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Features

Published February 2008

Video Game Nation: The Rise of Gaming and Its Impact on Learning

  Algis Leveckis & Tony DiRomualdo

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Having revolutionized entertainment, video games are now about to upend corporate learning. From their start in arcade parlors in the 1970s, video games have grown into a multibillion dollar industry that has surpassed Hollywood movies in revenues. Moreover, in the past 10 years, they have moved out of entertainment and into development and learning. The military was among the first to harness these “mindless toys” for serious purposes. Faced with a recruiting crisis in the late 1990s, the U.S. Army was forced to rethink its methods for attracting, developing and retaining a new generation of soldiers. It took the radical step of meeting the next generation in their world. The military has used interactive multimedia technology — a natural outgrowth of war games and strategic planning — to create advanced immersive virtual environments such as America’s Army, a recruiting game to test troops in limitless real-world scenarios.

Today, the video game generation has fully entered the workforce, but only a few corporations have embraced games and other interactive media and collaborative technologies to win the engagement of this new generation of workers. However, unrelenting pressures to improve productivity and performance, combined with this fundamentally different technology and the new mix of skills and attitudes of this next generation of workers, portends powerful shifts in how businesses will be managed and run.

The next generation of workers enters the workplace with capabilities tailor-made for global teams, collaboration and making a difference, but is also saddled with some well-known weaknesses in communication and basic business skills. Planting them in traditional classroom settings or requiring them to click on the “next” button of “interactive” e-learning will be neither cost nor time effective, let alone inspiring. UPS found that it took three times longer to train new hires under the age of 25 in the basics of its business using traditional learning tools. This generation is wired differently, and training approaches, tools and techniques must be adapted to how they learn.

How Video Games Support Learning
Video games have a place in the corporate learning landscape, but like any other tool, they must be used properly. When developed with sound pedagogical design, they create an immersive, engaging experience that can develop skills and new behaviors. And they are particularly attractive to next-generation workers.

Yet, some corporations have been reluctant to take even baby steps into this new world of learning tools. Despite their considerable promise, misperceptions about the cost and complexity of implementation, along with knee-jerk resistance to innovation, have impeded their adoption. Yet, the cost and complexity of video game development has reduced dramatically in just a few years. An immersive 3-D learning application that took years and millions of dollars to develop not long ago can be built today in just 90 to 120 days for a few hundred thousand dollars. Less cutting-edge but still effective 2-D games can be built even more quickly and cheaply.

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