Simulations and games, feedback and scores

Talking about simulations with some academic colleagues recently, I showed them two examples publicly available on OpenLearn: "A Day in the Life of a Social Worker", in which you play a junior social worker in a busy department, and "Saving Setrus", in which you play the President of an imaginary African country. Both have high production values, with rich graphical interfaces to immerse you in the setting, but there are big differences in the feedback you receive on your actions - which as I've written elsewhere is the critical component of any simulation intended for learning and not simply for entertainment. Does giving a numerical score for your actions as President mean that, as one of my colleagues thought, "Saving Setrus" is really a game and not a simulation?

"A Day in the Life of a Social Worker" consists of three sections: an in-tray exercise, in which you have limited time to deal with incoming tasks; a case conference, in which you have to choose appropriate dialogue responses to the various participants; and a home visit, in which you have to choose appropriate actions and responses to achieve the visit's objectives, despite the uncooperative attitude of your interlocutor. The feedback to the in-tray exercise is clear and plausible: your simulated line manager calls you in for a chat and discusses the tasks you selected and the tasks you didn't, commenting in each case on the wisdom or otherwise of your choices, and throughout the rest of the day you may get messages from colleagues giving you indirect feedback; for example, you may get an angry text from a senior colleague if you fail to rearrange an appointment because you didn't check your diary and so didn't see the conflict. The feedback to the other two sections is less striking because the possible actions for the learner are more constrained - especially since some of the options are patently silly - but still it is delivered within the game setting, without breaking the immersion.

In "Saving Setrus", the military dictator of your neighbouring country Laurania is stepping up his brutal crackdown on the political opposition, which is supported by many of your nationals in the second city Setrus. Over four simulated days, you engage in conversations with the other country's ambassador, the President of another neighbouring country, your attorney general (for advice on the legal position), an NGO working in the region, and the leaders of your armed forces. You also remotely address the UN Security Council respond to a speach by the Lauranian President. In each case, you choice is limited to dialogue options, adjusting your position with respect to each of them and with respect to international law. You cannot avoid deploying your armed forces at the end of the four days, although you do have some choice over what their orders are. The feedback which you receive at the end of each day is basically a set of three scores, rating your choices on humanitarian, legal and political scales. At the end of the simulation, there is also a brief discussion on the issues involved, but you don't get much sense of how your actions affected the outcome or even your scores.

The in-tray exercise is plausibly an introduction to being a social worker, whereas "Saving Setrus" is not plausibly an introduction to being a president. I think my colleague is right: the presentation of feedback as scores, and the invisibility of how these scores are obtained, contribute to the sense that "Saving Setrus" is really a game. This does not mean that it had no educational value; at very least, it gives a player exposure to the international law concerning military intervention and an awareness of the issues involved. But it is not really a simulation and I now think I was wrong to describe it as such.