Games workers play
Tomorrow's office environment could look a lot different than today's, if serious gaming advocates get their way. It could also be more fun
By Danny Bradbury
April 1, 2009
April 1, 2009
The military has been using games to train soldiers for years. Personnel unable to be in a combat situation have instead fought through highly realistic 3D computer environments. If the military can, at least in part, use virtual worlds to prepare soldiers for real life-and-death conditions, why don’t companies sit employees down at computers to prepare them for meetings and sale pitches?
A small community of serious gaming advocates has been asking that very question. Seriosity, a consulting firm that specializes in corporate gaming strategies, recently conducted a study of hardcore online gamers and found that the games they played reinforced the leadership skills outlined in MIT’s Sloan model of leadership: sensemaking, visioning, relating and inventing. This seems logical. After all, play is about exploration, discovery, teamwork and problem solving—exactly the kinds of skills businesses need from employees.
David Jacobsen, a director in the advisory services practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Toronto, hopes that applying gaming concepts to the workplace will empower people to learn, connect with others and bring new contributions to the rest of the organization.
“There is a significant advantage in the training of employees, getting them to do things that they find drudgery but that are important for the business, such as billing clients and then making sure that the debtors are collected from, and so forth,” he said. “Those kinds of things, in a game context, are much more readily done. You can provide incentives.”
But what will these games look like? Will they be symbolic 2D representations, or must they be 3D representations with as much veracity as possible? Doug Whatley, CEO of serious games developer BreakAway, said it depends on what kind of person will be playing, and what you’re educating them about. “Think of the military. If you’re training a soldier to walk down the street and fight, then you’d do that in a detailed environment,” he said. “If you’re training a general, you wouldn’t do that in a 3D environment.” As you move from operational scenarios through to tactical and strategic, the need for 3D interaction decreases, he argued.
Examples of games where 3D works particularly well include training in scenarios where interpersonal skills are crucial, such as in sales training. BreakAway offers a game called Virtual Training Bank which uses a series of highly realistic 3D rooms to train banking staff in fraud detection techniques. They must conduct interviews with key staff in the virtual bank as they attempt to track down discrepancies.
However, games can also be used to spark discussion, presenting scenarios that are more symbolic than explicit depictions of a person’s everyday working life. One of BreakAway’s games, called A Force More Powerful, was originally designed to help teach non-violent protest for activist groups. While it has been useful for clients such as the International Center for Non-Violent Conflict, it has also been surprisingly popular among corporate clients. “We used that game in companies to talk about merging two different cultures,” Whatley said. In a financial climate where merger and acquisition activity is likely to increase, examples of conflict resolution used in the game could prove useful to senior management and HR staff trying to smooth the way.
On the strategic side, Blueline Simulations offers a game called Executive Challenge, which tasks competing teams of people to grow an online business. “That simulation teaches strategy,” said Dan Gregory, a partner at Blueline. Games like this, testing financial and business acumen “don’t have much eye candy,” he said. “We throw different scenarios at them while they’re trying to grow their business, things like union avoidance, manufacturing defects or stolen intellectual property.”
However, he also said that it’s hard to play the game twice. It’s a one-shot deal, designed to give people a taste of some of the challenges involved in running a business within a discrete, partitioned environment. It’s the sort of thing that some teams of employees might be asked to play on a team-building afternoon.
Stretching the definition
The distinction between games that you play once and games that you dip into repeatedly for collaboration with others is an important one. PwC’s Jacobsen is pushing for a more holistic and asynchronous approach to gaming, in which play extends to become more a part of everyday working life. The concept of ubiquitous participation will be crucial to the plot, he said. Instead of simply playing once, ubiquitous participation in the gaming context involves regularly dropping in over long periods of time to participate on an ongoing basis. Life in the ‘other world’ continues whether you’re there or not, and asynchronous participation becomes key to remaining engaged.
“Games were a significant driver of ubiquitous participation, where people participate any time of the day or night,” Jacobsen said. This ubiquitous participation is also a central tenet of the Web 2.0 phenomenon that makes it so popular among users. You may only drop into Facebook or edit an entry on Wikipedia every once in a while, but repeated interaction still generates a sense of belonging. It is one of the things that separates Jacobsen’s view of corporate gaming from the more traditional concept of games as training tools for businesses.
The irony is that the closer we move toward ubiquitous participation, the less like games the results may look. “It’s rather the things that games and gaming have spawned and are now coming to fruition in the consumer and in the business space,” Jacobsen said. Web sites like Gyminee.com are a good example of how gaming concepts are used in environments that don’t resemble games. The Web site lets members set fitness training goals and monitor their progress. Participants can join groups and encourage each other in their fitness regimes. This marries the concepts of play and fitness coaching.
In a workplace setting, such concepts could play out in different ways. A game could involve staff in designing a better restaurant for their employer. Teams might drop into the virtual environment to collaborate on suggestions for their own virtual diner. The best suggestions could accrue points to make the game more interesting. The final result will then be factored into real-world designs, creating a way for the company to draw on its staff for innovations.
If the restaurant design teams wanted to collaborate properly, they might want to share everything from instant messages through to colour swatches, Web pages, audio and video. To facilitate this kind of playful collaboration, Jacobsen calls for “super-groupware”—collaborative environments that accept all types of information and enable employees to manipulate and share them in new ways without having to disrupt their workflow by examining documents using different software.
Out with the old groupware
Traditional groupware uses different databases to store different types of information. “In the new form of collaboration, there’s only one database, and all documents and communication go through it,” he said. “You’d have no more e-mailing and going out of Word and going into PowerPoint, but a single database that has all the unstructured information, which is video and handwritten things that have been digitized. That’s the collaborative space that is emerging.”
Properly done it would replace e-mail, he added. All communications would go through the single system, just as increasing numbers of people are using Facebook and Twitter as their primary communications mechanism with each other today.
Jonathan Mell, enterprise social software consultant at social media consulting firm Headshift, said ease of manipulation is crucial to the use of such products. “Groupware’s problem was that data entry was so onerous for the subject matter expert that it became a real burden for people to use,” he said. But Web 2.0 has created interfaces such as one-click submission buttons in browsers that make it easier to get information into the system. “Now you’re seeing the ability to contribute to these things using a very light touch.”
Jacobsen points to Jive Software’s Clearspace and Igloo Software’s CSN range of products as examples of this emerging but still nascent product category. These online community forum products reinforce his notion that gaming in business may not look like conventional video games at all.
“It’s a more mature kind of game. ‘Game’ isn’t really a good description of it. It’s gaming in the workplace that has evolved into collaboration around a single database, and using social networking as a way in which people can check and calibrate their thinking.”
These products are essentially social networking tools for businesses, but they could be used as platforms to foster the type of competition and playful community participation that underpin his vision. Such systems could be used for everything from competitions among sales staff through to virtual suggestion boxes.
Using the third dimension
Even though these systems may not be game-like, Jacobsen likes the idea of 3D environments as a means of connecting people to these back-end systems, enabling them to use their collective data in new ways. PwC is among many that have established a Second Life presence, but unlike some others its primary purpose is for internal exploration, rather than customer marketing, said Jonathan Reichental, director of IT innovations at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Reichental helped set up the company’s virtual location.
“We built the ability to send e-mail from within Second Life to the mail infrastructure outside of Second Life,” he said, explaining that networking with back-end systems was important to help get the company’s employees interested. “So you can go into our island today and there’s a drop box. You can write a message and submit it to a dedicated mailbox.”
But why bother? With systems such as Microsoft’s LiveMeeting doing a perfectly respectable job of facilitating group meetings without the need for 3D processing, and with corporate e-mail still just about coping with messaging between employees, what could you do in an environment like this (which Reichental prefers to call the “3D Internet”) that you couldn’t do with good old-fashioned 2D interfaces?
The use of space in a virtual world is the difference, he said. He likes to ask questions in virtual meetings and get people to position their avatars across a room according to their point of view. Like apples? Stand on the left. Oranges? Go to the right. Undecided? Stand somewhere in the middle. Try doing that in LiveMeeting.
Similarly, Claus Nehmzow, an independent consultant who used to be a partner and virtual world practice leader at PA Consulting, said he likes to display PowerPoint presentations in virtual worlds as a series of screens positioned around a room, rather than clicking through slides on a single screen. “I walk the group from slide to slide, and it helps me to know if people are paying attention,” he said, adding that if a group of people remains clustered around a particular slide, it makes him aware that there is room for further discussion around a topic. “The way that people walk around you reflects how interested people are. You don’t need high graphical quality, but the basic 3D element gives you a much richer environment.”
Nehmzow is no stranger to using virtual worlds for gaming. While working at brand consulting firm Method, he helped develop a Second Life presence for Cigna, a health services firm.
“We had an interactive fridge that let you go and try out the fridge and talk to others, and showed you how the food labelling works,” he said. “In another game, you sit in an interactive diner. Other people can give you advice and ask questions. At the end you get a tab showing how you performed against your nutritional goals.”
Reichental highlights another benefit of 3D virtual worlds as an interface for gaming and collaboration. Presenting data spatially and enabling people to interact with it makes it richer and more understandable. “You can have people physically point out and move the data in front of you,” he said. “So, maybe you’re talking about the volume of oil that is being used, and the visual would be oil, which would somehow be depicted across the whole country. An individual could navigate that map and manipulate it and see it from ways that are difficult to visualize.”
So, a new type of work-based gaming concept awaits, in which combinations of 2D and 3D interfaces are used to marshal employees in a series of frequent, ongoing interactions designed to encourage discovery, competition and shared experiences.
If this all sounds slightly vague, it’s because no one’s entirely sure how it will work yet. And don’t expect it to become clearer tomorrow. Building gaming concepts into business won’t happen overnight, Jacobsen said. It will evolve over time, as the ’net generation—the younger demographic that has grown up with the likes of Skype, Twitter and Web 2.0—begins entering the workforce and rising to positions where they demand such things.
Ultimately, as this concept takes shape, the real advocates of serious gaming within business would like to see a more intimate fusion between work and play. That fusion is hinted at in the Seriosity report’s executive summary: “The engagement of games and the lessons they foster may influence a new gamer generation to expect real work that better resembles the structure of complex play.” We are a long way from that point, but as businesses loosen up, maybe work will become a little more fun, at least.
A small community of serious gaming advocates has been asking that very question. Seriosity, a consulting firm that specializes in corporate gaming strategies, recently conducted a study of hardcore online gamers and found that the games they played reinforced the leadership skills outlined in MIT’s Sloan model of leadership: sensemaking, visioning, relating and inventing. This seems logical. After all, play is about exploration, discovery, teamwork and problem solving—exactly the kinds of skills businesses need from employees.
David Jacobsen, a director in the advisory services practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Toronto, hopes that applying gaming concepts to the workplace will empower people to learn, connect with others and bring new contributions to the rest of the organization.
“There is a significant advantage in the training of employees, getting them to do things that they find drudgery but that are important for the business, such as billing clients and then making sure that the debtors are collected from, and so forth,” he said. “Those kinds of things, in a game context, are much more readily done. You can provide incentives.”
But what will these games look like? Will they be symbolic 2D representations, or must they be 3D representations with as much veracity as possible? Doug Whatley, CEO of serious games developer BreakAway, said it depends on what kind of person will be playing, and what you’re educating them about. “Think of the military. If you’re training a soldier to walk down the street and fight, then you’d do that in a detailed environment,” he said. “If you’re training a general, you wouldn’t do that in a 3D environment.” As you move from operational scenarios through to tactical and strategic, the need for 3D interaction decreases, he argued.
Examples of games where 3D works particularly well include training in scenarios where interpersonal skills are crucial, such as in sales training. BreakAway offers a game called Virtual Training Bank which uses a series of highly realistic 3D rooms to train banking staff in fraud detection techniques. They must conduct interviews with key staff in the virtual bank as they attempt to track down discrepancies.
However, games can also be used to spark discussion, presenting scenarios that are more symbolic than explicit depictions of a person’s everyday working life. One of BreakAway’s games, called A Force More Powerful, was originally designed to help teach non-violent protest for activist groups. While it has been useful for clients such as the International Center for Non-Violent Conflict, it has also been surprisingly popular among corporate clients. “We used that game in companies to talk about merging two different cultures,” Whatley said. In a financial climate where merger and acquisition activity is likely to increase, examples of conflict resolution used in the game could prove useful to senior management and HR staff trying to smooth the way.
On the strategic side, Blueline Simulations offers a game called Executive Challenge, which tasks competing teams of people to grow an online business. “That simulation teaches strategy,” said Dan Gregory, a partner at Blueline. Games like this, testing financial and business acumen “don’t have much eye candy,” he said. “We throw different scenarios at them while they’re trying to grow their business, things like union avoidance, manufacturing defects or stolen intellectual property.”
However, he also said that it’s hard to play the game twice. It’s a one-shot deal, designed to give people a taste of some of the challenges involved in running a business within a discrete, partitioned environment. It’s the sort of thing that some teams of employees might be asked to play on a team-building afternoon.
Stretching the definition
The distinction between games that you play once and games that you dip into repeatedly for collaboration with others is an important one. PwC’s Jacobsen is pushing for a more holistic and asynchronous approach to gaming, in which play extends to become more a part of everyday working life. The concept of ubiquitous participation will be crucial to the plot, he said. Instead of simply playing once, ubiquitous participation in the gaming context involves regularly dropping in over long periods of time to participate on an ongoing basis. Life in the ‘other world’ continues whether you’re there or not, and asynchronous participation becomes key to remaining engaged.
“Games were a significant driver of ubiquitous participation, where people participate any time of the day or night,” Jacobsen said. This ubiquitous participation is also a central tenet of the Web 2.0 phenomenon that makes it so popular among users. You may only drop into Facebook or edit an entry on Wikipedia every once in a while, but repeated interaction still generates a sense of belonging. It is one of the things that separates Jacobsen’s view of corporate gaming from the more traditional concept of games as training tools for businesses.
The irony is that the closer we move toward ubiquitous participation, the less like games the results may look. “It’s rather the things that games and gaming have spawned and are now coming to fruition in the consumer and in the business space,” Jacobsen said. Web sites like Gyminee.com are a good example of how gaming concepts are used in environments that don’t resemble games. The Web site lets members set fitness training goals and monitor their progress. Participants can join groups and encourage each other in their fitness regimes. This marries the concepts of play and fitness coaching.
In a workplace setting, such concepts could play out in different ways. A game could involve staff in designing a better restaurant for their employer. Teams might drop into the virtual environment to collaborate on suggestions for their own virtual diner. The best suggestions could accrue points to make the game more interesting. The final result will then be factored into real-world designs, creating a way for the company to draw on its staff for innovations.
If the restaurant design teams wanted to collaborate properly, they might want to share everything from instant messages through to colour swatches, Web pages, audio and video. To facilitate this kind of playful collaboration, Jacobsen calls for “super-groupware”—collaborative environments that accept all types of information and enable employees to manipulate and share them in new ways without having to disrupt their workflow by examining documents using different software.
Out with the old groupware
Traditional groupware uses different databases to store different types of information. “In the new form of collaboration, there’s only one database, and all documents and communication go through it,” he said. “You’d have no more e-mailing and going out of Word and going into PowerPoint, but a single database that has all the unstructured information, which is video and handwritten things that have been digitized. That’s the collaborative space that is emerging.”
Properly done it would replace e-mail, he added. All communications would go through the single system, just as increasing numbers of people are using Facebook and Twitter as their primary communications mechanism with each other today.
Jonathan Mell, enterprise social software consultant at social media consulting firm Headshift, said ease of manipulation is crucial to the use of such products. “Groupware’s problem was that data entry was so onerous for the subject matter expert that it became a real burden for people to use,” he said. But Web 2.0 has created interfaces such as one-click submission buttons in browsers that make it easier to get information into the system. “Now you’re seeing the ability to contribute to these things using a very light touch.”
Jacobsen points to Jive Software’s Clearspace and Igloo Software’s CSN range of products as examples of this emerging but still nascent product category. These online community forum products reinforce his notion that gaming in business may not look like conventional video games at all.
“It’s a more mature kind of game. ‘Game’ isn’t really a good description of it. It’s gaming in the workplace that has evolved into collaboration around a single database, and using social networking as a way in which people can check and calibrate their thinking.”
These products are essentially social networking tools for businesses, but they could be used as platforms to foster the type of competition and playful community participation that underpin his vision. Such systems could be used for everything from competitions among sales staff through to virtual suggestion boxes.
Using the third dimension
Even though these systems may not be game-like, Jacobsen likes the idea of 3D environments as a means of connecting people to these back-end systems, enabling them to use their collective data in new ways. PwC is among many that have established a Second Life presence, but unlike some others its primary purpose is for internal exploration, rather than customer marketing, said Jonathan Reichental, director of IT innovations at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Reichental helped set up the company’s virtual location.
“We built the ability to send e-mail from within Second Life to the mail infrastructure outside of Second Life,” he said, explaining that networking with back-end systems was important to help get the company’s employees interested. “So you can go into our island today and there’s a drop box. You can write a message and submit it to a dedicated mailbox.”
But why bother? With systems such as Microsoft’s LiveMeeting doing a perfectly respectable job of facilitating group meetings without the need for 3D processing, and with corporate e-mail still just about coping with messaging between employees, what could you do in an environment like this (which Reichental prefers to call the “3D Internet”) that you couldn’t do with good old-fashioned 2D interfaces?
The use of space in a virtual world is the difference, he said. He likes to ask questions in virtual meetings and get people to position their avatars across a room according to their point of view. Like apples? Stand on the left. Oranges? Go to the right. Undecided? Stand somewhere in the middle. Try doing that in LiveMeeting.
Similarly, Claus Nehmzow, an independent consultant who used to be a partner and virtual world practice leader at PA Consulting, said he likes to display PowerPoint presentations in virtual worlds as a series of screens positioned around a room, rather than clicking through slides on a single screen. “I walk the group from slide to slide, and it helps me to know if people are paying attention,” he said, adding that if a group of people remains clustered around a particular slide, it makes him aware that there is room for further discussion around a topic. “The way that people walk around you reflects how interested people are. You don’t need high graphical quality, but the basic 3D element gives you a much richer environment.”
Nehmzow is no stranger to using virtual worlds for gaming. While working at brand consulting firm Method, he helped develop a Second Life presence for Cigna, a health services firm.
“We had an interactive fridge that let you go and try out the fridge and talk to others, and showed you how the food labelling works,” he said. “In another game, you sit in an interactive diner. Other people can give you advice and ask questions. At the end you get a tab showing how you performed against your nutritional goals.”
Reichental highlights another benefit of 3D virtual worlds as an interface for gaming and collaboration. Presenting data spatially and enabling people to interact with it makes it richer and more understandable. “You can have people physically point out and move the data in front of you,” he said. “So, maybe you’re talking about the volume of oil that is being used, and the visual would be oil, which would somehow be depicted across the whole country. An individual could navigate that map and manipulate it and see it from ways that are difficult to visualize.”
So, a new type of work-based gaming concept awaits, in which combinations of 2D and 3D interfaces are used to marshal employees in a series of frequent, ongoing interactions designed to encourage discovery, competition and shared experiences.
If this all sounds slightly vague, it’s because no one’s entirely sure how it will work yet. And don’t expect it to become clearer tomorrow. Building gaming concepts into business won’t happen overnight, Jacobsen said. It will evolve over time, as the ’net generation—the younger demographic that has grown up with the likes of Skype, Twitter and Web 2.0—begins entering the workforce and rising to positions where they demand such things.
Ultimately, as this concept takes shape, the real advocates of serious gaming within business would like to see a more intimate fusion between work and play. That fusion is hinted at in the Seriosity report’s executive summary: “The engagement of games and the lessons they foster may influence a new gamer generation to expect real work that better resembles the structure of complex play.” We are a long way from that point, but as businesses loosen up, maybe work will become a little more fun, at least.
