Over the past week I’ve been thinking about explaining what makes a simulation fun without becoming too philosophical about what ‘fun’ is. Not that I wouldn’t enjoy waxing philosophic, but since our subscriptions to ‘Forio’s Forum‘ are growing, I’m going to try to avoid treating the forum like a personal blog.
As I mentioned in my previous article, fun is one of the four critical elements of F.A.C.E. value (fun, accessible, clear, educational) that makes a successful simulation. While all four elements are important, fun probably deserves the most attention because fun is what turns just another training event into a memorable experience.
What is fun?
Fun is a subjective concept, but you can tell how fun a simulation is (or any game for that matter) in a non-subjective way by analyzing the how it’s used. A fun business simulation is one that spreads via word-of-mouth and grows exponentially in popularity until it’s saturated an audience. If the game peters-out after a few days, or people need to be compelled to play, then it isn’t fun. If people play without being forced to, if they tell their friends about it and their friends play, then the simulation is fun.
This idea of people motivated to learn on their own explains why simulations aren’t just another activity to embed into a workshop. They can literally change the way people learn. If a simulation is fun, the simulation takes on a life of its own.
This is the critical point: if the simulation is accessible and fun, nearly everyone in your company will play it outside of a traditional class. People will try the simulation and tell their friends and colleagues about it. People will talk about their high scores and strategies in the hallways. Instead of forcing people into training, you’ll have trouble keeping people from playing the simulation.
So fun simulations are an efficient way to educate a lot of people about something because, once the sim gets going, you don’t have to do very much to keep up the momentum. But, beyond efficiency, fun simulations change the quality of what is learned. This is a subtle point. When you’re doing something fun, your performance isn’t based on rules; consequently your performance improves almost automatically.
The difference between knowledge based on rules and knowledge based on intuition is something Tim Gallwey discusses in his Inner Game books. For example, in The Inner Game of Tennis, Gallwey noticed that most tennis players talk to themselves on the court about the rules of tennis.
” ‘Get up for the ball.’ ‘Keep it to his back hand.’ ‘Keep your eyes on the ball.’ ‘Bend your knees.’ The commands are endless. For some, it’s like hearing a tape recording of the last lesson playing inside their head . . .”
Similarly, much of what managers need to know is based on formulas and rules. And much of this knowledge is lost or misapplied because of the frustration that everyone has in converting rules to useful actions. As Gallwey says, “By thinking too much and trying too hard, players produce tension and muscle conflict in the body. The player is undermines his own confidence. As a result the stroke grows worse and frustration builds.”
Gallwey’s discovery was that successful tennis players are able to “translate knowledge of rules into effective action.” In other words, the key to better tennis-or better anything lies in improving the relationship between the conscious teller and the unconscious, automatic, doer.
And the best way to make this “spontaneous translation of rules to action” occur is to have fun. To focus less on the individual tasks and get into the spirit of the game. When this happens in tennis, Gallwey says, “We are concentrating without trying to concentrate. We feel spontaneous and alert. We have an inner assurance that we can do what needs to be done, without having to ‘try hard.’ We simply know the action will come, and when it does, we don’t feel like taking credit; rather, we feel fortunate, ‘graced.’ ”
Can CFROI be fun?
Say your company has an initiative where the decision to fund future projects will be based on Cash Flow Return On Investment (CFROI). Every manager will need to understand CFROI. You could provide training classes on value-based management, but calculating CFROI is difficult and complicated for many people. You’re almost certain to confuse, frustrate, and intimidate a large portion of your audience by teaching only the formulas for calculating CFROI.
Many people will know the rules for calculating CFROI, but they’ll never actually be able to apply it to a real-life decision. As a consequence, they won’t use it and the initiative will fail.
Augmenting lessons with a fun simulation can alter the quality of the learning. The concepts become meaningful and comfort with the application of the techniques increases. Because people are building their intuition, they don’t need to think about the rules and the application of CFROI becomes obvious and sensible.
Fun simulations are memorable experiences.
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Twelve Ways to Make Your Simulation Fun
So what makes a simulation fun? There are a lot of ways to slice this. A McKinsey consultant that I worked with years ago said that lists like this should be ‘MECE’ (pronounced “mee-see”), meaning that they should be mutual exclusive and collectively exhaustive. Unfortunately, this list is neither. What I have offer are twelve ideas from my experiences building simulations that might spark your thinking about how to improve a simulation that you are working on.
Ten Minutes to Learn, a Lifetime to Master. The rules should be easy to explain, but the simulation should be complex enough that it takes a several runs to become expert. In the long run, will people continue to play the simulation? For a simulation to truly succeed, it must be able to withstand the test of time and not get boring after a while. You have to make sure the simulation stays fresh. This can be accomplished through multiple levels, with new challenges and increased sophistication on the higher levels. Or it can just be that the game has subtleties that are discovered as the player becomes more sophisticated.
Small Successes. Although challenging games are fun, it isn’t fun to always lose. This is especially true of computer simulations because players may feel uncomfortable with the unusual format of the training. It’s usually more fun for players to have some success even if only a few things go right. Reward, don’t punish.
Players are in Control of Their Destiny. The player must make a decision and figure out the best way to win the simulation. Ideally, there should be multiple paths to winning. For example, in a competitive strategy game, the low cost – low price competitor could win, or a high priced competitor with great service could also win. The best strategy games are multi-player because your own success depends on whom you play against, what their decisions are, and how they respond to your decisions.
Customization. If possible, it’s fun for players to have some control or ability to create their own simulation. Customization can be as simple as the ability to choose the name of your team or simulated company. In more elaborate simulations, you can have a set-up screen where some players have the ability to create scenarios or entirely new games by changing options in the simulation.
Trade-offs. There should be a clear downside to every decision. For example, one of learning objective might be that regional managers need to spend more time with local managers. You could have a slide bar called “Time spent with local managers” with one side low and the other side high.
It’s going to be pretty obvious that the right answer is to peg the slider bar at the “A Lot of Time” end.
A much more fun and realistic way to show how time should be spent is to allocate time on a weekly basis to the top five activities that the manager performs.
This way, the best decision isn’t obvious and the manager begins to think about what the world would be like if the amount of time per week spent on major activities changed.
Dynamic. The best decision should depend on what year or week you are in the simulation. For example, in PDA Sim, the price that will maximize profits changes as the simulation progresses and the product gets adopted by different customers. Early adopters are less price sensitive than later adopters. This makes the game more challenging because you can’t just set prices and leave them for all five years if you want to get the high score.
Realism. Players enjoy games more that look and act like the world that’s represented in the game. Managers should see reports in formats they are familiar with. If the company uses emails or memos to communicate, then memos and emails should be included in the simulation.
The simulation doesn’t have to exactly match the pace and activity of the real world. In fact, usually it’s a good idea to ‘tune up’ the simulation so that change happens faster than it does in real life and one or two exciting or outrageous events occur during the play of the simulation.
I’ve seen management games designed to look like point-and-shoot games. For example, your company is a spaceship and, by making good management decisions, you get ammo and can destroy competitors’ spaceships. To me, this is a ridiculous format. I’ve worked as a consultant at hundreds of companies and, so far, I’ve never seen anyone actually shot. The Playstation and Xbox games are designed to realistically represent science fiction fantasies (or martial arts combat, or whatever) so, within their own genre, they too conform to this idea of realism.
Important business decisions are typically made over several days (at least) and decision-makers have time to assimilate lots of data and anecdotal information before making a decision. This makes turn-based role-playing game (RPG) simulations more more meaningful and fun for managers than Real-Time Games (RTGs).
Fantasy. As I said under realism, fun fantasy for business simulations doesn’t involve shooting spaceships or crawling through dungeons. But most people like to think about what it would be like to be the CEO. If you’re trying to get people to think about corporate strategy, there’s probably no better way than giving them an opportunity to run the company themselves.
Business people also like to imagine what it would be like if the company entered new markets or dominated the market. There may be new products or services that will be introduced in the next year.
There can be negative fantasies that can be educational. For example, what strategies under what circumstances would result in crashing the company?
Business simulations combine well with scenario planning exercises. Scenario planning engages managers to think about what could happen in the future and the business simulation fleshes out the scenario and makes it feel real. The simulation also provides managers with the opportunity of working through strategies to deal with specific scenarios.
Scenarios that I’ve seen work well in business simulations include:
- A new, powerful competitor or technology enters the market.
- Prices for complementary goods change dramatically. (For example, in a car company simulation, gas prices change dramatically.)
- Government regulations or penalties (like taxes) change.
- Customer preferences change dramatically.
- The company restructures.
Good Design. The graphical design is the first impression that players have of the simulation. Like all first impressions, the graphic design is going to affect the long-term perceived quality of the simulation. A good simulation is easy to pick up and follow even if you’re just joining in for a few moments. Simulations with great design and excellent graphics are more fun than simulations without.
Appropriate for the Medium. There have been some excellent simulations created without using computers, just like there are great games that don’t use computers. One popular example in system dynamics is The Beer Game. In the beer game, you play a brewer, wholesaler, distributor, or retailer. The game shows how demand oscillations can be created by the structure of the supply chain. The simulation is exciting, memorable, and frustrating (I’ve seen people get so angry at their teammates that they’ve left the room in the middle of the game).
There have been dozens of attempts at converting the beer game into a computer simulation. In fact, I’ve tried to create one myself. Most of these computer versions of the game aren’t very much fun. That’s because the beer game was designed to be played on a game board with other people in the room. The game structure is simple and, because there is no computer simulating complex results in the background, it’s successful at explaining how company or industry structures create behavior. Making it into a computer game is like playing Jeopardy! or Monopoly on the computer. It’s more efficient, but incredibly dull. It’s possible to teach supply chain dynamics in a fun online computer simulation, but you have to build the game from scratch in a way that’s appropriate for the medium.
It’s almost always a bad idea to change the medium for any game or simulation. There have been some exceptions. For example, many people enjoy on-line chess and bridge. But this is because a player can always find a willing human competitor. I think most players would prefer to play face-to-face, but they are willing to compromise in order to play a game of chess at 6 AM on Sunday morning before their spouse or kids wake up.
Human Interaction. Creating a community, through collaboration or competition, is one of the best ways to make a simulation exciting. Because an online simulation can be played at any time, anywhere in the world, it can increase the opportunity that players have for interacting with others and it provides a common topic that people from different cultures and backgrounds can discuss. Any kind of real human interaction increases the enjoyment of a simulation.
There are several ways to create communities online.
- Competition. High score lists are the simplest form of competition. Much more engaging are simulations where teams compete for a limited supply of something. Often teams compete for market share, but they can also compete for other limited resources, like a budget allocation. If the company is a multinational, then it’s sometimes fun to involve multiple offices in the competition. Competition can be staged into tournaments, like the play-offs, so that you can have a winning team every few months or so.
- Collaboration. Players can collaborate by playing roles (such as marketing, operations, finance) and playing on teams. Often collaboration and competition are combined. Individuals collaborate on teams and those teams compete against other teams.
- Discussion Groups. If you have users in different locations who are playing at different times of the day, a web-based discussion group can work well. Users can have discussions without being online at the same time. Also users can see comments from everyone who has ever played the simulation. This makes that users feel that they are part of a larger community of users, which helps make the simulation fun even if the simulation is played infrequently.
- Real-Time Chat. Online chat works well for synchronous, or classroom, simulations. This can be fun for users if multiple people are chatting simultaneously.
- Communication Embedded in the Sim. Sometimes it’s important to limit the type or amount of information that users can share. Usually this means building email or chat into the simulation.
Personalities or Talent. To top things off, you need to have good personalities with your simulation. It’s engaging to have a senior manager from the company introduce the simulation through a short memo or a video clip. If your simulation includes customers, it’s engaging to have real customers that the players are familiar with included in the simulation.
Twelve ways to make your simulations fun.
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Suggested Articles:
- Simulation Articles from McKinsey
- Storytelling in Computer Games: Past, Present, and Future
- Forum Classic: The Four Key Attributes of Successful Simulations
- The Drive To Learn
- Forum Classic: Why Prototyping is a Good Idea
