Why Games Are Good For Business

How to Leverage the Power of Serious Games, Gamification and Simulations

Helen Routledge

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137448965
• eBook ISBN: 9781137448989
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

By tapping into the same psychology that keeps gamers glued to Minecraft or World of Warcraft, innovative organizations are creating their own engaging and flexible learning experiences. They're called Serious Games. This is a practical toolkit for those who want to learn about more serious games and how to apply them in the workplace.

chapter1

Serious Games – What,Why, How and Who?

Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.

Benjamin Franklin

If you’ve picked up this book then I’ve managed to pique your curiosity enough to ask yourself, “Serious Games… What, Why, How and Who?” Well, I wanted to kick-start this foray into the new world of Serious Games with a broad introduction to what they are and who is currently using them. However, first things first: let’s briefly touch on games in their broadest sense. The oldest video game is considered to be from the 1940s. Does that surprise you? The Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device was a missile simulator inspired by the radar systems of World War II, developed by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann in 1947, the same year the first (albeit very basic) chess program was created by Alan Turing. Games as we know them today are actually a lot older than most people think. Of course humans have been using games for training for centuries – the Ancient Greeks used games in readiness for war, the Russian Army used strategy games, and knights in the Middle Ages used games to train. Games are not even a uniquely human experience; many animals use gameplay to learn vital survival skills.

Since the 1940s and the birth of video games, generations of workers have entered the laborforce in ever-increasing numbers. It is often assumed gamers are young, male and solitary; however the truth is the average gamer is in their 30s, incredibly social and in recent years the onset of mobile casual games has evened out the balance between male and female. In the US, 211.5 million adults play games, almost two-thirds of the population (NPD Group 2012)! And these adults are spending almost $25 billion on video games. It was also reported by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) that 63 percent of gamers regularly play together (Entertainment Software Association 2014). The games industry has a greater annual turnover than Hollywood!

Are games really the sophisticated training solution I’m looking for?

Games do something no other form of industry, interaction or media do; they allow you to be bad at them… and they punish you for it by stalling your progress. At first glance this doesn’t sound great, but think about it for a moment. Do we want to be in a world where we are constantly positively reinforced for poor decisions or poor choices? Unlikely, especially when we are trying to learn and develop.

Games take interaction to a completely new level which is often underappreciated by those who don’t play them on a regular basis. One of the features making them perfect for learning and development is this “punishment,” the requirement for the learner or player to prove they understand the rules and concepts to progress. The proof of expertise is most definitely in the pudding when it comes to games!

Think games are all about blood and gore? Think again!

As an industry, of course, there have been many games published which focus on shock tactics and war as a means to sell, but if you look just a little deeper into the indie games space and toward the smaller publishers you’ll see a whole new industry.

The typical video game is not the blood-spattering, media-grabbing, parent-stressing cartoon that makes the nightly news on a slow or tragic day. Instead, it’s a massive problem-solving exercise masked by the veneer of an exotic adventure. Or it’s the detailed simulation of an entire world history. Or it’s a serious opportunity to try coaching a sports team or setting military strategy.

In short, even if their surface is violent, sexist or simple minded (which is not true nearly as often as non-gamers believe), games are incredibly complex computer programs that lead the brain to the new combinations of cognitive tasks and demand new levels of processing power. (Beck and Wade 2004)

Portal, published by Valve Corporation (2007) is a physics-based puzzle game. The makers of this game had such a great response they have released a Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) package for schools so teachers can use this engaging commercial game to teach real science lessons.

Dear Esther (2008) developed by The Chinese Room, is a ghost story, told using first-person gaming technologies. Rather than traditional gameplay, the focus here is on exploration, uncovering the mystery of the island, of who you are and why you are there. Fragments of story are randomly uncovered when exploring the various locations of the island, making each journey a unique experience. Built originally as a mod for Half Life 2 (2004), Dear Esther quickly established itself as an award-winning, critically acclaimed experimental first-person game. It is unlike any other game currently available and abandons all traditional gameplay, relying on a rich world soaked in atmosphere as a place to explore a poetic story.

Flower (2009) was a game developed by That Game Company to be a video game version of a poem, exploring the tension between urban bustle and natural serenity. The player enters various flowers’ dreams to transform the world. The developers’ aim was that, by the end of the game, the player will have changed a little as well.

The End (2011) is a free online web game commissioned by Channel 4 Education. It is a game of self-discovery for 14–19-year-olds which integrates strategy, puzzles and philosophical questions into a world which explores a range of commonly (or less commonly) held views about death, belief and science. The game takes the player on a metaphysical journey, recording their interactions in the world to reveal their attitudes toward mortality. These views are presented alongside those of their friends and some of the most important thinkers of our time, such as Gandhi, Descartes and Einstein.

Papers, Please (2013) was developed by lone designer, Lucas Pope, who previously worked on commercially successful AAA Uncharted Series (Naughty Dog) and at first sight seems an unlikely topic for a game – stamping paperwork! The game focuses on the work life of an immigration inspector at a border checkpoint for the fictitious country of Arstotzka. The player inspects arrivals’ documents and uses an array of tools to determine whether the papers are in order, for the purpose of keeping unwanted individuals, such as terrorists, wanted criminals or smugglers, out of the country. When discrepancies are discovered, the player may interrogate the applicant about the discrepancy, and possibly demand further information, such as fingerprints or a full-body scan. There are opportunities for the player to have the applicant arrested and the applicant may, at times, attempt to bribe the inspector. This may all sound a tad dull, but within the game is a complex moral structure backed up with financial consequences linked to your decisions. For example, if you let through a man who has the correct paperwork, then his wife appears whose paperwork is incomplete, what do you do? Do you let her through (and suffer a fine) or do you split up the family, or do you detain her and earn a financial reward? There are no set moral decision points, yet the whole game is one moral question. There is no moral compass or feedback given for the player’s decisions – instead it relies on a player’s own feelings to guide the gameplay. The game has done phenomenally well, with Simon Parkin writing for the New Yorker blog, declaring Papers, Please the top video game of 2013 (Parkin 2013).

These are just a handful of games breaking the industry mold and exploring more complex concepts using the medium of games. However, you don’t hear about them as they don’t conform to the headline-grabbing hysteria often seen when it comes to games in the mainstream press. What these games demonstrate is the growing sophistication and complexity in design, both in terms of gameplay as well as emotional narrative.

Personal motivations

When I was young, I played a lot of puzzle games. I also played a lot, and I mean a lot, of SimCity 2000 (Maxis 1993), a futuristic city management game. You were the mayor and you built up a city, designed the layout, worked out how to divide the land between housing, commercial and land zones, planned airports, ports for trade and underground sewage networks. I had opinion polls to deal with and a budget to manage and I remember the feeling of pride when the inhabitants of my city were pleased with the job I was doing, as well as fretting over how to make their lives better when they weren’t so happy. At the time I had no idea about Serious Games, but to this day I can remember the joy and pride I felt when my city hit its peak and I had reached as far as I could take it. I remember all the rules, the interface and everything about how the game worked. At the time I didn’t think about all of the variables and knowledge I was taking in. I was just having fun. Reflecting on this years later, when I was at university studying Behavioral Sciences, it hit me – all of the theories I was learning about for motivation and development and cognitive psychology were evident in the games I played both as a child and as an adult.

I hear stories like this from so many people I work and socialize with, so I asked a group of people I know (and some I didn’t) what impact games had had on their lives. Here is a selection of their responses:

Tom Cutler: Serious Game Developer

“Min-maxing is a process I learned from playing video games. It’s all about playing to your strengths (maximizing them) and minimizing your weaknesses. It’s a way of managing your resources to achieve the best possible results for a given goal. It brings to mind a quote by Miyamoto Musashi, a famous Japanese swordsman from the 16th century, ‘If you know the way broadly, you will see it in all things.’ I’ve found min-maxing relevant to my everyday life because you can apply it to so many different situations to achieve effective results.”

Andrzej Marczewski: Gamification Thought Leader and employee at Capgemini

“to break up problems into manageable ‘levels’.”

Andrew Fox, Developer of award-winning @TheExoplanets, Doctor Who Encyclopedia and @AmericasPrez

“a whole truckload of patience! As well as of course the classic adage ‘persistence pays off’.”

Jason Cross, from The Legacy Academy

“exploratory learning is often more powerful than guided learning.”

So why now?

You may be wondering, “if games have been around for so long, then why haven’t they made an impact before?”

For much of the time over which technology has been developing, the impact it has had on our lives has been steady and slow, due to the cost, size and market demand. However, in recent years, all of these “blockages” have been removed completely. In the developed world, we don’t think twice about buying the latest device: we are hungry for new developments and we can afford it. This constant drive toward bigger (or smaller) and better tech has created an insatiable appetite. It’s keeping up with the Jones’s gone haywire! We are now at a point in our technical development where our homes and personal lives are more high-tech than our places of employment. At home we have smartphones, high-speed broadband, movies on demand, tablets, powerful PCs and gaming consoles, and technology has invaded almost every room.

Our access to powerful technology at home is a given and this is driving our appetites to push for a similar access in our places of work.

A secondary driver is the maturity of the players. With the rise of cheaper and more accessible technology, arcades became social hubs in the 1980s where groups of young people would gather to play, flirt, compete and socialize. Arcades became a social phenomenon. Many a young person would spend hours at the arcade playing games such as Donkey Kong, Pac Man, Asteroids or Street Fighter II, stacking their coins to prove their ability to their friends. These players from the 1980s are now working their way up the office ranks into senior positions. Just like the kids of today who have never known a time before the Internet, the managers of tomorrow will never have known a time before video games.

A final driver I want to touch on (and this is certainly not a definitive list) is the sophistication of the gaming technology we see today. The move toward globalization and the everyday nature of the Internet means we can now play games with people from all over the world. There will be someone out there at any time of the day who wants to play. This unprecedented access feeds our demand and opens up so many new possibilities. In the increasingly globalized workplace we need to connect to colleagues around the world, the social impact of online gaming and the social networks supporting those communities is starting to infiltrate the way we do business.

Beck and Wade (2004) conclude from their survey of 2000 business professionals that gamers are systematically different in the ways they work. “They choose systematically different skills to learn, and different ways to learn them. They desire systematically different goals in life.”

These differences have come about due to the changing landscape we find ourselves in. What is important to convey is that gamers are not a niche group of people operating on the outskirts of society; they are a mainstream cohort of individuals supporting a massive industry for many of the world’s leading economies. The controversial Grand Theft Auto V (2013) game developed by Rockstar is estimated to have cost $137 million to develop, but on launch day the game raked in $800 million in worldwide sales (GamesIndustry.Biz 2013). Of course this is a massive success story, but overall the games industry is now more lucrative and important than Hollywood and yet it is still seen as a niche, amateur hobby industry. The evidence for that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Foreword by Richard Smith
• Preface
• 1 Serious Games – What, Why, How and Who?
• 2 If I “Feel” It – I Remember It
• 3 So What Can You Do with Serious Games?
• 4 A Look Behind the Scenes
• 5 The Case for Genuinely Blended Learning
• 6 How Was It for You?
• 7 Making a Difference to YOU
• 8 Don’t Be a Technology Magpie
• 9 How to Get Involved — Next Steps for YOUR Organization
• 10 What’s Next for Serious Games?
• References
• Index