The Cost of a Computer Game vs. The Cost of a Serious Game

A computer game that you might get this Christmas could easily have cost between $20 million and $100 million to develop. Meanwhile, the serious games that you might have to play at work probably had a budget of around 10 and 300 thousand dollars (see costs for simulations). Likewise, the computer game may have a development time of three years while the serious game probably had a development time of six months.

And yet, as staggering as that difference is, the actual difference in resources required is probably 100 times that amount. This is because a commercial computer game is inevitably a new example of a genre that has had hundreds of previous iterations before it (with one exception being Spore). And each one of these iterations has experimented with new ideas while refining old techniques, including interface, display, and goals structures.

For example, when you play a first person shooter released last month, you are accessing intellectual property that has been constantly refined since well before Castle Wolfenstein 3-D, in the form of both design and supporting tools. If one had to truly build a similar first person shooter from scratch today, it would probably cost about $1 billion.

If one compares serious games to computer games then, serious games has quite a giant hole out of which it has to climb. Things might, however, be better than they seem.

Serious games can borrow from computer games, if much more carefully. This includes some design patterns, interface displays, and tools, from Adobe Flash to motion capture to use of scores.

There is something much more powerful than that, however. Serious games can use and leverage the real world.

Consider a well-designed serious game that has to teach people how to influence other people: If the serious game can use a real-time, first person perspective and broad approaches to content with accurate contexts and embedded heads-up-displays, and with after-action-reviews, the serious game may not have to fully teach people how to influence in its artificial environment with dozens of levels. Instead, it can "just" force people to start to apply different techniques and analyze their own results. As long as it is successful in doing that, students can then infinitely practice in (and learn from) subsequent real world situations, from instant message conversations with friends to critical meetings with power brokers.

This opens up a content fidelity (the real world!) that computer games can only dream about This is not a given for simulation designers (a lot of serious games that I have seen do not line up to the real world). But as long as serious games connect design and actions to the real world, (and perfect use is not a required output, such as with pilots). they may actually have a budget advantage to which computer games will never catch up.

Don't want to read "Simulations and the Future of Learning?" Read this summary instead

I wrote Simulations and the Future of Learning as a detailed case study of the journey of re-imagining content as we move from linear content in a passive form to simulations in an interactive form. The book is about building an educational concept car - the first dynamic simulation-based course on leadership.

But if you don't want to read the book, I would like to suggest this great summary: Simulation insubordination: How simulation games are revolutionising elearning by Siobhan Thomas, made available by the revolutionary ETC press and its visionary leader Drew Davidson.

In his detailed summary, Thomas has captured the essence of my first book so completely that I hope it hasn't made it redundant. It certainly makes my prose seem clumsy compared to his.

An Insider's View on the Reason Why Most Research for Business is Useless

Why is most research on business issues so useless? Why doesn't it drive the results that businesses require? Organizations may have commissioned reports on new markets, or Second Life, or Web 2.0, or outsourcing or re-insourcing, but why don't the reports have a richer impact? This question is getting a lot of attention, as larger organizations are slashing the budgets of both internal and external research organizations. But this is also true for business books as well.

I have written more business research in my professional life than most people, with Gartner and for other organizations (see partial list). And I have, as much as possible over the years, tracked the attention (which is pretty easy) and then the impact (much harder) that my analysis has had. Also, I've tried to track the impact that the work of other people's analysis, including fellow researchers and even best-selling authors.

Researchers will agree, if asked at night over drinks: most business research sits unused on shelves. It is thus a valid question to ask, especially in tightening budgets, why is that so? Is that inevitable? And, to a lesser degree, who's fault is that?

Certainly the researchers with whom I have worked are very academically accomplished people. They often graduated from the best schools. They have a list of degrees. They speak and present well. They can recite facts scarily well. They put in the time structuring their own content rigorously. They interview leading thinkers and practitioners.

So what's the problem? Why do most people glaze over when reading most business research? More importantly, why don't most organizations respond in the ways advocated? Why is research on business issues often looked back at, months or years later, as missed opportunities?

Using A Faulty Model for Content

The big problem is that most business research relies on the same faulty intellectual constructs as other forms of linear content- it relies on linear analysis, case studies, and inspirational examples. And like with movies and magazines, they impress us with their cleverness but don't actually enable effective action (or any action, except more presentations), because they are not designed to.

The reports focus on knowing, not doing. The people at the receiving end of such research seldom turn the concepts into productive actions, because the research does not help them enough in doing so. At best, most research I have studied only takes the audience on 20% of the journey. There is the same gap between research and results as training and results. It is just that research is better staffed.

The content model advocated on this blog is that of actions, systems, and results. (And, there is a multiplier effect between them. If you do not have all three you really don't have anything.) So what do these concepts look like in more detail?

Results

Let me start with the last concept, of results. Any research should articulate Desired Results. But what does that really mean?

The analysis around results focuses not only on what one should get if one follows the research, but also on the contextual issue of "how should one view results?"

There are obviously entire books and business industries just looking at the question of what is a result? Some people advocate a balanced scorecard approach to results, where any activity big or small can be measured against a handful of alternative measurable criteria.

For other people, the nature of the result might be one specific goal. Such as, "no matter what, I am going to close this big sale." Or, "my goal is to sell my company for X million dollars." Or, "my goal is to grow my company to a certain size." There are the notions of single stretch goals, often focused on without regard to the other consequences.

For a college student, it could be increased number of opportunities For a business it might be cost reduction. Some personal goals are more tacit -- "my goal is to minimize disruptions." "My goal is to make a decent living, so I can focus on my hobbies."

So any business analysis has to consider what are the spectrum of results, how to look at them, and then how to look at them both for an organization, a group, an individual. I like to ask, "what does success look like?" But this is often distilled down to the answering this question for stakeholders: "what's in it for me?"

Actions

Business analysis also has to take into mind: what are the available Actions for implementers? So if one is writing advice for a senior vice president, a necessary aspect of my analysis is, what are all of their options? What are their good options, and what are their bad options?

And for options, how do you execute against them? Do you do them in a soft way or a hard way? These obviously have multiple components to them.

If the push is, "form a governing committee," that might be a sufficient action at a certain senior-level but maybe insufficiently precise at a lower level of the organization. For that lower level, the issue becomes, what actions do you have to take in order to form a committee.

Some of the questions need to be answered for actions are: what are the right things to do for a given position? What are the wrong things? What feedback should people look for in their environment to know when to do something harder or softer? Or not at all?

Systems

The final step in any kind of the analysis has to be of System. Systems are the invisible layer that connects actions and results. As I've often written, taking advantage of the system is how some people can seemingly effortlessly get profound results. The acting withouth knowledge of the invisible system can leave other people into endless amounts of frustration.

A classic example of the description of a simple system is "the glass ceiling." The premise of this blunt system is that the no matter how many effective actions certain people take, they will never reach certain results. For example. no matter how hard a female senior executive might work in an advertising agency, she will never achieve the results of becoming CEO of the company. "The invisible hand of the marketplace" is another systems construct.

And obviously, systems are often interdependent. It may not be one system that connect actions to results but multiple Internet interconnecting systems.

Scared Researchers?

Is this type of work possible? Sure. Here's one example I did for a client: A Business Analysis Example of Actions, Systems, and Results. So the question becomes, if this framework of actions, systems, and results is so much more powerful, critical, and seemingly obvious, why don't more analysts and researchers of the world use it?

The answer is twofold.

First, most of our business analysis follows a similar pattern. There is an established genre of business research. Most looks at broad trends in snapshots of various metrics. Meanwhile, creating a framework of actions, systems, and results is not familiar and expected by the client and therefore not delivered by the vendor. This model is also more visual than linear. I am constantly amazed at how many researchers and analysts with whom I have worked have no sense of three-dimensional content. They are truly trapped in a linear, case study, simple one-dimensional or (maybe) two-dimensional chart philosophy.

Secondly, this framework requires more work. It takes more time to produce less content (see 15 Most Important Generic Questions to ask Subject Matter Experts when designing an Educational Simulation and Interviewing Subject Matter Experts for Simulation Design). It also, to some degree, has to be a little more customized for the individual audience.

Still, in this downturn, business analysts and researchers will have to work harder to justify their existence. Many researchers will be put out of business.

The good news is that the increased pressure to actually produce impact, not just generic value and "cleverness", might force analysts to break out of their confort zone and invent new genres of content. And new great examples will be minted, and a profession re-invented.