Episode 9 Lessons Learned Simulations and Training with Matthew Stevens
Lessons Learned Simulations and Training with Matthew Stevens
In this episode I connected with Matthew Stevens of Lessons Learned Simulations and Training. In this interview we discussed the meaning and purpose of humanitarian work; Matt’s career working n the field; as well as how he uses serious games and simulations for teaching and training others.
Matthew Stevens
Matthew Stevens is Director of Lessons Learned Simulations and Training, an Ottawa-based professional development training firm for humanitarian and development workers and a pioneer in bringing simulations and serious games to the humanitarian and development sphere. Matthew has worked with refugees and migrants globally since 2008, from downtown Cairo to the Peruvian Amazon. Before returning to Canada, he served as Country Director for an INGO in Amman, Jordan, delivering online higher education to displaced youth. Matthew holds a Masters degree from the Centre of Refugee Studies at York University.
https://www.facebook.com/LessonsLearnedST
Transcript:
Dr. Dave Eng:
Hi and welcome to Experience Points by University XP. On Experience Points we explore different ways we can learn from games. I'm your host Dave Eng from Games-Based Learning by University XP. Find out more at www.universityxp.com. We have a special guest on today's episode, Matthew Stevens. Matthew Stevens is director of Lessons Learned Simulations and Training, an Ottawa based professional development training firm for humanitarian and development workers. And a pioneer in bringing simulations and serious games to the humanitarian and development sphere. Matthew has worked with refugees and migrants globally since 2008 from downtown Cairo to the Peruvian Amazon. Before returning to Canada, he served as the country director for an INGO in Amman, Jordan, delivering online education to displaced youth. Mathew has a master's degree from the Center of Refugee Studies at York University. Matthew, welcome to the show.
Matthew Stevens:
Hey, thanks. It's great to be here.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Great. Thank you for being here, Matthew. So, I know your bio is great and that's part of the reason why we connected to talk on the podcast today. I see you've worked with refugees and migrants from around the world for over 12 years. Can you share more about your career and how you came to where you are today?
Matthew Stevens:
Sure. Yeah, that'd be fantastic. So I guess, like a lot of humanitarian workers, I actually came into this work almost by mistake. I was trying very hard to be a journalist. I was in Cairo in Egypt in 2008 looking for interesting journalism jobs. And I came across an Oxford professor actually named Dr. Barbara Harell Bond. And she was looking for someone to help run a media campaign to draw attention to the fact that, large numbers of Iraqis were arriving in cities across the Middle East, so in Cairo, Amman, Beirut, Damascus, places like this.
Matthew Stevens:
And normally, when we think about refugees, we think about them as people living in a camp somewhere. But what was happening in this scenario is that these people were arriving quietly. They were driving or taking flights. And settling down informally, renting an apartment and trying to live their life as best they could. So, I spent a lot of time on that project sitting down with people from across Iraq, learning about the circumstances that led them to leave their homes. And it was just such a powerful experience, really meeting people, spending time with them, getting to know them a little bit. And I said to myself, okay, this is really something important. This is what I want to be doing with my life, is engaging with people like this. Since that experience, I made humanitarian development work my focus. I've always maintained a focus on working in small teams and working closely with the communities that we're trying to engage with or support.
Matthew Stevens:
I had a pretty common humanitarian career after that, so bouncing around between countries and projects. But again, it's not always the case that humanitarian workers get to spend a lot of time with the people they're trying to support. And I have been lucky in the respect that I have been able to do that. Whether that's through research projects or different sorts of community engagement projects. I spend a lot of time hanging out in people's living rooms and chatting about their experiences, how they're finding life in displacement, how they got to where they are. One of the things that really struck me was that, people would often say the same sorts of things, so that, "Humanitarian workers don't listen to us." That things the humanitarian workers are doing aren't as helpful as they could be. People didn't really understand the systems they were locked in. And that it was very frustrating. It was difficult to experience that seemed to be defined by miscommunication and confusion on the side of the people who were receiving support, anyhow.
Matthew Stevens:
And eventually, all of my work came to be about this problem that I kept seeing again and again. I mean, I have to admit, ironically, as I spent more time rising up in organizations, I also became more distant myself. So, becoming part of what I saw was the problem. So finally, I came back to Canada a couple of years ago and decided to start a training consultancy to focus on these sorts of issues.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Yeah. Great. Thank you Matthew. I appreciate you talking about that central aspect of, basically putting the human back into humanitarian work. Because I think, at the end of the day it's really about serving those stakeholders, those refugees and those individuals that you talked about before. But before we go into more depth, for our audience, can you share exactly what you mean by humanitarian work? Because I have a preconceived notion about it, but I'd like to know it from, what humanitarian work means from your perspective.
Matthew Stevens:
Yeah, that's a really, really great question. And I mean, the quickest answer is, it means a lot of different things. Humanitarian work can take on a lot of different shapes. So that, can refer to emergency response. Something like when a disaster occurs, like the earthquake in Haiti. That would mean, arriving quickly, directly rescuing people that we can, supporting or providing rather immediate life saving supplies in a time of very acute crisis. But humanitarian work covers a lot more than that. It can refer to human made disasters like Wars, so those in Syria or Yemen right now, for example. Or medical response, so of course, there's a lot going on with respect to COVID these days both domestically and around the world.
Matthew Stevens:
Most of my own personal work experience has been with refugee response. So, supporting those who have been forced to leave their home countries due to war typically. Now, one thing that I think is important, there is a contrast between humanitarian work and development work. So, humanitarian response is thought of as short term emergency intervention. So, that's digging through rubble, providing food and shelter, acting as quickly as possible, and then leaving. Development work is longer term. It tends to be economic or social in nature. So, things like giving up micro loans to help people start home businesses or improving agricultural outcomes. Development work obviously, does not have to take place in a disaster scenario.
Matthew Stevens:
But we're realizing more and more that in the humanitarian sector, that development and humanitarian approaches should actually be much more blended. And interestingly enough, refugee response is the crux of where this thinking is. So, today almost 80% of refugees in the world have been displaced for more than five years. And nearly 20%, so almost a hundred percent together, nearly 20% have been displaced for more than 20 years. So, when you approach a refugee response project with a short term emergency mindset, you're ending up building projects that, they keep people alive, but provide very little opportunity to provide meaning to people's lives or to support people in finding meaning in their own lives. So, what we need to start doing in humanitarian response, I think is again, bringing in some of those development principles and trying to look at problems, crises with a longer term mindset.
Dr. Dave Eng:
I think that, knowing that there's a difference between humanitarian work and development work is critical because like you said before, humanitarian work is about that immediate response, if there's a disaster, you go there. But that development work is on a much longer timeline. And I'm thinking right now, since a lot of the work that you've done has been with refugees in the past, can you help clarify for me, is there a difference between a refugee, an immigrant and an expatriate, because I know those terms are often used, I guess in an international sphere. But I'd like to know from you, Matthew, is there, what would you consider the differences between those three titles?
Matthew Stevens:
You're but opening up a can of worms there. But it's an important question. It's a really important question. Legally, and there is an international legal framework around what a refugee is. A refugee is a person who has left their home due to persecution. And that can be based on, their ethnicity, their political views, their religious views, things like that. There's a very specific list of criteria that determine if you are or are not a refugee. And notably, you're not a refugee, if you leave because of an economic problem. You're not a refugee, if you leave because of a climate issue. Technically, you're not a refugee, if you leave because of a natural disaster, excuse me. But of course, there are gray areas here in that, organizations like the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, will support people who fall out of the legal mandate, but fall under the moral mandate.
Matthew Stevens:
To become a refugee, you have to cross an international border. So, if there's a conflict in your country and you move to the next city inside your country, you are an internally displaced person not a refugee. And what you tend to find though, is that these terms get so messy, right? I mean, we'll talk about, I mean, I prefer the term irregular migrant. But what you'll often see in the press reported as an illegal migrant, people who are leaving their homes because of economic scenarios or challenges. They have no protection under international humanitarian law, but often they're leaving for very similar reasons. So, I mean, when you talk to people from a conflict zone for example, they might be leaving their home, yes, because there's danger but danger combined with economic hardship, "Where am I going to get my next meal? How am I going to pay for the necessities of life?" In this country that might be experiencing violence. So, the distinctions become very, very convoluted and not functional and practice, I find. Yeah.
Matthew Stevens:
The term expatriate is often used to refer to Western foreigners that go to other countries, which is an interesting question in and of itself. We in some of my more cynical moments, I would say, that an expatriate is just an illegal immigrant who happens to be white. But that might be too cynical.
Dr. Dave Eng:
I see. Well, thanks for giving us a brief overview, Matthew. I appreciate it. But now, I really want to talk about Lessons Learned Simulations and Training. Can you give us a brief overview on your organization, how it started and what you're doing right now with it?
Matthew Stevens:
Yeah, of course. So, lessons learned as I said, I found it when I came back to Canada. And it was an initiative aimed at helping to address some of the problems that I saw while working abroad. It seemed like a very natural progression. You mentioned in my background, I had been managing and INGO office in Jordan. Trying to build the local chapter of an organization around better outreach, empathy, listening, responding to the problems that people described to us. Being more responsive to needs that were described by individuals who we were engaging with, rather than based on our preconceptions. But at a certain point, it was a small organization and I wanted some of these lessons to become a bit more mainstream. I'd also been in Jordan for about five years, so it was time to come home and be a bit closer to family. These are things that humanitarian workers have to balance as we get older, I suppose.
Matthew Stevens:
So, lessons learned, the goal is to teach other humanitarian workers, why it's important to listen to people, to engage, to build projects that react to observe needs. One of the core values at Lessons Learned is experiential learning theory. The idea that people learn best from direct experience. And we also put a heavy emphasis, like so many educators on Bloom's Taxonomy, so the idea that learners should be doing more than just absorbing information, that they should be applying it, analyzing things that they've learned, evaluating and creating when they learn something new. And that's where simulations and serious games come into the picture.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Great. Thank you, Matthew. Yeah, I'm glad you brought up experiential learning because when I first started getting started in this field using games for teaching and learning, that was the theory I referenced most often, that experiential part. So, I know that active role in a learner, and not only just receiving knowledge, but creating knowledge on their own through this experiential process, is really great and supported by using those serious games and simulations. So, can you talk more about, what are some specific simulations that you've used in the past in order to help train others for humanitarian work?
Matthew Stevens:
For sure, for sure. So, typically we develop our own simulations. We've used some others as well, some other similar products. But mostly what we do is employ our own. And basically, the idea behind what we put together is that, humanitarian work features a lot of complex problems. With lots of moving parts, there's no right answer to these. It's more a situation where you pick the least worst course of action. You want to distribute food to a group of people living in a city, well, okay, it's easy enough to suggest, but how do we find the people that we want to get the food to? Are we going to go out to them or hope that they come to us? Once we find them, do we have enough food for everyone? And if we don't, what kind of criteria do we use to decide who receives support or who doesn't? How do you inform the people who receive aid or who don't receive aid? How do you physically move the food to their homes? Where's it going to be sitting in while it's waiting?
Matthew Stevens:
And questions like, who's paying for it all? What did the people who were paying for it, want out of the exchange? Do we have a plan for when the program support finishes? Because donors usually, don't fund things for all time, eventually this program will end. Those sorts of questions are actually the easy ones. I mean, what if people don't actually like the food that we have to give? What if they don't want to eat chickpeas and bread for every meal of every day for the next five to 20 years? What if the neighbors see us dropping off food for newcomers next door, when there's nothing for the people that have lived in that community for a long time, how are they going to feel about that? What's the local government going to think when their own citizens start to complain about that distinction being made and on and on and on.
Matthew Stevens:
You could see that there's a lot of questions that might not come to mind at first when we start to propose a project, but that arise as we start to work. Now, as serious gamers know, these complex problems are the exact things that learning games can help us explore. So, what we try and do at Lessons Learned, is compare and contrast different points of view. Having people take on different roles, brief them on how they would see the world, let them explore these different worldviews and interact. Our biggest simulation game is called, The Day My Life Froze. And in that, we break up around 15 people into three groups. So, some people take on the roles of heads of displaced households. Some take on the role of humanitarian workers. And some take on the role of donors.
Matthew Stevens:
Now, each group of people will have their own briefings, their own motivations and their own goals. And they don't fully understand what the other groups are doing. They each engage with a different serious game, sub game almost, which structures the processes that they follow to achieve their goals. So, heads of household for example, essentially play, it's like a real time worker placement game with sand timers representing family members. It's spread across an entire room. And they're assigning these household members to different jobs or tasks in an abstracted layout of a city. So, they're paying taxis to move around the space. Bringing in money and food. Looking for safe apartments to rent. And trying to maintain a decent quality of life throughout the exercise.
Matthew Stevens:
Humanitarian workers on the other hand, they sit at a row of desks watching what's going on from a distance, but they're not engaging with any of that. They're only allowed to interact with heads of household via interviews. So, they sit down, one person at one side of the desk, one person on the other. They have a multiple choice exam that they give to the person. And they're trying to sort out what people need. And in this very artificial way, which actually is quite similar to what we do in humanitarian work. We ask a series of questions. We score your answers. And based on that, we decide if you need some sort of support and what that support might look like.
Matthew Stevens:
Once the humanitarian workers in the simulation have that information, they take what they've learned to donors who are actually in a whole another room entirely. And the donors are there to help, but they have their own agenda. And they're trying to push their own goals a little bit or negotiate. Of course, we have to provide what the people in this context want but also, how do we get what we want out of the situation, whether it's political or economic or what. And so, this system operates on these slow feedback loops where very often at the end of the day, the heads of household aren't actually receiving what they want or what they need from the humanitarian agencies at all.
Matthew Stevens:
So, the learning game is designed to overturn our preconceptions about wants and needs in times of crisis. And to illustrate the consequences of those preconceptions. We look a lot of information flow, how conceptualizations of problems are communicated up and down, the humanitarian chain where confusions arise, frustrations, points of tension, things like that.
Dr. Dave Eng:
I'm glad you shared that in Matthew because it seems like a lot of what the simulation is based off of, particularly when individuals have their own motivations and objectives, it's like having a secret mission card for a lot of different tabletop games. Like you have a secret objective, something that you're trying to accomplish. I know, that for a lot of games that I've played, sometimes that objective gets in the way of someone else's objective. Sometimes that objective you can accomplish without any intervention from everyone else. But knowing that's what you want to do and must do and knowing that everyone else has an objective as well. It fits in with that providing a player with a direction to go in. And I also enjoy the fact that, it's very similar to a mega game. I don't know, if you've ever played a mega game or seen them, but just individual players having an individual motivation to do different things that may affect the game state as a whole is very much a large part of what makes these mega games, these large experiences for everyone else.
Dr. Dave Eng:
But for our audience, Matthew, I wanted to know, is there any tips you would give someone, say an educator that they say, I want to use a simulation or I want to create a simulation for my class. From your perspective, having done it before, what is one tip you would give someone who wants to use simulations you're using for learning?
Matthew Stevens:
That's an interesting question. How should I frame that? I think for one, I think that you've hit the nail on the head there, that we definitely have looked a lot at recreational megagames and semi-serious mega games in inspiring the work that we do. Right? That sense of confusion, that friction of information flow and things like that. That's what those tools are so good at. And yeah, we make them a little bit smaller, a little bit shorter and less overwhelming. So, 15 to 20 people in a couple of hours as opposed to 108 or something like that. But I would say, that's a good place to start.
Matthew Stevens:
One of the nice things about mega games these days is that, you can actually go onto the internet and there's lots of Facebook groups and discord chat channels of very friendly people on, that are happy to talk about, how they put these structures together. How to run them, how they tend to operate. You can buy packages online, as you probably know. And run some casual ones yourself. I think, that's getting a little bit of experience running things is very, very helpful. I certainly had a lot of people, I've heard a lot of people say that, Dungeons and Dragons is a fantastic way to learn how to do these things because you are learning about how people interact with each other. Starting to understand how conceptualizations or models, I guess, of the world can work. But I don't think that's absolutely necessary. That's one way you can go.
Matthew Stevens:
I think at the end of the day, how would you say it? You just can't expose yourself to enough information. Number one, so looking at things like, listening to the Ludology Podcast, things like that. I mean, listening to this podcast as well. But anywhere where you can gather up bits of information about game design, will help start those creative juices moving. I really would recommend trying to run a few larger semi-serious games like megagames in a recreational capacity first. That's something that we did when we got started at Lessons Learned was, "Okay, let's put on a few, just casual recreation games to learn how to put on an event like this and how to manage it when it's happening." Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of different resources as well, that you can explore. So, as a person learns and grows, I would definitely recommend looking at the PAXsims blog at paxsims.org that's run by Professor Rex Brynen at McGill University. And I think, that's really one of the number one places for these sorts of serious games, anyways, peace building or humanitarian exercises as well as war gaming.
Matthew Stevens:
There's an academic journal called Simulation and Gaming, which is a very, very deep source of information, I mean, on a lot of different topics. But it's always interesting reading. And I would say also, I mean, for ed lessons learned anyhow, I've done a lot of reading on military war gaming. I think that, from my vantage point anyways, the military has some of the most well-defined methodologies for this kind of simulation game or serious game. And when you break it down, they actually deal with similar problems to humanitarian workers or peace builders, who are trying to keep people alive and as happy as possible in very difficult situations. So, there're books by Philip Sabin or Peter Perla, also are quite good.
Matthew Stevens:
Another resource I like quite a bit is, there's a book called Thinking Inside the Box, it's by Natasha Gill. And it's basically, it's a free ebook, so no one has an excuse not to read it. And it's basically arguing that, before you let your simulation participants get too creative, they should actually try and recreate the real life projects or exercises that exist, so that they can understand why the real life ones work or don't work. And then, go on to create some crazy out of the box ideas.
Matthew Stevens:
I should also mention, and actually with respect to resources, Lessons Learned with another Canadian serious gaming organization called Imaginetic and with Save the Children UK, are just about to co-publish a hundred page report on games based learning in the humanitarian context. And which is very exciting. It's not out yet, but it will be soon. And that would be a very good place to get some advice as well.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Great. Thanks for you Matthew. I know that we talked about mega games, but we may not have defined it for our audience. I have a colleague, Scott, that runs a lot of mega games. I think I'll have him on the show later. And I'm glad that you shared a lot of those resources. I'll make sure to put those in the show notes because I'm really interested in seeing that report and using serious games and mega games for teaching and learning. To go back a little bit and pull us back about humanitarian work, what do you think is a common perception that people have about your work that is wrong or that you often have to correct when people talk about your work?
Matthew Stevens:
Oh yeah, honestly, the number one thing I would say about humanitarian work, that the biggest secret that we all keep, is that it really isn't that glamorous. People imagine, you're flying around the world to very exciting places. But it's mostly desk work. It's a lot of writing reports, doing statistics. The vast majority of the humanitarian workers out there, spend their days moving money into crisis affected areas and moving information out of it. Yeah, if you are in a place that's quite dramatic, you tend to be in a compound, so you can't go out or you can only go out in very controlled circumstances. Yeah, it is actually, it's just a lot less glamorous than one might expect it. I actually, we try and capture that in a simulation, I mean, the humanitarian workers. They're mostly just shuffling pages and looking at numbers. Organizing coordination meetings with other organizations to make sure that they're not doing the same project twice, things like that.
Matthew Stevens:
And I would say, maybe a misconception with respect to simulation games, is actually that learning games have to be fun. We deal with this all the time. You come to a new organization and you say, "Look, we would like to put together a training game for your team." And they say, "Oh, well, games, I mean, I'm not paying my team to sit around and have fun." Well, when we build a training game for humanitarian response or any context really, we're not necessarily building something that's fun. At Lessons Learned, we're often building things that are engaging, that communicate information about a complicated system in a way that people can understand. We know that's a difficult context. So yeah, it's not just about having a great time, it's really about generating meaning, rather than having a fun afternoon. You can have a little bit of fun, but respectful fun.
Dr. Dave Eng:
I know that, when we talked about experiential learning before. Whenever you use games and simulations for that learning outcome, you want it to be, you want that medium, that game to serve that eventual outcome. Sometimes that means, that you'll create a game or scenario or a serious game, where it is not as fun as if you were to purchase a commercially available game. But commercial games also have different purposes and different outcomes compared to a serious game or a simulation.
Dr. Dave Eng:
And I think one of the things that I talked about before, and you talked about right now, is that with simulation you want that amount of fidelity. If it doesn't meet the specific outcomes of the people you're trying to teach, then it's failed as a simulation, like it's something to teach with. That's the reason why, commercial games are designed the way they are. They want their users to keep playing, to keep engaging with them. That's not to say, that you can't achieve the same thing with a simulation or a serious game, but the end goal for that simulation is, "Did our players learn? Did our students achieve that specific goal that we've set out?"
Matthew Stevens:
Definitely. Definitely. Yeah.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Yeah. And with that said, I wanted to know, in your entire time at Lessons Learned, what would you say is the biggest lesson that you've learned yourself, running a serious games and simulations?
Matthew Stevens:
That's a good question too. I would say, that the biggest lesson is probably, how hard it is to make sure that our work is sensitive and respectful. The whole point behind Lessons Learned is to help workers embody thoughtfulness and respect in everything that they do. Listening to people, designing projects with other's hopes and dreams in mind. Making sure that we use language or photography in respectful ways. And don't make objects out of the people we're trying to support. Obviously, when you're building a learning game about these subjects, you're really walking on a knife edge. You want to invite participants to see the world from another set of eyes. But that's still a point of view that isn't my own. And if I make mistakes or cut the wrong corners, I mean, you have to cut some corners when you're building a simulation, but be careful about which ones you do. It can be very, very dangerous in a lot of ways. And I don't think that's an exaggeration in the humanitarian context.
Matthew Stevens:
So, there are a few ways that we try to deal with this. Step one is obviously, just go out and talk to people, the communities that you're trying to represent in the exercise and the simulation. Ask what people feel needs to be communicated about their lives or situations. And then actually, listen to what they say. So, when things don't match your preconception or your expectation, that's one of the most important things, that will be the most important thing to put in the actual final simulation. And yeah, you build the exercise, you build the simulation around those messages.
Matthew Stevens:
Now, once you've actually built something that you think approximates what you've been told, of course, then you have to go on and share the exercise with some people from that community. Let them take part in it, see if we've done an acceptable job of representing and communicating a different worldview. And then of course, we have to change what doesn't work and try again. So, there's a lot of iteration. There's a lot of repetition that goes into these sorts of things. But also, I'm keeping in mind that no matter how well we hone something, there are viewpoints that won't be captured properly. It's always going to be an approximation. No matter how much work I put into being holistically inclusive and respectful, I'm always going to miss a few things, some just by error or some, because I mean, you have to think about the cognitive load of the people who are taking part in the exercise. How many rules can you teach them?
Matthew Stevens:
A good example of this, is actually in The Day My Life Froze simulation, we don't deal with questions of gender. And it's an incredibly serious element of humanitarian work that's not being included. So, how do we deal with something like that? I mean, at one point we did have gender in the game. And just, we were finding the participants were getting confused. They were getting overwhelmed by the number of rules that they had to learn at the beginning of the exercise. And finally, we decided that instead of including it in the simulation itself, we included in the debriefing.
Matthew Stevens:
We ask people afterwards, "Well, what was missing from this exercise? What was missing from the simulation?" Usually they can correct identify, "Well, there was no gender represented in this. Everybody is a neutral gender." And you'd go on and say, "Yes. Well, these are, they're learning tools, right? This is not a representation of reality." So, reality is much more complicated. And that we're learning strategies and approaches from this exercise, but not facts about any one group of people. We're learning about how to approach a community, not how a community is. I think that's something really, that we in simulation gaming industry often miss out on, that none of our learning tools are perfect. And that's okay. So, admitting that we have omitted something, isn't us admitting to a failure, but it's more opening up an opportunity to use those imperfections to extend the lesson beyond the exercise itself.
Dr. Dave Eng:
The thing, an important thing that you brought up there about simulations, and it's especially important, if you are going to be designing them for the first time is this, I look at it as a spectrum between fidelity and abstraction. For simulations, you want to be as true to life as to the specific things you're trying to teach your individual population or your students or your players or anyone else. But some things also need to be abstracted away. And you talked a little bit about that with gender before. What is the main thing that you'd like your students to learn and how can we address that in debrief? So, those main things you want to be as true to life within your simulation in your scenario though, that's the fidelity and then the spectrum.
Dr. Dave Eng:
But on the other end, you can afford to abstract some things away. And I often, the example I use is when you look at something like Microsoft Flight Simulator, they want the highest fidelity possible. It should feel like you're trying fly this plane. Whereas when you look at abstraction, the first thing I always think about is, think about a chess board. Chess is supposed to be an amalgamation of warfare. Why is it that this Knight can only move in an L? That doesn't make any sense, but that's an obstruction. That's maybe this military unit has a specific movement restriction. They can only move in that way.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Maybe other military units like pawns can only move forward. There might be some reason why that can be. But those are the things that have been abstracted away where that game is at its core components. The reason it's set up that way is because, the details behind the reason of that movement is not important to the outcome and that's why they have been abstracted. Whereas for a simulation, you want it to be as close to that material as possible, so you are on the side of fidelity. Have you seen yourself doing that in your own work, like being closer to certain elements and abstracting way other elements?
Matthew Stevens:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, all the time. I mean, and I think like I say, it's important though to be cognizant of where you're doing that and why. And I mean, one thing I would say, it goes back to what you were saying about the difference between a commercial game and a simulation game. There are so many, right? But in a commercial game, I mean, you do have to make the game fun enough for people to want to keep playing. But you also, come to that game with some preconception or some idea that the people you want to play at your commercial game are there because they want to be there. They're excited about games. They might like learning a bunch of crunchy rules. I mean, maybe they don't, but some do, right? You can build a game that's really complicated, overload the players at the beginning and they spin through this really complicated world.
Matthew Stevens:
In a simulation game, you have to accept that some people won't want to be there. They might not have ever played a game before. They might not be excited about the idea of taking on a role. And so, you really do have to think about, okay, well, how much can I reasonably expect these learners who may not be gamers to take on? And that does limit what you are able to do, I think. Yeah, you just really do have to think about the extent to which the cognitive load of your participants I suppose. Yeah.
Dr. Dave Eng:
So Matthew, we're coming up on it another time here. So, I just wanted to ask a few closing up questions. Is there something interesting about yourself that I can't read on your resume? My fun fact question.
Matthew Stevens:
Do you want something serious or silly?
Dr. Dave Eng:
It's up to you.
Matthew Stevens:
Well, I want something silly. So, when I was an undergrad a long time ago, I was briefly the president of the university juggling club. How about that? That used to be on my resume, but it didn't last. I had to pull that off eventually.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Yes. And you talked a little bit about some other colleagues in your field. Do you have a recommendation for who I should interview next? I'd like to learn more.
Matthew Stevens:
That's a good question. I could check in with, I don't know, if you've reached out to Rex Brynen.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Actually the second person to recommend him, James recommended him to.
Matthew Stevens:
That makes sense. Yeah. I know, he is a very good speaker and very, very knowledgeable. I could try and connect you with him. I could also try to connect again, I can't promise that they would be receptive, but the people at Save the Children are doing very, very interesting work with digital learning games. And they might have time to chat. I can look it.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Okay. Thank you. And then last question, Matthew, is where can listeners connect with you online, if they would like to learn more about you or Lessons Learned Simulations and Training.
Matthew Stevens:
Fantastic. The best place is probably at our website, www.llst.co, so Lessons Learned Simulations and Training, LLST. We do have a Twitter account which is at @LLST_media. But I must admit, we're a little bit remiss, it's a team of one and a half these days, so the tweets don't come out as quick as we might want them to. And then again, I mean, honestly, the best places is, could just be to reach out to me directly. I'm always excited to hear from people who were interested in this kind of work. So, my email address is mstevens@llst.ca. So, mstevens@llst.ca.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Great. Thank you Matthew. So, on the show today we're joined by Matthew Stevens of Lessons Learned Simulations and Training. I hope you found this episode useful. If you'd like to learn more, then a great place to start is with my free course on gamification. You can sign up for it @universityxp.com/gamification. You can also get a full transcript of this episode including links to references in the description or show notes. Thanks for joining me.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Again, I'm your host Dave Eng from Games-Based Learning by University XP. On Experience Points we explore different ways we can learn from games. If you liked this episode, please consider commenting, sharing and subscribing. Subscribing is absolutely free and ensures that you'll get the next episode of Experience Points delivered directly to you. I'd also love it to be took some time to rate the show. I live to lift others with learning, so if you found this episode useful, consider sharing it with someone who could benefit. Also, make sure to visit University XP online www.universityxp.com. University XP is also on Twitter at University_XP. And on Facebook as University XP. Also, you'll feel free to email me anytime. My email address is dave@universityxp.com. Game on.