By Saundra McDavid
Faculty Member, Business Administration at American Public University
Playing games at work? This is usually not a good move for career advancement. However there are actually some games out there that may enhance useful workplace skills.
One of the best lessons I learned back in the days when I had time to play games, was from Sim City. That’s a game where you are tasked with building, and running, a city. You have to manage civil unrest, natural disasters, and constituents who demand money and time at inopportune moments. And you have to manage your budget. When people don’t like your city, your population decreases and you lose revenues; the same problem businesses encounter with their products and services. However, one of the best lessons I learned is that if you reduce your spending, and simply wait a while, your revenues increase. Granted, you can’t ignore spending completely; however, you can postpone major purchases until you have saved enough to afford them. Now, that’s a lesson that spans both work and personal life.
Interpersonal skills can be honed in many of the military games, where you are tasked to lead a group of people to achieve some sort of goal, whether it be to save the planet, or remove hostiles from a city.
There are also games that simulate an actual business environment: GameDev Story, for instance. Imagine running a company that makes games, while playing a game…. on your phone. As long as you are okay with graphics from the 90’s, the decisions you’ll face in this game are the same ones encountered by management. If you want a more realistic interface, Capitalism II is one of the best economic simulations on the market. In fact, it has its own case study.
A professor from the British Institute of Technology used this game in several of his Management of Information Systems courses. (Enlight Software Limited, n.d.) The goal was to show how an enterprise resource planning tool (ERP) can help in management decisions. The Capitalism Lab allows for advanced simulations, including macroeconomic and retail simulations, and allows students to experiment with real-world concepts and educational theories. For the project, students were tasked with creating a successful business in one hour. Those with the most market share at the end of the period were deemed the winners. However, unlike the real world, the losing students were allowed to submit a paper explaining why their strategy failed in order to increase their grade. Imagine how well that would go over in the workplace.
In law school, there was a game that helped us to remember the objections an attorney could make at trial. This has now expanded into a myriad of games geared toward remembering the nuances of immigration, constitutional and criminal law.
As educational as these games can be, chances are if you are playing them at work, your days of employment are numbered. Unless you work for Microsoft, who has created productivity games that “motivate players to become better corporate citizens, share and enhance existing skill sets and acquire new ones.” (Jacobs, 2011, para. 1) In 2009, Microsoft created the Windows Language Quality Game in order to entice employees to help improve the linguistic quality of Windows 7. (Smith, 2010)
Microsoft has seen increases of between 400% – 1600% in participation when games are used. (Smith, 2013) What other types of games could be used at work? Something that teaches a task at work, like sorting a list of items; or expanding a skill set, or assessing threat diagrams, like in Microsoft’s Elevation of Privilege game. Threat diagrams are used to assess a company’s vulnerability to internal and external forces. Microsoft created its game similar to the game of Spades, where players use cards against each other and the threat diagram. (Jacobs, 2011) In order to introduce employees to Office, Microsoft also created the Ribbon Hero games.
While the games are allowed to be played at work, they must be fit in during the workday, along with all of the employee’s required duties. Thus it’s best for companies to limit the availability of the games, to ensure that employees are focusing on their assigned tasks and not overestimating their discretionary time.
When creating games to teach productivity skills, focus on games that create good corporate behavior and avoid relying on skills that are not common across all employees. Also, leaderboards are not often the best motivator, because ideally all employees should “win” if they improve their skills.
Microsoft has an entire division dedicated to designing productivity games and a procedure for identifying when games would assist in learning in the workplace. The next time you find yourself teaching a new employee a task, or teaching a new task to an employee, consider whether this could be accomplished with a game.
Resources
Enlight Software Limited. (n.d.) Capitalism II Case Study. Retrieved from http://www.enlight.com/capitalism2/CaseStudy_BCIT.html
Jacobs, S. (2011) Gamasutra. UBM Tech. Retreived from http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/126763/Serious_Play_Conference_2011_Microsofts_Productivity_Games.php
Smith, R. (2010, Aug.7) Management Innovation eXchange. http://www.managementexchange.com/story/communicate-hope-using-games-and-play-improve-productivity-42projects
Smith, R. (2013, Apr. 28) The Future of Work is Play. CHI 2013 Workshop “Designing Gamification.” Retrieved from http://gamification-research.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Smith.pdf
About the Author: Saundra McDavid has a J.D. and MBA from St. Louis University. She is a member of the Missouri bar and practices in the areas of cybersecurity and intellectual property law. She is a faculty member in the School of Business at American Public University.
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