Richard Nantel

Eighteen years ago, I bought the original SimCity game and subsequently went for two days without food or sleep. I obsessively worked away at creating the perfect city filled with happy citizens. The day my virtual city obtained a stadium remains one of the highlights of my technological life.

Games that encourage learners to think like engineers, doctors, lawyers, urban planners, and other professionals are called epistemic games. These applications are now being used in schools to encourage creative problem solving.

Below is a great example from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The lucky students were even able to present their urban plans to the mayor of Madison.

Let’s be honest. It’s been pretty tough for departments to justify purchasing video game consoles for training purposes. Sure, Wii Sports may improve your golf swing or bowling accuracy, but, apart from reducing workplace stress and increasing worker morale, video game consoles haven’t yet made a significant impact on workplace learning.

Thanks to Johnny Lee, you can now purchase that coveted Wii console and write it off as a business expense guilt free. Mr. Lee has hacked a $40 Wii controller to create a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen, and a head-mounted 3-D viewer.

Technically, you don’t need the entire $250 Wii console to create Johnny Lee’s digital whiteboard. His hack only requires a $40 Wii controller, which can be purchased separately from the console, and $10 in electronic parts from Radio Shack. I promise not to tell your purchasing department. Perhaps you can even find a training use for the red-hot Wii Fit.

P.S. Unlike during the pre-holiday shopping rush, you no longer need to camp out all night at your local electronics store to get your hands on a Wii console. Wiis are now commonly available and can be acquired during your lunch break.

By the pure luck of being at the right place at the right time, my family now owns a Wii. Although my past is filled with hours at a computer playing Wolfenstein 3D, playing Doom, and crashing Lear jets using various flight simulators, the Wii is my introduction to game consoles.

My right shoulder is still sore from a late-night marathon Wii Baseball practice session Saturday. The good news is that I went from being a loser at the plate, continually striking out, to hitting home runs on a pretty consistent basis.

The experience is very realistic, even if my avatar is a stylized puppet figure with floating hands but no arms. The balls come flying at you at the right speed, and your reaction time is similar to a real batting experience. I found myself recoiling from inside pitches. Best of all, hitting the ball creates a little vibration in the hand controller, just as if you’ve hit a real baseball with a wooden bat.

The tactile feedback (haptics) and convincing yet stylized 3-D graphics of the Wii would make the platform an excellent tool for technical training. Imagine learning to do maintenance on a piece of machinery using this platform. Learners would likely be lining up to have their turns.

Will we see custom-built workplace training content appear for the Wii platform? Although the cost of developing games for the Wii is less than half the cost of developing for other platforms such as Xbox 360 or PS3, a commercial Wii game still costs millions to develop.

But, a short workplace learning simulation would not need to be as large or complex as a full-fledged commercial game. Consequently, the effort would be significantly less.

Rumors are circulating on the Web that Nintendo will be selling a Wii development kit for less than $2,000 to encourage third-party developers to produce titles for the platform. Hopefully, a learning content development studio will pick up a copy and give it a try.

Movies aimed at children changed significantly about 15 years ago. Film studios realized that little kids didn’t go to movies on their own. They were there with their parents, who paid for their tickets and obscenely overpriced candy, popcorn, and soft drinks.

Some smart movie producer realized that parents would be more likely to bring their children to movies that would also be enjoyable for the parent. The result was that kids’ movies such as “The Land Before Time” (1989) — a movie universally condemned by human rights advocates as too cruel a form of torture for adults — were replaced with movies such as “Aladdin” (1992), a movie that contained the appeal of a well-known comedian, Robin Williams, and inside jokes only adults would understand.

A few years later, it was common to see adults without children seated in showings of “Monster’s Inc.,” “Chicken Run,” “Toy Story,” and many others.

Game developers seem to be on the cusp of a similar discovery.

Parents have for many years been grudgingly buying game consoles for their kids and have been tolerating having them spend hour after hour in the playroom shooting up aliens and crashing cars. Four of the top five best selling games for the Xbox 360 platform are violent, “shoot-em-up” action games.

Nintendo’s Wii, the most coveted unavailable electronic device of 2006 and 2007, is helping to introduce an entirely new generation to games. In many households, the kids are being sent to bed early so that Mom and Dad can head to the playroom and get in a few games of bowling or tennis before calling it a night.

The result is that parents want a Wii as much as kids. This is contributing to Nintendo’s inability to meet demand, even when producing a staggering 1.8 million of these devices per month.

Game developers have realized that adults can be introduced to games through good design and the appeal of playing non-violent games they already know, like tennis and bowling. The logical next step will be to design games specifically for adults.

My next post will examine what these games might look like.