Where It’s At: An Anecdotal Look at the Stages of Games-based Learning Adoption in the eLearning Sector - Kevin Corti
Stage 3: “Finally, they’re starting to get it” After going through much introspection (not to mention numerous rounds of proof-of-concepts, marketing material re-prints, web site refurbs and several sales/marketing personnel) vendors finally manage to identify a select number of qualified and, at least, semi-senior customer contacts. Both vendors and potential customers are starting to get to grips with each other’s quirky languages leading to novel conversations and where terms like ‘real time physics engines’ and ‘end-user compliance issues’ coexist awkwardly in some surreal Douglas Copland-esque setting. Vendors have learned that they must get customers to articulate their organizational needs in an optimistic attempt to be able to define something tangible that they can bid for. The problem is that the customer’s people really struggle to come to grips with this and, after wasting many months searching on Amazon for “The Dummies Guide to Commissioning Serious Games Solutions for Corporate Governance” they finally furnish the crest-fallen vendor with the classic “Maybe in a year’s time” email. Key takeaway: The customer contact has to take a mighty personal career risk to sign off a budget at this point no matter how convinced he/she is in the potential of serious games. Most will not be willing to make the jump at this point (even though it is also a massive opportunity for them to make a mark for themselves). Patience and reflective perseverance are in order. Stage 4: The penny drops…the trouble is that is also the budget! Suddenly the serious game vendor is inundated with RFPs, invitations to tender and phone messages declaring that customer X “has budget and needs a proposal by last Tuesday”. The vendor does their (now studiedly prudent) probability calculations and realizes that with so little competition in the market place and so many opportunities, even a 10% success rate is going to start to look pretty impressive. That is, however, before they are able to quantify the tiny budgets, ridiculous feature requirements and highly compressed time frames mentioned (or not) on page 187 of the Ts and Cs of the boilerplate RFP. Vendors (and let's not forget to praise the now well-renowned ‘industry gurus as well here) have done a remarkable job of hyping…sorry…raising awareness of the business benefits of serious games, and now it seems that everybody and his dog wants one. But before you start trebling your headcount, wait a moment. Unfortunately the vast bulk of customers will not have had the privilege of working on a serious game project before and consequently they will fall back on their trusty eLearning commissioning survival guide. This ‘handy publication’ preaches the following vital tenets:
Despite all of the above points being actually true – how on earth do those guys pay the bills? – they are of no use to the serious games vendor who knows very well that games development is a complex, time-consuming and, often, very iterative process. It is a very different thing indeed to its eLearning cousin four times removed that it has encountered only once previously at a drunken wedding in 1994. Serious games companies will struggle to make the software applications meet full standards compliance (repeat after me…it is not ‘content’) and will live and die by their ability to retain and reuse IP over the code that they write. There is a saying in software sales circles that goes along the lines of: “Quick, good and cheap – pick two” referring to, for example, the extremely low likelihood of a low cost, rapidly hacked out software application being any use to the end-user. That ‘softwarian’ law, which is reasonably well appreciated in other areas of business, has yet to penetrate the corporate serious games space where it is very common to receive an RFP that upon initial estimation requires 9 months for development and at least $150k but which actually allows 2 months (including Christmas and beta testing) and for which the budget is $20k. Key takeaway: The customer now pretty much believes in games as a tool to enhance their training initiatives. They don’t yet know how to cost, spec and commission a serous game project. Take note! The customer is NOT wrong, they are simply in need of…education. Believe in your offering and be prepared to walk away (politely) if the project constraints are too painful. If the project does indeed go pear-shaped then chances are that the customer will recall your professional advice – which they choose not to take the first time round – and realize that this serious games malarkey is not quite as easy to implement as eLearning. You will thus become the trusted expert and a preferred supplier. Stage 5: Woohoo…we’ve got ourselves a big name case study! The serious games market WILL explode. We haven’t even got to create a market really as it already exists. Apparently, according to ‘a big market analyst’ the corporate training market and eLearning market are already worth 18.9 zillion dollars per annum! Whatever the actual figure may be, serious games vendors can take confidence in the fact that they don’t have to cultivate a market from scratch. They ‘simply’ need to persuade customers to re-purpose some of it. Before that can happen though, this industry needs to have generated enough verifiable evidence to prove the case to the mass market out there. We’re talking efficacy here. We need to demonstrate that Project X actually saved the client significant money and had no down side. We need to be able to show that by using a serious game, client Y significantly improved the effectiveness of their core business processes. We need to illustrate how a serious game implementation led directly to a marked increase in profitability for customer Z. When the industry as a whole cracks this stage then we will all be driving around in uncomfortable Italian sports cars and getting to actually spend time with our kids, but the evidence suggests that this is not yet the case.
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