"Serious games are more than entertainment. Using the medium of a game, they change the way that people interact with each other for a short period of time, but long enough to achieve results that playing by the normal rules of conduct has not produced."

Opening Statement

When Healthcare.gov's troubles first made headlines, the initial reaction among many observers was a snort of derision at the idea that government could create an innovative website. Memories are short in Washington, DC, so it's not surprising that these critics forgot the recent IT successes in the US federal government, such as the public dashboard that lets citizens browse the federal IT budget -- not to mention many of the projects that this dashboard identifies.¹

There's no doubt that government bureaucracy and regulation can stifle innovation. So, too, can countless other factors that afflict both private- and public-sector organizations. Microsoft's disastrous initial launch of the Surface tablet is hardly a unique incident in the history of technology companies. Firms whose names are practically synonymous with innovation, such as Google and Apple, have had their own expensive flops (e.g., Google Wave, Apple G4 Cube). Meanwhile, innovation flowers in unexpected places, such as military bureaucracies.²

There's clearly more to innovation than getting a group of smart people into the same room. As the academic study of innovation shows, the equation has many variables, some determining the success of invention (creating and delivering new technology) and some driving adoption (convincing people to use the technology). Staring into the complex picture that this research paints, it's easy to get overwhelmed. With a thousand potential variables driving the success or failure of innovation, where do you start?

STEP INTO THE MAGIC CIRCLE

To address these challenges, many organizations have turned to serious games as tools of innovation. As the name implies, serious games are more than entertainment. Using the medium of a game, they change the way that people interact with each other for a short period of time, but long enough to achieve results that playing by the normal rules of conduct has not produced. As Marshall McLuhan told us long ago, the medium matters.

One of the seminal figures in the study of games, Johan Huizinga, has described the medium of games as a "magic circle," in which the players willingly suspend the normal rules of interaction.³ For innovation, the magic circle is critical. The customer agrees to behave in ways that can reveal, with greater clarity and accuracy, what that person really values. Executives, who often find that their organization can develop new technologies yet fail to deliver them effectively, can assess the sources and severity of possible misalignments. The member of the development team whose voice gets lost in the hubbub of strong personalities and managers pulling rank can participate more effectively in the generation and assessment of new ideas.

The ecosystem of serious games is highly diverse, with games ranging from simple exercises using basic office supplies to complex, software-based simulations requiring a heavy investment in both resources and time. Some are short, ad hoc exercises that may take only a few minutes to play, while others may be regular activities that span days. Whatever their differences, all serious games are:

• Genuinely different. Serious games have structure, but one that differs significantly from the rules under which people typically operate. In Buy a Feature, a game that helps make important prioritization decisions, customers must negotiate with each other to fund projects, instead of negotiating one-on-one with the development team.
• Outcome-oriented. Unlike many other innovation techniques, serious games end with a very specific outcome. In a simulation of the possible shape of the software market in the next three years, players make moves that represent realistic actions that software producers and consumers might make. The outcome is the result of these moves: who succeeds and fails in the simulated market.
• Time-bound. Games have a specific endpoint defined from the beginning. This may be a simple time limit, a specified number of moves, or some other mechanism that constrains the time spent on the exercise. In nearly all cases, the amount of time spent to address an innovation problem, such as testing a hypothesis about customer segmentation, is much smaller than other options, such as traditional market research.
• Participatory. Unlike many circumstances in life, serious games give everyone an equal chance to contribute. In Planning Poker, an Agile estimation technique, every team member can play a card representing what he or she really believes the amount of work to be, instead of having an outside party tell the team what the estimate will be. Using this approach, teams arrive at much better estimates.
• Engaging. Games engage people more readily than focus groups and whiteboard brainstorming sessions. Thus, serious games often succeed in getting more people involved more reliably in innovation activities, perhaps for no more complicated reason than that we are playful mammals.

Serious games therefore provide an attractive alternative to traditional innovation techniques for both participants in the innovation process: technology producers and technology consumers. Whether or not producers and consumers behave like innovation partners, or even realize they are engaged in this partnership, innovation does require at least two participants to play. In the best of all possible partnerships, there is a smooth collaboration between the two players, but often this isn't the case.

For example, the producer may worry that the consumer just isn't getting the message about the potential value of new technology. The consumer might need to convey that the problem isn't the message, but fundamental design elements that are patently unattractive. There are many examples of this phenomenon, including Microsoft's failed 2007 redesign of the Hotmail user interface.⁴

In such a situation, both partners need to speak and listen effectively. When the traditional mechanisms governing these communications (e.g., usability feedback sessions, customer support traffic) stumble, serious games provide a different set of rules that can replace or supplement the typical ways that producers and consumers play the larger innovation game.

SERIOUS GAMES AS INNOVATIONS

In the academic research on innovation, scholars have used the term "technology" to cover many different things, from new HIV treatment drugs to new conflict resolution techniques.⁵ In this broad view of technology as nearly anything that people must decide whether or not to adopt, serious games are themselves a type of innovation. People who may adopt them must ask an important question: is there a game that addresses my need? If so, can I increase my odds of success by emulating someone else's successful example?

As I already mentioned, the world of serious games is large and diverse, which can be both a strength and a weakness. While there may be a game that addresses a specific innovation challenge, picking the right one is not an easy task. There is no grand unifying theory of games that, once you have stated your problem, identifies the sort of game you need.

Instead, we are left with taxonomy and anecdote. My own taxonomy emphasizes the problem that the game addresses, instead of the form of game (browser-based games, in-person role-playing exercises, etc.).⁶ Other taxonomies emphasize other elements. Whichever classification scheme you find most useful, taxonomy alone isn't enough to help people adopt serious games. Instead, we need to hear how people use them, and whether there's any resemblance in these anecdotes to the situations we face. Aside from being playful animals, human beings like a good story, because it reduces the cognitive effort needed to learn new ideas and their applications.

This issue of Cutter IT Journal will therefore feel a little like a short story anthology, in which the authors relate tales of successful serious games. We asked contributors to provide examples, wherever possible, of serious games as tools of software innovation. At times, you may read about examples from outside the world of software. Strategies for innovation cut across multiple contexts: what works in software innovation works in other varieties of innovation, and vice versa. So expect some eclecticism in the content you'll read and take heart that, as an innovator, you are not alone.

IN THIS ISSUE

In our first article, Paul Ambrose and Grace Johnson provide a framework for using serious games throughout the innovation process. While many serious games aficionados have separated invention (starting with the generation and assessment of ideas) and adoption (which marketing exists to influence), Ambrose and Johnson see them as part of the same process, and they advise the reader on which games to use and when.

Given the long time needed to design, build, and deliver new naval weapons systems, the US Navy has been keenly interested in accelerating this process, without making costly mistakes in the process. One proposed solution, the Open Systems Architecture (OSA), promises to streamline the acquisitions process. But how could the Navy feel confident that it would work, or that stakeholders would embrace it? Nickolas Guertin, Paul Bruhns, Douglas Schmidt, and Adam Porter report how the Navy used a large online game to answer these questions. Given how war games have helped military professionals plan for future wars, the defense community proved willing to try a game-based approach to defense system acquisition.

Next, Michael Cahalane describes how a virtual world such as Second Life can be a "collaborative development environment" in which like-minded people work together to create new innovations. He relates how Starwood Hotels and Toyota used Second Life to engage their customers in such activities as test-marketing designs and crowdsourcing new product ideas. He then concludes with a case study of an open design community that used Second Life "to facilitate effective collaborative development activity for architectural and urban planning purposes," offering lessons learned that may be applied by any organization seeking to exploit the potential of virtual collaboration.

In our next article, David Wortley discusses the uses of computer games as educational tools. In one case, the "education" was a marketing effort turned training tool; the US Army discovered that the "first person shooter" game it had developed to attract new recruits could also be used to teach new soldiers what a career in the Army entailed. In another instance, a serious game was created to teach future doctors how to identify life-threatening head injuries. As successful as these serious games have been, however, Wortley argues that "gamification may have even greater potential as a driver of innovation, shifting the emphasis from immersive technologies to enabling technologies."

Many a corporate imperative, such as talent management, starts with a great deal of exhortation from above, only to see the initiative never gain momentum among the rank and file. In our final article, Phaedra Boinodiris describes how organizations are using serious games to define these initiatives, measure their progress, and encourage adoption. Games change the normal rules of work in a critical way, Boinodiris argues. Rather than defining these initiatives as a series of directives, well-designed games can provide a social collaboration platform that cuts across the organization, increasing adoption and providing more mutual visibility and accountability.

This collection of articles provides a quick but instructive tour of the ways in which serious games can help innovation dramatically, without a huge investment in time and resources. Innovation does not need to be as long, complex, and arduous a process as it often appears.

ENDNOTES

¹ The US federal IT dashboard is at www.itdashboard.gov.

² For one fascinating example, see: Downey, Scott A., and Zehra T. Guvendiren. "Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Collection Management in the Brigade Combat Team During COIN: Three Assumptions and Ten 'A-Ha!' Moments on the Path to Battlefield Awareness." Small Wars Journal, 2008.

³ Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949.

⁴ For a taste of the user rejection of the redesigned Hotmail, see www.mydigitallife.info he backlash was so strong that Microsoft decided to give users an option to revert to the "classic" user experience.

⁵ For a compendium of representative research, see: Rogers, Everett. Diffusion of Innovations. 5th edition. Free Press, 2003.

⁶ I've outlined the taxonomy at a website where I archive serious game success stories: www.seriousgamesatwork.org.