Interactive movie in Learning and Development
Serious Games as Innovative Learning Solutions
Interactive movie in education is a genre of serious gaming. Serious Games are typically online applications that use video games’ mechanisms to communicate specific information (knowledge) that helps introduce relevant concepts and the application of those concepts to solve problems. Serious games differ from classical video games in that their primary objective is not entertainment but effective learning.
The most immersive genre of serious gaming is the Interactive Movie. An interactive Movie is a nonlinear film that uses the “branching narrative” storytelling format. It allows players to pick between a series of choices as they go along, giving them control over how the plot unfolds.
Along the way, multiple “endings” and many story paths result from millions of unique permutations created by the nontraditional script. “There are lots of potential paths that the journey could take, and it’s up to you for when you feel sated,” Annabel Jones, co-producer of Netflix’s first interactive movie, Bandersnatch, told The Hollywood Reporter of the viewer’s journey ahead.
The interactive format offers a clear benefit: its nature as a puzzle encourages more active learner engagement than most projects. But the most significant advantage lies in the data we can gather from user participation. By putting interconnected decision-making to work, interactive movie-based simulations generate more robust pattern discovery and insights into trend analysis than traditional content can. This new data indicates real-world decisions like the preference for different business strategies or engagement with human behavior.
Soft skills profiling with interactive movies: download FLIGBY’s sample report on 29 people skills:
Experiential Learning in Safe Space
Interactive movies often simulate real-world events or processes designed to solve a problem. A Simulation is an approach and a tool that does possible controlled experiments based on clear rules for the player. A good simulation requires a model that reflects reality but in a simplified way. For example, FLIGBY models an imaginary Californian winery. The micro-simulation depicts certain aspects of running a winery in an entirely realistic way, in this case, the kinds of problems that a winery manager is likely to face. The simulation builds the characters of the management team realistically, depicting personalities and their conflicts in ways that any FLIGBY player is expected to have routinely encountered in their work life. At the same time, the simulation neglects certain other aspects of operating a winery or deals with them in a highly simplified manner.
Check out the teaser of FLIGBY, the award-winning interactive movie co-produced by Prof. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, father of the Flow theory:
Simulation is also known as problem-based-learning, or whole-task learning, which puts the player into the role of a problem solver, responding to realistic workplace scenarios. The lessons are built around a series of progressively more complex situations. A scenario-based game is somewhat similar to a decision-dilemma-driven teaching case study. Scenario-based learning lets players acquire experience through a trial-and-error process that is as effective as getting on-the-job training, without having to face possible real adverse consequences, such as the burden of having made wrong decisions.
Interactive Movie as Scenario-based Learning
Scenario-based learning combines the magical appeal and relevance of stories with the realism of hands-on training. Virtual scenarios let learners gather professional expertise and experience within a much shorter time than what they would have obtained working in real jobs. For example, in FLIGBY, six months of virtual time in the life of Turul Winery is compressed into a game of a few hours.
A good way, to sum up, is to enumerate features that are prerequisites for any serious game to have a chance to be successful:
- Build an engaging story
- Have strong characters a player can identify with or dislike
- Make successive tasks increasingly difficult
- Offer an attractive prize or a succession of prizes
- Add an unexpected turn of events; surprises (keeping in mind the stated caveats)
- Give players a significant degree of control over the game
- Set and enforce clear game-playing rules
- Ensure that all interdependent aspects “fit” together well
- Allow trial and error
- Limit the number of objectives the player should try to reach in the game
- Give frequent feedback
- Try to make the game original and creative
- Perform user experience tests
