Actors vs. animation for adult learning?

While computer based training has been around for decades, the marriage of games and education is not so old. Given that education often focuses on the learning of children and children love playing games, the marriage is destined to last. What is not so clear is whether playing games is suited to adult learning. Our focus is on workplace training of adults to allow them to experience certain situations rather than to pass on book-type knowledge. Many challenges face us in this endeavour. To focus our attention on those aspects that are critical for learning from training simulations we present our findings from the first in a number of studies. This study looks at the value of watching actors in a video compared to observing game characters involved in a similar scenario in terms of what is noticed, remembered and able to be reasoned about to determine how the media compare as training devices.