LIVE. DIE. LEARN.

Sam Harold reckons we need to learn to lose.

A core part of remaining innovative in this fast-paced technological world is keeping your eye peeled for any opportunity for insight or creativity.

It is said that every story has already been told. While this statement may be a little hyperbolic, it does point to an important reality. When it comes to innovation, it is often far more important how you use your tools than it is in making new ones. As such, the most common form of innovation can come from taking inspiration from something that already works, and in trying to understand how its components function, using them to produce something new.

Working in the digital space, games make an obvious candidate for such introspection. Throughout all my time, creating games or publishing learning packages, a common trend has set the two decidedly apart.

Games allow a player to lose

A game rarely bases its primary purpose on the player’s outcome. Games are designed to cater to a wide audience of varying abilities and tastes, so it is far more important to focus on nailing a game’s distinct experience and ensuring that no matter the player’s ability, that experience is maintained.

This prioritisation of a specific experience is similar to our goals as learning designers. However, we differ from our industry cousins in that we prioritise the user’s outcomes far more. The outcome is that all learners, regardless of ability, end with the same awareness of a given subject.

Interestingly, whilst games did not prioritise this outcome nearly as heavily, they still excel at producing their audience of satisfied and competent players. How is it able to achieve this, irrespective of its focus on such an outcome?

The origin of games stems from our need to learn

Fun and play are core aspects of learning for animals across the world. How we learn how to run, hunt or hide is reinforced by play and mirroring our peers. You see this when your cats tussle, or your dogs jump for a tossed ball.

This is no different for humans. Games originate from our desire to participate in learning through experience. When this is successful, we simply don’t call it learning. We call it games.

Learning and Play go hand in hand.

The process of play and of learning, go hand in hand. The difference between the two resides in our motivation. They share the same core loop. The success of this loop is dependent on our willingness to engage with it. We can not force a want to know. No different from a developer forcing a game upon a captive audience.

But we can maximise the value of that experience, for those who see its value, by ensuring that we retain the value of a core and complete learning loop.

Demanding excellence

We can only maintain one’s participation in the loop if we can maintain that user’s focus. When one is engaged and determined, they learn and enjoy that process when they can see improvements and gains. If one instead is made to feel unengaged or apathetic, unable to see the relevancy or increase in their control, they are left to feel dissatisfied.

This is where learning can get a bad reputation. If we want to avoid this stigma, how do we ensure our users remain satisfied in those prior respects?

The industry’s fixation on achieving its desired outcome, achieving sufficient excellence on a subject in the earliest possible time, we are ensuring that our users are prevented from ever being engaged to the required levels. We break the learning loop wide open and deny them the experience of the natural ups and downs, wins and losses, of that loop.

Whatever a learner may do will ultimately lead to the desired result, with every avenue working to narrow down the possibility of deviance. This is the breeding ground for apathy. How can one be motivated to engage further when mere participation is sufficient for the best result?

The structure of play requires loss. The capacity to lose confirms to a user the existence of this cycle, experiencing loss and gain drives users towards higher standards of excellence and bestows them all the benefits a loss can provide. After all, losing can be fun!

Losing allows you to identify what you were doing incorrectly and highlights your areas for improvement, providing an organic incentive for participation.

When we do all we can to avoid this possibility, we deny learners this ability to reflect, on top of disengaging them, and safeguarding them from this important aspect of the natural cycle of learning. Yet, we act perplexed at the dirty word connotations of our learning…

A continuous process

Learning makes up part of a continuous living cycle. Satisfaction follows whenever we are able to improve our lives. This is the nature of happiness. To increase our sense of power and accomplishment and to overcome our limits.

This happiness is what transforms our learning into acts of fun. The process of engagement and satisfaction is the only real difference between the two.

As a continuous process, you must find your highs and your lows. You can only learn something if it was something you did not know before. You can only feel achievement when you know the required effort.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained

Losing allows us to identify our faults, motivates us to pursue excellence, and is necessary to provide some challenge and a bit of fun.

To be motivated, you must be allowed to lose. If you have no ability to lose, what could you possibly gain?

Sam Harold is an Instructional Designer and Moodle Developer.