DMS Blog

We are on the tracks of what lays behind the success of the phenomenon called Edutainment. Why professional training today is so interested in games (role-playing, interactive games, and so on) and entertainment? Why serious professionals and top-level managers need to be entertained to learn better?

In 1939, Johan Huizinga, Dutch historian and one of the founders of modern cultural history, in his Homo Ludens wrote: “PLAY is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing. […] Here we have at once a very important point: even in its simplest forms on the animal level, play is more than a mere physiological phenomenon or a psychological reflex. It goes beyond the confines of purely physical or purely biological activity. It is a significant function — that is to say, there is some sense to it. In play there is something “at play” which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action. All play means something”.

What does it mean playing to a third millennium man? What’s the secret of success of videogame industry and how to explain the raise of what Jesse Cameron Hertz called the Joystick Nation culture? In the US the videogame industry boom is enduring economical crisis, and from pure entertainment production is moving toward professional training more often. Basically people want to play more, to escape reality, to have more fun. Why such a compulsive need?

Analyzing play as a cultural and natural phenomenon, Huizinga pointed out that play “first and foremost, then, all play is a voluntary activity”. And if young people learn playing, simulating more complex activities typical of reality, “for the adult and responsible human being play is superfluous. The need for it is only urgent to the extent that the enjoyment of it makes it a need. Play can be deferred or suspended at any time. It is never imposed by physical necessity or moral duty. […] It is done at leisure, during “free time”. Only when play is a recognized cultural function — a rite, a ceremony — is it bound up with notions of obligation and duty”.

The second characteristic is that play is not “ordinary” or “real” life. It is rather a stepping out of “real” life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own.

If we connect these concepts to serious games and edutainment for professionals, we can see how they are stretching the meaning of the play as a voluntary activity or as a step out of real life. So why play is notwithstanding a trigger to transfer know-how and contents?

Probably the key is in how people perceive the time spent in playing: they have the illusion it is an escape from reality, from responsibilities. A kind of truce, freezing everyday routine and pressure. And behind each escape lays a repulsion: we escape boredom, a job we don’t like, we try to avoid the tense atmosphere of our office.

The success of using games for training people probably conceives their dissatisfaction. People do not enjoy themselves anymore, they feel ill-at-ease in their own (professional) environment. What’s why they lose passion for their job and they seek shelter in another dimension. They look for the chance to train their abilities, to increase self consciousness in a protected environment, where they make mistakes without serious consequences.

With our Real-life Simulations the players can see their job becoming a game, they can challenge themselves and regain pleasure in what they do. If they era able to enjoy in front of the video, and to find again self-confidence, they can return to real life stronger and more motivated.
For the new year we’ll try to look more deeply at the concept of “passion” and at the potential “passion” has when it inspires people.
Stay with us!

ARG (Alternate Reality Games) are very popular in US at the moment. They are interactive stories that involve players also physically using multimedia, such as telephones, email and mail but rely on the Internet as the central binding medium. People interact through the net, exchanging e-mails and messages, interacting with real and virtual characters at the same time. Participants’ ideas or actions may affect the story and its going on.

People are highly involved because everything in the plot is a mirror of real life: the stories take place in real-time and are not re-playable, players’ choices have real consequences, characters function like real people, not game pieces, respond authentically, and are controlled by real people (game designers), not by computer, thus being unpredictable.

ARGs was born as entertainment, free to play, with costs absorbed either through supporting products or through promotional relationships with existing products, as games, videogames, TV serials, and so on. As what happened to other forms of entertainment, ARGs took the attentions of companies and HR departments, that started developing “serious” versions to train people solve real problems. World Without Oil was the first ARG centered on a serious near-future scenario: a global oil shortage. The game started on April 30 and concluded on June 1, 2007, and called upon players to imagine and document their lives under those conditions.

We can foresee the potential of ARGs in the field of training, particularly their application to soft skills training, such as team working and the ability to draw collective strategies.

Usually ARGs spread out over days or even several months, with a large numbers of players. As for their production and management they require a full team of professionals (Puppetmasters or Game Designer, Media Designers, Instructional Designer, Writers, Programmers, Editors, Content or Subject Matter Experts), ARGs are quite heavy to handle. That’s why ARGs designed for learning, often referred to as “Mini-ARGs” (mARGs), has seen the rise of more spontaneous, short-term experiences designed around specific goals and objectives, better fitted for training events such as conferences and workshops.

Well, comparing these ARGs for learning to our Real-Life Simulations we can find many analogies, as real-time playing, high degree of involvement, a good way to test people’s behaviors. ARGs are for sure an original way to involve people, close to outdoor and experiential learning. What ARGs miss, obviously, is the possibility for the users to play a simulation many times, so repeating the same experience (always under different circumstances) many times, familiarizing with it and training his/her soft skills properly. We can say ARGs are an evolution of Role-playing games (RPGs) and Live action role-playing games (LARPs), where technology helps overcome the limits of a close classroom, bringing the game in the real world, but not avoiding other limits. Emotion helps people think over, but the story can be played only once. In other words, it is not a real training useful to change behavior in the long run.
Anyway, we fully agree with the tagline of World Without Oil, “Play it before you live it”, as our Real-life Simulations are uncommon tools for people to challenge their skills in a safe environment, where to learn how to act and react, evolving their behavior properly.

As developing talent is one of the cornerstones of our LIFELIKE INTERACTION® approach, we recommend you the webinar “Developing Talent: Today’s Most Critical Business Imperative“. Organized by Chief Learning Officer Magazine, th webinar will be on-line next Thursday, November 19, at 11.00 AM Pacific Time (i.e. 8.00 PM, local time). The speech will be held by Claire Schooley, Forrester Research Senior Analyst, who has more than 25 years of experience in education, management and consulting. Schooley covers the strategy and technology associated with talent management, including performance, succession planning, formal and informal learning and recruiting.

In a delicate situation for economy and society as it is today, organizations want to accelerate business by effectively leveraging their employee talent to meet the broader, bottom-line goals and objectives of the business. Developing and enhancing the value of talent means to ensure that the right employees with the right skills, training and experience are in the right jobs. And also repay them fulfilling their expectations. The webinar will examine effective ways to “right-ize” your organization with emphasis on strong learning and development using informal and formal approaches.

The matter is of great interest from our point of view, as measuring change, mapping out the Human Factor and developing Talent are the main goal you can achieve using our Real Life Simulations and our Intelligence solutions.

Games and simulations are one of the hottest trends of the moment. Brandon Hall, CEO of Brandon Hall Research in his article “Five Learning Trends for 2009” wrote that games moved far beyond “edutainment” into realistic, interactive experiences, didactically relevant.
Even big management consulting companies as Accenture use this kind of solutions more often, to stimulate personal development and to give senior managers the opportunity to experience managing in a competitive market.
Simulations are reaching higher levels of reality day after day, while computer graphic and 3D virtual worlds form a new type of learning infrastructure. To be effective, the user must be engaged and drawn in the simulation, he must behave without any hesitation.
As our brain is fully aware of the difference between real life and fiction, simulations must resemble real life at the highest degree to get the user stuck to the story and challenge him/her more and more.
The limits of the tools on the market at present time concern the level of realism these tools reach.

Real Life Simulations made by DMS Multimedia are innovative precisely because they are not trapped in fiction: the user has not to pretend to do something he/she doesn’t do usually, or to be somebody else. On the contrary we want the user to be him/herself, that’s why our Real Life Simulations recreate reality from the smallest details, so that the user will move in situations he/she can recognize as routine, facing everyday quests and problems. And that’s why our approach is working: because we work on people’s real skills and behavioral habits.
That means, our Real life Simulations work because they are not fiction.

The proof of the pudding.

It is true in many fields. Video games, movies, training programs.

Even Steven Spielberg said so, referring to a video game developed for Wii and smart phone. Title of the game: Boom Blox. It is a puzzle video game for the Wii console and mobile devices.

Boom Blox features a realistic physics system. The game presents a series of physics-based puzzles, By using the Wii Remote the user can keep structures made of blocks from being knocked down or knock them over by various means, throwing, shooting, and grabbing at the blocks.

The game has 300 single-player levels and over 100 cooperative and competitive multi player levels.

It help to straighten the player’s reflexes, dexterity, and problem-solving skills.

Steven Spielberg, during an interview on video games, said “Only when somebody will confess that he cried playing video games will have become a true narration form“.

Emotion is the key to involvement. And that’s the secret of success of many Spielberg’s movies and many video games. A research by Nielsen Consulting in 15 European countries says video games will surpass TV as entertainment format in the next 2 years.

Why? Video game is an activity much more involving and amusing, and also help people to socialize. Complex stories and smart plots are the hottest trends, while violent and less social video games are less popular.

The new games aim to physical training, memory and brain training.

New technologies help a lot: trough 3D graphics and powerful engines we can develop virtual worlds extremely close to real life. Emotion is the key factor. And virtual worlds that can excite people are powerful training tools.

For us “emotion” is a key factor and if you want to know more of our result, keep on reading our posts!

Why you should trust and choose US? That’s a good question. To answer we look at our solutions and we confront our methodologies and technologies with the solutions on the market.

And the answer is: because we have an unconventional approach to distance learning. We call it E-VOLVING.

What we mean by “unconventional” approach in distance learning? We took inspiration from the world of communication and marketing. At present time people talk about Unconventional Marketing and Interactive Communication. Like the most up-to-date marketing strategy, our E-VOLVING approach is not a top-down process, where people receive contents passively.

Conventional tools are less and less effective because people are different: they want to be engaged, challenged, they want to be protagonist, they want to be an active part of the game.

That’s why marketing, communication, ADV and also distance learning are looking for new ways to involve they targets: unconventional tools are engaging and astonishing, based on entertainment.

From a didactic point of view, our approach is unconventional because:

- we deploy the most updated technologies so that the users are at the core of the process;

- we develop highly creative solutions to involve the users who want to be surprised and engaged;

- we create an extraordinary relationship with the users interacting with them.

Our aim is to help people to evolve themselves supplying them with training solutions that unchain their talent.

It is not just our opinion. Our customers are the first to say that our approach and solutions work.  Ours is a 10 years story of success.

The boundaries of what we all know as “e-learning” are too narrow for us. The phenomenon has been widely discussed and experts have written reams about it. The main unsolved task is to train people’s soft skills. As traditional tools proved to be ineffective, the new frontier of research is moving toward SIMULATIONS.

Our personal recipe for effective simulations is made of EMOTION, UNPREDICTABILITY and FEEDBACK. Our solutions are REAL LIFE SIMULATIONS, video-based interactive tools, based on our LIFE LIKE INTERACTION® technology.

Want to know more?

Stay with us!

Read our posts and visit our website www.dmsware.com.

And please do not forget to leave us your comments.

The experience taught us that for a really effective Real Life Simulation good storyboards and smart actors are not enough. It is necessary to build up sets and reconstruct the background in which the users moves in their real life with as many details as possible.

Take a look to our Real Life Simulations developed to train Medical Sales Representatives (MSR) to deal with physicians. We choose with care even the furniture that appear on the screen behind the character you meet during the simulation. That’s because even the smallest detail on the set conceals important details of the character’s personality.
Our Real Life Simulations are designed to train you to observe and understand the person in front of you, tracking his/her personality from many different small pieces that form a wider puzzle: his/her voice, his/her clothes, his/her office.
To create a proper set we count on many resources: creativity as well as handicraft. The most important thing is the final realism of the set.
Here are some pictures of our team working behind the curtains.

[View with PicLens]

For further details, please visit tour website.
Stay tuned.