TD Magazine Cover Story on Short Sims: Clark Aldrich

TD Magazine is the flagship publication of the Association for Talent Development (ATD), the professional body for people who run workplace learning. For January 2019 it put Clark Aldrich's article "Try Short Sims" on the cover, the highest-profile issue of its year. The magazine's own teaser ties the format to a pairing of meaningful interactivity and low cost.

Aldrich is an educational simulation designer and the founder and managing partner of Clark Aldrich Designs. He launched the Short Sims website in 2016 under the motto that simple educational simulations work better, after several years spent developing what he saw as the next stage of serious games and educational simulation.

Aldrich describes short sims as a new kind of interactive educational media that usually runs five to 15 minutes, uses few words and asks the learner to make many decisions. Each one focuses on a single subject and can sit inside traditional course material.

Technically a short sim is a set of static, nonlinear storyboards connected by links. The links create the feel of dynamic interactivity and meet the teaching goals at a fraction of the time, cost and skill that a full simulation needs. That low production cost is the main selling point for training teams without a game studio. The Short Sims site lists the same selling points: simple to create, update, audit and deploy, built with industry-standard tools, and suited to anything from soft skills to certification.

The Short Sims website loads and presents the format as the easiest path to experiential eLearning. It offers a playable example, three narrated example videos by Aldrich and a Short Sims Workshop course. The course costs $75, uses the authoring tools iSpring and BranchTrack in its examples, and states that it neither requires nor includes AI use. The site's pitch is that slide dumps belong to the last century and that learners should practice real decisions instead.

The cover story is still downloadable as a PDF of the magazine article, hosted on a Wix document address. The home page also carries a list of Aldrich's past and present clients, and the workshop is presented for anyone stuck creating traditional online learning. A directory entry for Short Sims, with Aldrich's studio, is on the games page.