Wall Street Journal Reports on San Francisco Gamification Summit - Gamification is Becoming Big Business!

“Gamification is serious business,” according to the Wall Street Journal and their coverage of the Gamification Summit that happened in San Francisco this week – attracting well over 600 individuals from companies as diverse and even unexpected as Salesforce, Cisco and SAP. With the gamification market expected to expand astronomically to $2.8 billion by 2016, industry executives, the media and companies large and small are paying attention to this remarkable advance in the technology of training and education, and we at Designing Digitally, Inc. couldn’t be happier. San Francisco, the home of many gamification experts, was the natural hot spot for this burgeoning summit and we thought you’d be interested in hearing more about it on the Designing Digitally, Inc.’s blog.

You see, we’ve been championing gamification as a logical expansion of our eLearning development, 3D training simulations and virtual worlds development services for a years now. Gamification – the transformation of online training modules into robust, competitive, entertaining & immersive 3D learning programs that new employees actually enjoy engaging with – is becoming a focus for any company interested in consistent and effective training, particularly for younger new employees who have grown up playing hand-held and onscreen gaming systems. It’s simply a natural extension of the entertainment mediums they’re accustomed to, and a highly effective method of inculcating practices and processes they’ll need on-the-job, with far greater safety and cost savings involved for that initial training period.

Gabe Zichermann, a gamification expert and author and the conference chair of the three-day Gamification Summit, had this to say about the theory behind gamification and how it can influence employee education and training:

“What we are trying to do is use the best technologies from games to create engagement and change behaviors. We’ve never operated a society that was free from structure, rewards, or penalty for bad behaviors. Now because of technology, organizations of all sizes are capable of putting that into their systems…Everybody plays games. Whether it’s a soccer mom comparing kids or guys comparing frequent flier miles, everybody’s keeping score. Keeping score is a core part of human nature. Why not bring these elements to all parts of life and make everything, even (unpleasant) jobs more fun?”

We couldn’t agree more, which is why gamification plays heavily in the eLearning and 3D training simulations we design, write and create for our many clients in radically diverse industries. You can learn more about gamification experts, the Gamification Summit and how big players like Major League Baseball, NBC Universal and Pepsi are jumping on the gamification bandwagon by checking out the Wall Street Journal event coverage here.

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