingly.
Every studio I’ve spoken to that does this, to a fault, says that many of the games they’ve released are far too big and far too hard for most players’ behavior. As a general rule, less than five percent of a game’s audience plays a title through to completion. I’ve had several studios tell me that their general observation is that “more than 90 percent” of a games audience will play it for “just four or five hours.”
This provides an important insight for the training difficulty regarding difficulty level. When designing training games, they can’t be too hard, or you risk the player becoming frustrated and quitting.
Or perhaps even worse, because trainees are typically a captive audience, instead of quitting they will simply disengage. Your trainees will only go through the motions only because they are required to, and a result, will not internalize as much of the training material as those that are engaged. This is especially troublesome because the utility/ROI of your already pricey training system will drop. As one of the most expensive varieties of training system, you need the highest returns you can get.
How to appropriately design a training game? Extensive pilot testing. Take 10 to 20 trainees, put them through the training game, survey their frustration with the game, and also plot a histogram of their performance levels. Your target for the frustration distribution is a moderate skew towards the low end, and your target for the performance distribution is a normal curve.
Why do we want moderate skew to frustration? If it’s normally distributed, that means roughly half of your trainees are frustrated with your training program, and that’s not what you want. If it’s heavily skewed, that means your performance distribution is likely skewed too; it’s too easy, and no one is being challenged. The key, like in the retail games industry, is finding the sweet spot.
Inside Higher Ed discusses the results found by a survey conducted by Pearson on faculty use of social media. The results are pretty surprising.
- 80% of faculty have social media accounts.
- About 32% use social media to talk to other educators.
- About 30% use social media to talk to students.
- The adoption rate for social media by faculty that teach online classes is only slightly greater than the adoption rate for faculty in traditional settings (by 10% or so).
- There are relatively few differences by area (comparing business, hard sciences, and humanities and social sciences).
- 96% of faculty have heard of Facebook. Which makes me wonder who the other 4% are.
- Roughly 70% of faculty believe video, podcasts, wikis and blogs are useful teaching tools.
You can find the presentation of all this information here. There are some methodological concerns – a random sample of 10,000 Pearson customers were sent survey invitations, and only about 10% responded. It is quite likely that this biased these results toward social media – after all, the faculty most likely not to use social media are also the most likely not to check their e-mail and take online surveys.
At the least though, it does show that there’s at least a fair share of faculty who do see the value in these new technologies. That’s promising, especially since my lab is launching the first large-scale quantitative examination of social media in teaching next Monday. If it works, at least we’ll have an audience!
I recently came across a fairly unique presentation format called Ignite! The basic premise is well captured by its tag line, “enlighten us, but make it quick.” Speakers have 5 minutes to present 20 slides that advance automatically every 15 seconds, and there are relatively few restrictions on who can be a speaker – in fact, random folks are actively encouraged to present or even lead their own Ignite event.
What’s especially amazing about Ignite! in particular is the wide range of folks attracted to present at these events. Kids at least as young as 10 and at least as old as 61 have presented at Ignite! events, and about 3% had never done public speaking before. Only 15% were regular public speakers. All Ignite! events appear to be well-attended.
The popularity of Ignite!, I think, reflects a movement toward short form presentations. Death by Powerpoint has been viewed increasingly negatively of late. One only needs glance at the title of the New York Times piece, We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint, to get a sense of how bad it’s become in the military.
One of the reasons PowerPoint is viewed so negatively is that the popularity of PowerPoint has exploded while the theory behind its use has not. People have been giving presentations with visual aids for millennia, but for some reason, when designing something in PowerPoint, most people forget what makes an effective presentation – engaging, interactive, high-energy speaking. The visuals are only for reference or to illustrate – when you put 10 bullet-points up per slide, you’re doing it wrong. And even more importantly, PowerPoint slides are not a replacement for speaker’s notes. If you have so much raw information displayed on your slides that your speaking only provides light context for the bullet points on the slide, you’ve probably got too much up there.
This also reflects a larger problem in education/instructional technology: the belief that throwing new technology at a problem will somehow “fix” it. We see this when millions of dollars are invested in new technology infrastructure in an organization or school district with very little attention being paid to how it will be used. Tech by itself doesn’t accomplish anything. You need a plan. PowerPoint doesn’t make your presentation better unless you have a clear reason to use it. Without a plan, it could actually make your talk much worse.
What Ignite! does is force speakers to consider what they’re saying and why they’re saying it, rather than just encouraging them to spew forth every little bit of information on the topic that they can. And that’s the real strength. It also makes me wonder what would happen in an organization that implemented a 5-minute maximum policy for presentations. I bet meetings would be just a little bit more pleasant.