PIXELearning's Kevin Corti on eLearning, Serious Games
- Jason Dobson

UK-based PIXELearning is a company that specializes in the application of game and simulation techniques and technologies for training and educational purposes. This games-based learning is a key component of the serious games market, and PIXELearning was founded specifically to target opportunities in business education and management training which the founders felt were being poorly addressed by conventional eLearning approaches. Recently we had the opportunity to speak with Kevin Corti, who co-founded the company along with Suraj Rana, four years ago.

Corti, who serves as PIXELearning's managing director and has a professional background spanning learning technologies and mechanical engineering, certainly seems passionate about his company's contributions to the serious games space, and offered Serious Games Source some insight into PIXELearning and what the company offers.

Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today. Could you begin by taking a bit about PIXELearning, specifically why you felt your company was needed by the serious games space?

As fervent gamers and learning technologists we despaired at the lack on innovation in this space and the lackluster approach towards creating learning experiences. All the conditions are there for eLearning to thrive yet the industry had, and indeed continues to serve up a diet of electronic ‘tell test’ content that utterly fails to engage the vast majority of its potential audience.

I’ve done two start-ups now and I’ve learned far more about business from the experience than from any course, eLearning content or book but, as someone once said, experience is like giving a comb to a bald man…it often comes too late. Well designed games can give you that experience but without the real world cost of failure.

What does your company contribute to the serious games space?

Well, for a start, we have a narrow focus on business education and vocational skills development. The serious games space is going ballistic right now and whilst I understand the decision of some companies to focus on the ‘sexy’ aspects; the military, medical and large scale public-funded philanthropy stuff, we feel that it is the more mundane areas that need to be and, indeed, can be improved. Anyone that has had to sit through a finance, management development, project management or presentation skills course knows how torturous that experience can be….especially if you are under 40. These areas may be unfashionable in much of the serious games space, but are the kinds of skills that are essential to enterprises of all sizes.

Secondly we are, as a company, committed to developing toolsets that will enable non-programmers to quickly create games-based learning solutions by themselves. That is a long and hard journey and it will be quite some before we get to where we want to be and to when the market is ready for that. However, it makes absolute sense to me that if we can remove the technical requirement from the development process to empower designers – and I mean learning designers – then what you have is a community of people who understand how people learn as well as the specific domain needs of their industry and organization. The eLearning market is an obvious example of what happens when you let the ‘tekkies’ define learning solutions. It is time that educators and trainers were given the tools to come up with their own solutions.

Could you talk a bit about The Business Game and the Enterprise Game, two of your company's serious games offerings? What are these products, how do they compare and contrast, and to whom or what are they marketed?

The Business Game was developed specifically as a teaching aid for UK schools that, from 2005, were required to deliver 5 days of enterprise education to 15 and 16 year olds every year. The majority of teachers who had to deliver this part of the school curriculum had no business experience and were struggling to meet the demands placed upon them.

The Enterprise Game is aimed primarily at the business support/startup/enterprise agency community and designed to foster the development of general business awareness amongst owner managers and staff. Many small companies are established by people with specific industry skills but who often lack broad business acumen.

The Enterprise Game is based on the same underlying simulation code as The Business Game but has been tweaked to be more challenging for adult learners and includes more detail in, for example, finance and marketing. Funnily enough, however, we have sold The Business Game to universities and The Enterprise Game to schools so we do have to be careful about generalizing markets.

PIXELearning also has another serious game, Business Success. What is it all about?

Business Success is an update of The Business Game and was modified in conjunction with Edexcel, Europe’s largest exam awarding body part of the Pearson Group, to more closely fit the UK school curriculum.

What other projects within the serious games space is PIXELearning working on at this moment that you can comment on?

We’re close to completing a game for Scottish Enterprise, the UK government’s regional development agency for Scotland, which is aimed at addressing the lack of general marketing awareness amongst the country’s smaller companies. We’re also currently developing a viral game for Skillsmart Retail, a UK Sector Skills Agency, which is aimed at addressing the perception that retail careers are all about stacking shelves where, in fact, this sector offers tremendous opportunities for rapid and varied career progression and excellent income opportunities. A recent deal will see us creating a game to help academics to better protect and commercialize research and IP. Other projects that I have to be low-key about at present are in the retail banking, financial training and automotive sectors.

What is the LearningBeans authoring platform? How can potential serious games developers leverage off of the software in the development of their projects?

LearningBeans is a game engine, authoring platform and back-end game and learner management system. It will allow any teacher, trainer or instructional designer to quickly define a rich, multi-faceted business scenario into which they can drop learners both for single-player and multi-player modes of play. We’re about 60% of the way to completing version one (single player) and we are looking at a summer 2007 beta release. We want people to experience what it is like to start up and grow a new business and to equally understand what is involved in running a multi-national corporation. Equally we want non-technical learning professionals to be able to do this in a matter of hours to create scenarios for very short and long courses (e.g. MBAs).

I don’t see LearningBeans as a tool for the serious games developer community. We’re seeking to empower ordinary business studies teachers, college professors, management trainers and instructional designers to be able to create rich, challenging scenarios that are specifically aimed at their audiences.

In general, how does PIXELearning view the serious games market? Where do you and your company see the market heading, say, in the next five years?

It is fair to say that if you are able to name half of the players in an industry – which we all can - then it is still at a nascent stage of development. That is where we are now. The potential is immense, however, and can impact on practically of sphere of human endeavor. Take a look at the Social Impact Games web site and you can already see an enormous depth and breadth of applications of games for non-leisure purposes. I think that it will take another five years to get Serious Games to the point where it has the levels of awareness of, say eLearning in 2000, but there is no reason why this will not be a sustainable multi billion dollar industry sometime after 2010.

I strongly believe that, whilst there will always be a ‘work for hire’ element to the solution set, it is in game engines, authoring tools and other technologies that the large economic growth will be seen. Reusable tools and engines can be sold in multiple territories and with healthy margins which thus foster sustainable research and development activity. We’ve seen that in DTP, web design, application development, video production and countless other industries. Games development is much more complex than, say, eLearning yet that is the market that is being largely targeted. You can’t do that with solutions that take ten times longer to develop and at ten times the cost. The key is in creating tools that are well designed for specific niches. LearningBeans won’t be a toolset for creating emergency response sims – someone else can do that – but we hope that it will be a key tool in the business education and training space.

Have you seen any trends within the space that have emerged, good or bad, since the serious games movement has begun to gain support?

The obvious emerging trend is around reusable engines, although this seems to be most prevalent in the military and homeland security space. I can see why so many companies, particularly American, are going after this budget spend but I don’t see it as a globally sustainable area, it is already overcrowded and there are many other sectors that need addressing e.g. basic numeracy and literacy in education and business skills.

There also seems to be a lot of companies producing 3D games/engines for applications that, in my opinion, don’t need that level of fidelity. The tendency to over-engineer solutions is a natural tendency for developers but I think that those that do this are in danger of over-estimating the market potential in the short to medium term and are overstating the proposition. We have to be careful not to over-stoke the hype curve or it will come back to bite us all just as happened with eLearning in the late 90s.

What do you see as the most significant obstacles that must be overcome as a developer of serious games?

Three years ago I would have said that the biggest challenge was in talking games to senior decision makers who had never played a game in their life and who saw videogames as a frivolous and childish activity. I have been amazed at how quickly this view has been changing and we rarely find it to be an issue these days. What is crucial is the ability to demonstrate the outcomes from using games for learning. If you cannot provide a body of evidence that clearly articulates the bottom line business benefit then you won’t close that sale. Too many companies seem to play up on the ‘engagement factor’ but the bean counters don’t recognize this as a business metric. They want to understand the impact on productivity, reduction in waste, sales growth and increased margins. This may seem frustrating to a game developer but it is reality so you need to learn to deal with it in order to survive and thrive.

Thank you so much for your time today. Is there anything you would like to add?

The last 4 years have been a veritable roller coaster ride and the hard work is far from over however I truly believe that this space not only offers tremendous opportunities to build healthy businesses but also offers all involved an opportunity to make a real difference to the lives of so many people in all walks of life. I find that to be highly satisfying and believe that this is the main reason for why so many people are getting involved with Serious Games.