Ever played Candy Crush? Come on, you know you have. Or at least if you ever tried, chances are you got sucked in pretty quickly.

There's actually a psychological reason for that, says Josh Jackson, vice president of SAIC's training and simulation group: Candy Crush artfully taps our drive to win; to score points, to conquer new levels. It also taps an innate desire to outshine, to tell people when you've accomplished something that just maybe they haven't pulled off yet.

Jackson calls it intrinsic motivation. And when combined with the appeal of immersing oneself in an alternative reality, albeit for a short while, it's one of the most compelling reasons why gaming technologies are so addicting. It's also why they're so effective for training. What if federal employees could take purchase card training by playing a game, rather than sit through an hour's worth of PowerPoint slides? What if they were encouraged to increase their proficiency by conquering new game levels?

It's happening – and not just in the military. Jackson sat down with Federal Times Editor Jill Aitoro to explain how.

SAIC opened what you described as a serious game studio in Seattle. What does that mean?

Our serious game studio is designed to leverage the creativity that is housed in the Seattle area around game development, art and graphic design to build interactive, virtual environments [for] better training. Some examples of that are games that allow people to navigate new skills and techniques, to get into a new job if they are experiencing career transition, or tackle some health problems.

Talk to me about the development process.

Typically, in a game development or training development life cycle, you would first understand the problem you are trying to solve from our customer. Once they define that, they sketch up what the solution might look like, what your virtual environment might look like, what scenarios there are, what the steps are, and what your key learning objectives [may be]. You define that, storyboard it out in sequence, and then you actually start to put the art behind it, the movement, and artificial intelligence, if needed, in the background. Then you bring it all together, review it, and push out a final product. But it is done in different pieces and places, stitched together in one location, and delivered.

How long start to finish does this take?

It completely depends on the scenario. It could be anywhere from a few weeks for a very simple scenario, a very small set of training objectives, to 18 months to two years to develop a very complex, multi-level, multi-scenario game environment.

How could a government customer utilize a center like that?

We are looking at our existing training programs and figuring out how we can incorporate game, and game design, into those programs to make training more effective and more immersive. If you think about the millennial generation, they have grown up on games. They play games on their mobile devices, on the desktops, and on their consoles. So what we are trying to do is leverage that commonality.

For training, it allows folks to be immersed in an environment where they feel comfortable making decisions. That is the whole point of a game-based training environment — make someone feel like they are in a real situation, forced to make real decisions and sometimes live with the consequences. Other times, show them the value of other choices that they should make.

Walk me through what an experience might be like.

They are on their iPad or iPhone being given a scenario. It could be a two-dimensional or three-dimensional scenario, and they would be given the background of the scenario and asked a simple question: What would you do?

Based upon their action they would then be drawn down another set of scenarios that would lead them to establish some training value. It could be something as simple as how to handle a [payment] card transaction and how to use a P-card. Or, it could be something as complex as how do you gather intelligence from a local villager in Afghanistan.

Talk to me about how simulation can be utilized outside of military training.

So, obviously, the Defense Department has been an early adopter of simulation and virtual environments for training. I think it has been cost prohibitive for many smaller federal agencies, so we have been looking at ways to develop and deliver highly immersive training cheaper and faster.

We see a few key areas where other fed agencies might use it. [One is] workforce. The federal agencies are growing, [but] there is a gap between the millennials and the more experienced federal workforce. There is a need to transition knowledge, which could be done through virtual environments and some kinds of games, as well as train the younger generation on the new knowledge that they need to gain.

Why is this better than traditional training methods?

Training is always about the human dimension; there is always a human in the loop. I think in the past 10 or 15 years we have gotten away from the human element and focused on the technology, which is only one component of a training solution. So we are looking at ways to maximize the benefit and the ability to draw out the human performance and improve cognition; that is one area we are investing in.

Jill Aitoro is editor of Defense News. She is also executive editor of Sightline Media's Business-to-Government group, including Defense News, C4ISRNET, Federal Times and Fifth Domain. She brings over 15 years’ experience in editing and reporting on defense and federal programs, policy, procurement, and technology.

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