Adopting Digital Game-based Learning: Why and How

It’s everywhere – these varied conversations about learning games and the spending of millions of dollars to further the state of art in learning games. I’ve been on a similar tack; however, it’s quite obvious that most training departments don’t have the millions or even hundreds of thousands of dollars that are required for sophisticated learning game development nor do they have the many months it can take to develop a full-fledged game.

Where do they start? What do they start with? It’s evident that they do need to, an audience familiar with game-based metaphors and interfaces are starting to enter the workplace in force. This new audience will demand more engaging learning and the organization needs to provide it.

I’ve just finished writing a basic paper on adopting DGBL (digital game-based learning). It’s meant for organizations who want to get their feet wet with creating learning games. The paper gives background information on the imperative of using games in the workplace, for which audience, where to begin, what sort of games, for what purpose and also briefly touches upon the issues that are typically associated with game development.

It will also be serialized as HTM pages that can be accessed through the Upside Learning website. I’ll be adding that as a comment to this post as soon it’s up on the site.

I hope this paper will help organizations consider casual games as serious and appropriate learning tools. Please feel free to comment about and question/debate the paper here. If you liked this paper, please recommend it on your blog, twitter feed, and social bookmarking service.