Today, I got the opportunity to apply my role-playing skills at work. By day, I’m a newly-minted member of my employer’s Emergency Operations Committee (EOC). As part of my orientation to the committee, other committee members and I “played” a tabletop disaster simulation, practicing the skills that we’ll need in case a real emergency occurs.

Applying a skill in a high-pressure scenario is hard for novices because of cognitive load. When our brains are exposed to something new, we have to dedicate more of our attention to simply “processing” what we’re experiencing, leaving less attention for “learning” it. This is why beginner improv performers struggle with basics like naming their partner and establishing a relationship; the cognitive load of just being in a scene and listening to your partner overwhelms your working memory. Practice helps you become better at a skill because it makes that knowledge more familiar to your brain, meaning that you can access it with less attention.

So today’s tabletop exercise was like a sports scrimmage, or like my improv classes: The pressure level was higher than just reading our EOC protocols, but not so high that we completely blanked on the organizational skills that we needed to practice.

We also had a lot of fun! For example, my partner and I gave ourselves code names (I was “Johnny Lightning”) and kept the group laughing as we hammed up our roles. This is also an important part of a good learning experience: fun, or more techincally, “engagement” is the secret sauce that makes learners willing to keep practicing, even through rough patches like a challenging task or confusion about the rules of the disaster simulation. (I suspect that there’s a strong inverse relationship between task complexity and “fun”-ness, and may try digging through psychology research to see if anyone has studied this.)

So serious games present teachers with two advantages: By managing the pressure that learners experience, the teacher can both directly increase learning (our main goal) and increase engagement, which can indirectly increase learning. Win-win, right? And best of all, I’m told that the next training scenario will be a live exercise: My very first work LARP! 🙂

What are some serious games that you’ve played, and how well did they work?