Let’s have a look at the top five reasons why gamified learning is so difficult to create. And what we think is the best way to approach each challenge.   

1. Find the right balance between game design and learning objectives

It’s easy to fall in love with an exciting game concept. But how do you know it will work for your learning objectives?

There’s a natural contradiction between an engaging game and rigid learning objectives. A game is never fun or engaging because the goal is to learn A, B and C. Instead, the game design should encourage you to learn A, B and C because the knowledge will help you win the game. This is the key to a good learning game.

Solution: Create a relevant story that gives a reason for the goal and helps you progress in the game. A good start could be to look at the main objective of the learning and add a twist. Then make sure mastering the learning objectives is the best way for the learner to win the game.

2. Adapt the game to the corporate environment

Some game genres come with a look and feel that can be tricky to adapt to a corporate environment. Even if your game is fun, neon-coloured candy or cute, animated trolls might not be in line with your corporate identity. And if the game will be used globally, it will also have to work in all cultures.

Again, it can be difficult to find the right balance. It’s tempting to play it safe, but that sometimes means you kill creative ideas and end up with a boring game. On the other hand, a wild and experimental game designer without a good understanding of the target group can confuse or even upset some of your learners.

Solution: Identify the key elements of the game design.  Find a look and feel that appeals to everyone in the target group without compromising the original game design.

3. Alignment between the stakeholders

This is probably where most learning games fail – and the main reason why big dreams of an exciting learning game often end up with a simple knowledge quiz. Creating a good game requires both knowledge about the topic and skills in game design. This combination most often involves two or more people who need to communicate closely with each other. Deciding the consequences of decisions in a game can be difficult for a subject matter expert if they don’t understand game design mechanics. Coming up with realistic outcomes for the learner’s choices is almost impossible for a game designer unfamiliar with the topic.

Solution: Make sure you have a common language and shared vision of the result during the game development.  Prototyping key elements of the game design for test, evaluation and feedback is vital for development. The more closely a game designer can work with other stakeholders, and the faster everyone can see the result, the better. This is where the custom elements in our authoring tool really shine. Our solution makes it easy to adjust and test everything from texts, images, and video to scoring, rewards and game logic.

4. Limited budget

Let’s face it: learning solutions do not have the same budget as games. That means we must work smart to reach a standard that looks and feels like the games a learner can play at home. For us as a supplier, working with a fixed budget also presents risks when developing a learning game. The number of unknown factors is far higher than when developing a standard e-learning.

To reduce the number of unknown factors, some game developers have a customizable “game engine” that serves as a base for each new project. This is a powerful tool when making specific types of games. But the requests we get from our clients are often very different from each other. That’s why we need a more generic approach.

Solution: Finding a custom game design for each new project is not an easy task with a limited budget. Our approach has been to simplify the authoring process by adding a set of generic gaming elements to our authoring tool. This makes it easy to add scores, conditions and rewards to our existing building blocks and make the training respond to the learner. Combined with our experience making gamified learning, this approach helps us find a good game design, accurately estimate the development cost and share a common language internally as well as with our clients.

5. Appealing to all learners

Finally, a big difference between commercial games and learning is that we need to appeal to all learners. We cannot exclude people from learning a topic because some of them aren’t engaged by a specific game genre. The more “game-like” our projects become, the bigger the risk that we lose people in the target group. You can’t ask people to understand how an RPG or a real-time strategy game works before they can start learning!

Solution: Remember, we’re making a learning experience, not a game. Start with something everyone in the target group can relate to. What are their dreams? Find a game genre and create a story that speaks to them. Make sure to connect them to your organisation’s vision and learning objectives. Why not use real-life challenges from the learners’ work as a starting point?