-: My name is Colton Keiko Neves
and I am the Director of Product and Game Design
at SimCase.
SimCase is a very tiny company.
There's four people in it.
And it sits at the intersection
of higher education and gaming.
So we bring active learning experiences
to the college classroom, online,
and to work training spaces.
My core responsibilities revolve around
working with professors to bring their games to life,
building those games with a remote development team,
and then implementing those games in their classrooms
or in their learning environments.
Sort of secondary responsibilities are
understanding and building our marketing strategy,
writing blog posts, pitching our product
to prospective professors or other companies,
and basically expectation management
for clients, our developers, and my CEO.
So basically everything, but I would say
that's the right description.
So right now, we work with two core schools,
Wharton and Kellogg, and they surface learnings
that they think could be brought to life
by games-based learning.
So I'm working with a professor now
and I'm super excited about this.
I am very passionate about discrimination in the workplace
so we're working with him to bring
one of his theories to life.
So it's called Heed the Market
and basically it places you as a hiring manager.
And I have five offers, right?
Four of those offers are $100,000 for me.
One of them, one of the firms actually doesn't like people
who wear flowery shirts so they give me $80,000, right.
Then you're in this game.
You're the sixth hiring manager.
You see all five offers and you say,
"Well, then I'll give Colton $95,000."
And in doing so, you perpetuate
discriminatory practices unknowingly.
So the whole game is to reveal
that what we believe to be unbiased is truly biased.
So that's one of the games that we do
and then we produce a debrief to talk about with students.
For a game like this, it begins with
sort of an iterative investigation process.
What is that you're trying to teach?
What is the core takeaway?
And what would you like your students to walk away with?
Given that, what are the other limitations
in your classrooms?
How long is it?
How many people are there?
What material are you using beforehand?
Then we use that as sort of the lines within which to draw
and we come up with three or four suggestions
on how this should go.
That gets voted up or down with the professor
and then I take our final idea,
I mock it up, so I make prototypes of that,
and then I put it into a project management software,
something like JIRA, if you've heard it,
and then I work with the remote team
to build that in stages over time.
So you start with a single experience
that can be easily testable,
then you build it out to whole game,
then you bring it to the professor and the classroom.
So that can take anywhere from three to six months,
from beginning to end.