Episode 7 War Games with James Sterett, U.S. Army University/Command & General Staff College
War Games with James Sterett, U.S. Army University/Command & General Staff College
I connected with my colleague James Sterrett the US Army Deputy Chief, CGSC Simulations & Exercises Division. In this interview we discussed Dr. Sterett’s work with simulations, war games, and his philosophy on incorporating gaming into teaching and learning.
James Sterrett
US Army
Deputy Chief, CGSC Simulations & Exercises Division
https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-sterrett-32a7195/
James Sterrett is the Chief of the Simulation Education Division in the Directorate of Simulation Education of U.S. Army University/Command & General Staff College. Since 2004, he has taught the use and design of simulations and games, and supported their use in education. He also earned a PhD in War Studies from King's College London, and has participated in beta test and design teams for many games, notably including Steel Beasts and Attack Vector: Tactical.
Transcript:
Dr. Dave Eng:
Hi, and welcome to Experience Points by University XP. On Experience Points we explore different ways we can learn from games. I'm your host Dave Eng, from games-based learning by University XP. Find out more at www.universityxp.com
Dr. Dave Eng:
We have a special guest on today's episode, James Sterrett. James is the chief of simulation education at the United States Army Command and General Staff College. In this role he leads the simulation education division and teaches courses on training with simulations and war game design.
Dr. Dave Eng:
James earned his PhD in war studies from Kings College in London, his MA in military history from the University of Calgary, and his BA in history from Haverford College. James, welcome to the show.
Dr. James Sterrett:
Thank you.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Great James. So can you just give our listeners a brief overview of how you became the Chief of Simulation Education at the United States Army Command and General Staff College? Sounds like a great title. I'd like to know a little bit more about your background there.
Dr. James Sterrett:
So in part by being lucky and in part by being open to a new option. The production of my dissertation was materially delayed by getting involved in a lot of game projects, including running a game called TacOps, a modern-ish military simulation online and Decisive Action in a modern division and corps level simulation.
Dr. James Sterrett:
And as I was waiting to finally, having gotten through all these other projects, to finally defend the thesis, I got word through the TacOps mailing list that CGSC, the Command and General Staff College was hiring for its simulation division and they used TacOps, and they use Decisive Action. And I thought, "Well, I will never forgive myself if I don't apply."
Dr. Dave Eng:
Yeah.
Dr. James Sterrett:
So I applied and they looked at me and said, "Hey, you're about to defend your dissertation. You have some teaching experience as a teaching assistant at both Calgary and University of Glasgow.", where my wife was getting her PhD done. And they said, "All right, we need somebody to teach."
Dr. James Sterrett:
So they brought me on initially as a teacher and for the first four or five years I was a Northrop Grumman contractor. And then, there was an in-sourcing and they brought most of us on as government employees. So because reasons when they hired us on as government employees, I went from being one of the rank and file to being the team lead and the title has changed a bit over the years. But that's how I wound up where it is I am.
Dr. Dave Eng:
I see. So I just wanted to clarify two different things. One, you are a civilian?
Dr. James Sterrett:
I am a civilian. That's correct.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Okay. And two, TacOps. Can you tell us more about that, because you talked about using it during your dissertation then the US Army Command and General Staff College was using it. So can you expand a little bit more than what TacOps is?
Dr. James Sterrett:
Sure. TacOps was released originally in 1994, I think, as a tactical simulation, tactical war game, of modern combat. So you've got tanks and you've got infantry fighting vehicles, and infantry, and artillery, and all the stuff that you would expect.
Dr. James Sterrett:
It wasn't very pretty when it was released and it hasn't gotten any prettier since, but it's remarkably easy to use and it does a really good job of if not doing all of the absolute minutiae of tactical combat, it does a great job of allowing you to be the company commander or the battalion commander and work on how to synchronize movement of forces and fires and fight the enemy. It does a lot of things very well.
Dr. James Sterrett:
So the thing that I was doing as a side project was that a bunch of us on TacOps mailing list had been trying to figure out, how could we move... The original version of TacOps had only either hot seat or play by email play and we wanted to do it as teams.
Dr. James Sterrett:
And I had the bright idea, because I had run into the original Prussian Kriegspiel from some people in London, to run it like a Kriegspiel, in that we would separate the two teams completely. There would be the master map that I would run and we use mIRC chat in order to pass out information to them and to get all the information back, which was a pretty busy way to run the game for the empire.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Right.
Dr. James Sterrett:
But it had the advantage that, one, I got to see everything that was happening on both sides because all the information literally passed through me. Two, many of the people who took part in these were either current or former military who would tell me, "You're running an exercise and this is how to do it better." And I said, "Why, thank you. I will definitely work on running it better." So I learned a lot there.
Dr. James Sterrett:
And third, I don't know why I did this, but from the start I disciplined myself to always write a proper AAR, not a, "Oh, this is what I was thinking and feeling at the time, but a-"
Dr. Dave Eng:
What is an AAR, James?
Dr. James Sterrett:
Sorry, AAR is after action review.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Okay.
Dr. James Sterrett:
Which often, in hobby circles is, "Here's how the game unfolded and what I was thinking at the time."
Dr. Dave Eng:
Okay.
Dr. James Sterrett:
But a proper AAR is aimed at the lessons learned at the end. So what I was writing was, "Here are the missions each side had, here's the plan they walked in with, here's an overview of what happened, and here's what we can learn from what they did." And this had a couple noteworthy impact. One, it seals the exercise experience, if you will, for me, and I think that may have been useful for me walking in.
Dr. James Sterrett:
It may not have been useful from the perspective of the people hiring me, but certainly has helped me in slip streaming into work here, 15 years ago now.
Dr. Dave Eng:
So I just want to-
Dr. James Sterrett:
So the second-
Dr. Dave Eng:
Oh, okay. Go ahead.
Dr. James Sterrett:
The second thing that it really drove home to me were two others things that were useful simply as a historian. The first of which was the artificiality of imposing a linear narrative on chaotic events, which I learned from.
Dr. James Sterrett:
And second, the absolute importance of understanding what it is that people knew in order to understand why they decided to do what they did. Because I could sit there with the God view of being the umpire and say, "Oh, you don't know about this threat on your flank, but because you don't know about it, I understand why you're deciding to do whatever it is you're going to do is it's going to get you ambushed."
Dr. Dave Eng:
So you provided a lot of great information there. James, I just wanted to write down a couple of things. So one of them, you talked about Kriegspiel, and can you just confirm, is Kriegspiel what we would consider the forerunner to the modern war game?
Dr. James Sterrett:
It is.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Okay.
Dr. James Sterrett:
It's in many ways it's the first modern war game.
Dr. Dave Eng:
I see. And then the second part, for TacOps.
Dr. James Sterrett:
Sorry?
Dr. Dave Eng:
So it is a game that is played turn-by-turn, but it is not, I don't know if you would classify it as a video game or a digital game, but it is a simulation that it's not an analog simulations. Not like a tabletop simulation. Is that how you would classify?
Dr. James Sterrett:
That's correct. It's a computer game.
Dr. Dave Eng:
I see.
Dr. James Sterrett:
I think you can still buy it from Battlefront.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Oh, I see. So with all of that being said, can you tell us, for our audience, if someone wants to begin using things like a simulation, not necessarily a war game, but a simulation, how would you define what you mean by the term simulation?
Dr. James Sterrett:
So I tend to go back to the AMSO definitions, oddly enough, because the army doesn't always produce good definitions, but in this case I think they really nailed it. AMSO is the Army Model and Simulations Office. A model is a representation, so you can have math models, you can have physical models, you can have visual models, you have mental models.
Dr. James Sterrett:
A simulation is a model iterated over time and that seems a little odd at first, but then you think of some of the things out there that are simulations which involve no interaction whatsoever. We're going to simulate the flight of this ball through the air. So we have models to say what happens for every unit of time in terms of drag, and gravity, and air resistance, or what have you. And then, we iterate that. We find out where the ball winds up after it gets thrown with a given angle and a given force.
Dr. James Sterrett:
When we move to a game, what we're really doing is we are adding decisions and goals. We're adding competition. So when I'm throwing the ball and trying to hit you, now we have game.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Oh. Because I can try to avoid it.
Dr. James Sterrett:
Exactly.
Dr. Dave Eng:
I see, so that being said, what makes something a war game then?
Dr. James Sterrett:
To my mind, a war game is a game in which the topic is something having to do with warfare or the military. I have a pretty broad definition. There are other people who will have much tighter definitions and they will say, Oh, it must have hexes and counters, and this and that and I am not as narrow in my understanding of the term, I suppose.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Yeah, and I guess if we were to expand it further, can something be a war game if it focuses on something that's completely tactical versus something strategic, or something that is a realistic simulation versus something that's fiction. Would you still classify it as a war game?
Dr. James Sterrett:
All of the above, yes, under my definition, my approach to it. As long as it has something to do with military operations of some sort, then it's a war game. As a wider example in the master's track that I run for war game design, one of the students a few years back did his game on, how do you do training for an infantry company in the California National Guard?
Dr. James Sterrett:
And part of the challenge there is, how do you get them through all of their required training while also having them report to all various natural disasters that happen in California, and other events that people get called up for from the National Guard. To my mind, sure, it's a war game. It has to do with military training.
Dr. Dave Eng:
So would you say that a war game doesn't necessarily even have to have, I would say contention between parties? You illustrated before about an Army National Guard. Sometimes the contention has to deal with a natural disaster, not necessarily an enemy force.
Dr. James Sterrett:
Yes, it might be that the contention is against the system. It might be that the contention is, in effect, coopetition, a term that I think I'm stealing from a game named Aftershock, which you may or may not have heard of.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Yup.
Dr. James Sterrett:
Okay.
Dr. Dave Eng:
So, I know that you've explained a lot about your background, specifically starting with TacOps and everything. Can you tell us more about what is your philosophy behind creating games and simulations, I guess leading up to your current position and what you're doing right now?
Dr. James Sterrett:
I'm going to answer this in a sideways manner because I'm going to start by talking about what's the philosophy for using them.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Oh, okay.
Dr. James Sterrett:
So using them in the classroom, the key thing you've got to begin with is, what is the purpose? And this is the start of a model that at CGSC we call PDI for purpose, decisions, interactions. You have to be able to talk either to yourself, as the instructor, or to the other person who I would be supporting, the other instructor, and say, "What's supposed to happen? What are students supposed to learn from this? How long do we have? Where does it fit into your lesson plan? What is this supposed to do?"
Dr. James Sterrett:
It's not simply, "Hey, we're going to go in and have a good time." This is supposed to help somebody learn something, so what is it they're supposed to learn so that we've got that understood well enough that we can identify whether or not the game's going off track?
Dr. James Sterrett:
From that, we move to discussing, what are the key decisions and dilemmas that the students have to wrestle with in the game in order to get at whatever it is you want them to learn? Or if it's a concrete experience at the beginning of class, so that they come to the understanding you want, or it drives the discussion you want.
Dr. James Sterrett:
However it is that it fits into the classroom, those decisions have to be able to drive that impact in class and if it doesn't, then fundamentally we're wasting time. And in a sense, you can then draw a line through the model, the purpose, decision, and interaction model, because everything above that line, the purpose and the decisions are really for the instructor to define.
Dr. James Sterrett:
And then, in the simulation education division, we are supposed to be the experts for the instructor on games that are available, simulations that are available. We take that information and run it off and say, "Okay, what can we find that might suit this?" And ideally, we come up with a slate of three, four, however many games that we think might suit, and we call the instructor back in and say, "Hey, here they are. Here's the petting zoo. Please sit down, play them, talk about them, try them out, see whether or not they suit what you want to do."
Dr. James Sterrett:
And hopefully the answer is, "Oh, this one, this will be great.", at which point we work with that instructor, "Okay, how are you going to use it in the classroom? Do you need our support? Do you need somebody there to teach it, to answer rules, questions?", because often it's useful in the class for the instructor not to be the one who's running the game, because that way they can be watching the student interactions and reactions and taking notes for, "Hey I want to discuss this.", or "I want to stop the game and talk about that.", whatever it might be, while somebody else is worried about, "This is how you run the game, hey, this is how the rules work."
Dr. Dave Eng:
I see.
Dr. James Sterrett:
Equally though, it may be that the instructor will say, "Well, this doesn't work. This really doesn't answer the mail." In which case we tried to find out why so that we can refine our understanding and go off and find it. In some cases that means that we go off and we have to design the game, at which point, in many ways, what we are aimed for is two things, oddly.
Dr. James Sterrett:
We're aimed for design for effect. We're trying to get the right decisions in there, but at the lowest possible overhead and rules. Most of our students are not gamers. They don't go home and play war games for fun. So if I haul out something like Operational Combat Series, their eyes are going to glaze over and they will run out of the room.
Dr. James Sterrett:
If I bring in something like say Battle from Moscow, then they will initially be a little bit nervous, but it's a simple enough, easy enough game to learn, I shouldn't call it simple, that they will start to understand how to play it and within a turn or three they will be fighting each other instead of the game system and therefore getting at whatever it is they're supposed to learn.
Dr. James Sterrett:
So we need to try and make, ideally, a very elegant game to get the minimum rules overhead and still get the impact.
Dr. Dave Eng:
I like that you share that it is often a best case if the instructor is not also the game master, because I know working with educators at times the instructor must be the game master because they are the only ones that they can rely on. You don't usually have a staff or teaching assistant or someone else.
Dr. Dave Eng:
But I want to know this from you, James. So when you talk about your really interesting work, what other people say, people that are not gamers, they don't work and simulations or anything else, what do you think is a common misperception that they have about your work?
Dr. James Sterrett:
Probably the most common misperception people have is that I spend all day playing games. And I will tell people that that's the joke version of my job description, but that the true one is I spend all day trying to get other people to play games.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Oh, okay.
Dr. James Sterrett:
And I've found that for people on our team, the useful mindset coming in is not, "Hey, I really like playing games at home. It's fun. I think I'll do great in this team." It's, "Hey, at home I really like going to game conventions and running demos for people.", or "I like making maps and scenarios for other people.", or "I like running role playing game campaigns." It's that that focus on other people running the game seems to be very, very useful coming into our team.
Dr. Dave Eng:
I see. And for the other educators and designers out there, say they like what they hear, they like what they know about your work, and everything else. They will also want to start getting simulations. They want to start using simulations as part of their teaching and learning.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Are there any resources that you use specifically, I guess starting with TacOps, and now affecting your current work, that you use on a regular basis to help you design, conceive, and apply these different simulations?
Dr. James Sterrett:
Boy, that's a big topic.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Well, let's narrow it down, James, into what would you say is your number one resource, what is a tool that you use on a regular basis?
Dr. James Sterrett:
Why don't we narrow it down to a couple of things that I point people at?
Dr. Dave Eng:
Okay.
Dr. James Sterrett:
So one of the things that we're always pointing students at is Board Game Geek, which is essentially Wikipedia for board games. You can find all sorts of stuff. You want to find games on a topic, you can punch in the topic, and you can start to find games on it and it will, much like Wikipedia, if you're like me and undisciplined with it at times, you start looking at one thing and 45 minutes later you're looking at a different topic that you've changed to.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Yup.
Dr. James Sterrett:
They often have extensive discussions of rules. They've often got extensive discussions of play balance or variant rules that may help you figure out, is this thing really what I want? Another resource that I make a lot of use of, or at least track a lot, is a website called PAXsims, P-A-X-S-I-M-S, which is run by a professor named Rex Brynen up at McGill University.
Dr. James Sterrett:
And in many ways it's the major website for what you might call professional war gaming.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Oh, I see. Okay.
Dr. James Sterrett:
War gaming, not necessarily just in a Department of Defense kind of war gaming, but war gaming writ larger than that, but war gaming for professional purposes and it's got a lot of high quality or articles added to it.
Dr. James Sterrett:
Similarly, if you're interested in Department of Defense gaming, then I would look at the Connections conference, Connections Wargaming conference, which meets once a year in the US, it's now branched out to a couple of other sites, but that's where, in effect, the war game nerds get together and talk shop.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Nice. And based on those resources and your contact at McGill, is there anyone else that has been influential in your career?
Dr. James Sterrett:
Probably the single most influential person, if we really go back, is a guy named Tim Jones, and Tim Jones was a history teacher at the school that I grew up at. My parents were also teachers there, and he was a war gamer. And for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, he started hiring me when I was in third grade to water his plants when he was on vacation and he would pay me in war games.
Dr. James Sterrett:
So he was also a really good history teacher, a great history teacher. So one, he thoroughly set the hook of being a war gamer, and being a war gamer is an entry drug to history, and he also set the hook for history. So that's a mutually reinforcing start there. And regardless of the things that happened after, I think I would have been interested in history and interested in wargaming for the rest of my life as a result.
Dr. Dave Eng:
I find that mental picture so amusing, as a young James is exchanging watering plants for this unit of measure in the war games. You're like, "How do you make change for a war game? Is it a month of watering plants equals one game, or half the game, or just the components of them?"
Dr. James Sterrett:
It was one vacation and equaled one game.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Oh, I see.
Dr. James Sterrett:
I didn't really ask about the details. I was perfectly happy with the exchange and so was he.
Dr. Dave Eng:
That sounds like a good exchange for me.
Dr. James Sterrett:
Yeah.
Dr. Dave Eng:
I know that over our email exchange before, James, we talked about, and this is a movie that came up when I immediately read about your background, what is your opinion of the 1983 film War Games, starring Matthew Broderick?
Dr. James Sterrett:
Oddly enough, in some ways I don't have a lot of opinion about it.
Dr. Dave Eng:
No?
Dr. James Sterrett:
But the oddity that struck me, I did not see it at the time that it came out. I didn't see it until probably in the last couple of years, but one of the things that did strike me is they have their simulation, their AI, hooked up so that there is no firewall between simulation data and real world command systems.
Dr. James Sterrett:
And the reason that struck me is that I know that in real exercises there is a great deal of trouble put to ensuring that that leakage will not happen because of the obvious problems that you could have. And occasionally it does and there's a lot of storm and stress over the fact that data has leaked out, not because people are worried about the classification leaking out, but because it could cause a panic and could cause somebody to shoot when they shouldn't.
Dr. Dave Eng:
When you consider that part of the, what should I call it, the human loop, there may be a simulation running, but before there was an actual command decision made, it needs to pass through a human, that choice needs to pass through a human.
Dr. James Sterrett:
So that's really a different topic. I'll come back to that in a sec. The thing that I'm really talking about is making sure that your exercise network, the data that flows out of the exercise, can't go onto a live command and control network.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Oh, I see.
Dr. James Sterrett:
One that it is tracking the real positions of friendlies and contacts. In terms of keeping human in the loop, I think that gets very complex because, we obviously, we think that we would like to keep humans in the loop. We also know that humans are fallible and that programs are fallible. Programs make mistakes.
Dr. James Sterrett:
There are things in warfare that happen faster than you can allow the human to be in the loop and make it work. There are systems out there, things like air defense, right, where fundamentally, what you're really doing is saying, "Hey, if you get a target in this area, in this zone, then here are your engagement parameters and you are authorized to fire."
Dr. Dave Eng:
Okay.
Dr. James Sterrett:
And part of the trick is making sure that those parameters are indeed correct. I've never been an air defender, so I am pulling in an example that some of them may sit there and shake their heads at, and one of my current students is an air defender, so he may come back after this and say, "James, you got it all wrong."
Dr. James Sterrett:
But as reaction times get faster, and often speed of reaction is the difference between survival or not, then I think we're going to find that becomes a sharper and sharper issue and we're going to find that there is increasing pressure to allow machines to make decisions on their own.
Dr. James Sterrett:
And the question is whether or not the programming is good. Possibly the famous real world example of a human overriding bad programming is Colonel Penkovsky in the Soviet missile Service who, the computer told him the Americans were sending missiles at him and he said, "No, I think that's a computer glitch.", didn't report it, and it turned out that the computer system was misinterpreting the moon rising, and fortunately we're all here to talk about it because Penkovsky was able to think ahead and took an enormous personal risk in order to not fire.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Right. So many times during the Cold War where someone could have pushed the button and it could have ended for us but it didn't.
Dr. James Sterrett:
Yep.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Yeah. So based off that, and based off everything you've learned so far, what do you think has been the biggest lesson that you've learned in your time in your current position right now?
Dr. James Sterrett:
Oddly enough, I think the biggest lesson came from Kriegspiel. So I've run a lot of Kriegspiel over the years after learning it in London. And there are three things that I identified early on that I thought were unusual about it.
Dr. James Sterrett:
The first of which is that you keep the players, as best you can, in a state of extraordinarily dense fog of war. You tell them as little as possible, as little as you can get away with. If there's a question about how much you tell them, you tend to tell them less in Kriegspiel. You don't want them to know what's going on because you're trying to recreate the reality of people don't know what's going on.
Dr. James Sterrett:
And the second is that you put them under time pressure as best you can. You don't want to allow them half an hour to ponder what their next best move would be. You've got to get them thinking, "I've got to make a decision now, but time is going to keep moving on. So if I don't make a decision, that is a decision. Maybe I need to make a decision on the basis of imperfect information."
Dr. James Sterrett:
And the third of these, and this was the one that has really, really grown in my understanding and it's important and, in many ways, overshadows the other two by now is every order you give has to be understood by another human being. And that's something that we really very rarely do in any of our games.
Dr. James Sterrett:
I reach out and I click the mouse or I move to counter and the piece does exactly what I tell it, exactly when I tell it, exactly like I tell it. That human factor is completely removed, and yet there is a very real and very difficult skill to conveying your intent to somebody else clearly so that they, even with the best will in the world, don't misinterpret it and don't do something you did not intend.
Dr. James Sterrett:
And so, when they find themselves, as inevitably happens, in a situation that your orders didn't cover, they can do something that would be at least close to what it is you intended if you were there looking over their shoulder.
Dr. James Sterrett:
And that's, particularly running Kriegspiel with our students, that's something that strikes me again and again, is the importance of being able to do that.
Dr. Dave Eng:
All right. I know that for games for a lot of people, that interaction, that the game will act on your will, on the specific instructions or directives that you give it, but like you said, for a military simulation, for a war game, that is part of that simulation, being able to convey that information in a succinct manner that conveys your intention and hopefully achieves the outcome that you want.
Dr. Dave Eng:
But with everything you've shared so far, James, I wanted to know, is there anything that you're still curious about that you want to learn more of?
Dr. James Sterrett:
Lots.
Dr. Dave Eng:
I guess if you had to narrow it down, like the resources. So what are you interested in?
Dr. James Sterrett:
So if I had to narrow it down, among the things that I didn't major in but almost majored in were geology and astronomy, and it probably says something that those are historical sciences and that they were attractive to me and I wound up in history, but often when I'm rummaging around, that's one of the places that I'm rummaging around in for fun. So, but I try to maintain a fairly curious outlook on life. So I'm always looking at new stuff if I can.
Dr. Dave Eng:
And what, James, on your resume, what is something that you think is interesting about you that I wouldn't be able to read on your resume?
Dr. James Sterrett:
Oh man, I forgot to think of an answer for this one. Sorry about that.
Dr. Dave Eng:
This is the professional version of James. Tell me your fun fact.
Dr. James Sterrett:
Yes, I know. And I should've thought of. So I am not a fan of professional sports.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Okay.
Dr. James Sterrett:
Don't enjoy them at all. But while I was a graduate student, I moonlighted for about four years as a cable utility, the guy who runs the cables around both from the truck out to the cameras and after the cameras, during the game, for TV sports events. So despite the fact that I have no particular interest in professional sports, I have been basically paid to be on the field.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Oh wow. Okay. So you've had basically the best seats you could possibly get at every major sporting event or most major?
Dr. James Sterrett:
At football, and hockey, and basketball, and baseball. Yeah.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Wow. That's great.
Dr. James Sterrett:
And in many ways, not being interested in the game was an asset because it meant that I could concentrate on my camera guy and making sure that the cable did what was needed for him to get where he needed to go and back. And I wasn't worried about, "Oh my gosh, the team's about to score.", because I didn't care.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Yeah. And, James, second last question. Is there anyone you think I should interview next? You're the inaugural guests on the show.
Dr. James Sterrett:
Oh wow.
Dr. Dave Eng:
So I wanted to know, who in your opinion do you think we should interview next?
Dr. James Sterrett:
So the obvious, to my mind, next person you should interview is Rex Brynen at McGill University.
Dr. Dave Eng:
At McGill. Yep. Okay. And the last question, James, if listeners wanted to be able to get in touch with you or connect with you online, what's the best way for them to do that?
Dr. James Sterrett:
The best way is either through LinkedIn or to send me an email and I believe you've got my email so you can include that in the podcast.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Great. I'll include the link to your LinkedIn profile as well as your email. James, thank you for being on the show today. I appreciate it.
Dr. James Sterrett:
You're welcome.
Dr. Dave Eng:
I hope you found this episode useful. If you'd like to learn more, then a great place to start is with my free course on gamification. You can sign up for it www.universityxp.com/gamification. You can also get a full transcript of this episode, including the links to references in the description or show notes.
Dr. Dave Eng:
Thanks for joining me. Again, I'm your host Dave Eng from Games-Based Learning by University XP. On Experience Points, we explore different ways we can learn from games. If you liked this episode, please consider commenting, sharing and subscribing. Subscribing is absolutely free and ensures that you'll get the next episode of Experience Points delivered directly to you.
Dr. Dave Eng:
I'd also love it if you took time to rate the show. I live to lift others with learning, so if you found this episode useful, consider sharing it with someone who could benefit. Also, please make sure to visit University XP online universityxp.com. University XP is also on Twitter @university_XP and on Facebook as University XP. Also, feel free to email me anytime. My email address is dave@universityxp.com. Game on.