Serious Games and Gamification: the Future

We will plead guilty from the get-go that we’re not a disinterested third party when it comes to championing the rise of serious games and gamification. It’s one of our core competencies here at Designing Digitally, Inc. and we love designing and developing these programs for higher education, military, government and corporate clients. Plus, our team loves making them! But we’re certainly not alone in seeing their vast promise for training and employee engagement, and this time around we’re hijacking the crystal ball of serious media maven, Forbes, as they share their predictions for the future of gamification in the business and education sectors.

As we’ve been explaining in our campaign to educate interested parties on the possibilities and potentials inherit within eLearning, gamification is the process of adding game dynamics such as competition, rewards, and recognition to educational programming, company training regimens and routine job duties. Engaging with these programs via digital access points such as computers, laptops and smart phones adds remarkable convenience as well as uniform experience and performance metrics to the mix. Coupled with the high IT usability quotient of today’s emerging workers who have been raised on video games and computer technologies, gamification is evolving into a dynamic media with virtually unlimited applications. In a nutshell, our gamification experts can create just about any scenario one can imagine for virtual training and job tasking needs.

We know the future of gamification is bright, which is one reason it is a key part of our business. Now let’s hear what a media heavy hitter has to say about that future as well.

Forbes Magazine contributor, Dan Schawbel, interviewed author, professor and New York University Assistant Director of the Business & Economic Program, Adam PenenBerg. Mr. Penenberg who was asked many questions about serious games and their future in the workplace. We found this bit about employee motivation quite interesting:

The Future

“I see a day when a person will log into work from home, his avatar interacting with other employees. Companies like IBM are big into avatars, by the way. Then the person will, in a game-like architecture, perform his job, receiving constant feedback as if he is in a game. This, too, is already happening. The next time you go to Target, notice the checkout screen. On it you’ll see a game that rates the cashier’s speed. According to one report, Target maintains a running average of an employee’s scores, requiring that more than 88 percent of transactions make the speed cut, with a cashier’s score affecting salary and promotions. Target has turned cashiers into players of a corporate game.”

Imagine that – Target hitting the bull’s-eye on efficiency and customer service via gamification!

Penenberg goes on to discuss surgical procedures, archeological text decoding, public health pandemic predictions, and DNA recognition – all made easier and more successful via gamification. Read the full, fascinating Forbes interview with Adam Penenberg about the future of gamification, here.

To learn more about Serious Games, Training Simulations and eLearning, contact the gamification experts at Designing Digitally, Inc.