Print Screen: Turning Games Into Work and Vice Versa

12/30/2008 6:15 PM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 2

Though video and computer games have been in the cultural mainstream for a couple of decades now, it's taken a while for the business community to see their potential as an ally in the workspace. We all can recall poorly made advergames or free CD-ROMs on cereal boxes, but only now do we have a generation of adults that have always had games in their lives. The next generation is even more deeply immersed in gaming, and this poses a challenge to traditional approaches to their training and marketing.

David Edery and Ethan Mollick are well aware of how quickly the sand is shifting underneath traditional business models, and have written a field guide to this rapidly changing landscape for latecomers and the clueless. Their book -- "Changing the Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Future of Business" -- should be a captivating read for both managers and gamers, though I'm not certain the authors are aware of how it will be used.

Edery and Mollick are certainly qualified to speak to the questions they raise in "Changing the Game." Both are affiliated with MIT and have been published in both business and games media. Edery is a manager for Xbox Live Arcade and Mollick works with training and simulation games at DARPA. Drawing on their varied experiences, they make a compelling case that videogames can have a role in a business plan.

The chapter on advertising in games makes the same case that gamers have been making for years: Ads should fit the setting. Ads should have the same relationship to the game as other environmental factors; i.e., billboards should be as destructible as the rest of the universe. But using the Burger King games as a cautionary example, the authors point out both how profitable and how difficult designing a game as an ad can be.

The BK games were undoubtedly successful. They drew gamers into the restaurants because some of the content was unavailable anywhere else. Some critics even thought the games worked as games, a difficult thing to do in any genre and almost unheard of in the advergaming world. But the development of the games saw a lot of conflict between the corporation's understanding of the King and the designers' firm ideas about what a good game looked like. (For example, there can only be one king, so you can't have a multiplayer game with everyone being the King.)

The authors are enthusiastic about the future of alternate reality games (ARGs) as a marketing device, though they can cite very few examples of it working beyond a single Audi campaign and the celebrated I Love Bees campaign for Halo 2. And their respect for Second Life as a marketing platform has been outstripped by reality, as more and more companies debate the value of that alternate world as a cost-effective extension of commercial power.

To some extent, "Changing the Game" really doesn't take off until the chapter about how videogames can be used as training and workplace education tools. The authors acknowledge that games and simulations are not new to the corporate world (paintball days, team-building exercises, etc.), but state that videogames offer an opportunity for training more people faster, often in place, and provide a welcome respite from the usual corporate drudgery. Edery and Mollick move well past the usual stories of America's Army and Department of Defense sims to discuss how a Neverwinter Nights mod was used to teach proper urban combat methods, and how the mountain-climbing game Everest was used to teach teamwork and doing one's duty in corporate America.