SGS Feature: 'Consumer Adoption Of Games-Based Learning'

In today's main feature written for Gamasutra sister site Serious Games Source, which deals with games created for training, health, government, and other uses, as well as their cultural effects, PIXELearning's CEO and co-founder Kevin Corti offers his advice and first hand observations into how to best go about getting a serious game from proposal to product in the public and private business sectors. In this excerpt, Corti comments on the point at which a serious game vendor and a potential customer or customers begin to understand each other with regards to a game proposal, and notes that while a notable achievement, most customers “will not be willing to make the jump at this point”, and that for a vendor “patience and reflective perseverance are in order”: “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.” You can now read the full Serious Games Source feature on the subject, including more from Corti on what he calls the stages of games-based learning adoption within the eLearning sector (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external websites).