NYTimes on Gaming in Corporate America
I thoroughly enjoyed the first page of this article about gaming infiltrating the work environments of corporate america. The writer discusses two great examples:
1. Entellium, which makes CRM software that includes a lot of game concepts. Character building, rating other players, and rankings all play a part in this system, in a very game-like way. Great stuff.
2. Seriosity, a company that appears to be making digital collaboration software that borrows a lot of game design aspects. You can rank emails, which in turn start to build meta-data around the sender of such emails, and it sounds like you can somehow export the meta-data to illustrate that, for example, Steve has been sending quality, innovative emails based on your rankings, while Sam’s emails are consistently ranked very low, indicating maybe you don’t see a lot of worthwhile information coming from Sam’s digital communications.
Things like this could be VERY powerful in corporate settings, and really transform an organizations’ internal workflow and processes, hopefully creating overall improvements in efficiency, service, or a plethora of company activities. On the flip side, this type of software makes things VERY transparent: you can basically see that Bob hasn’t rated you high, or you can see in the CRM that you rank LAST amongst your co-workers. A little pressure and competition is a good thing in my opinion.
We’ve been talking about adding a lot of these features to things like class forums and blogs, where students’ posts could be rated, and each week we’d have a “Top 5″ list of some sort based on the rankings. It’s a bit gimmicky, but it will work. Competition in the classroom is something that seems to be frowned upon in grade school, and even up through college. Bah I say! Even if there’s no tangable reward for winning, many students get into the competitive spirit just to be able to say “I won!” and have that as bragging rights. If it gets people engaged, why not give it a try? We have some similar ideas, what I consider low-hanging fruit, to possibly spice up some of our online learning opportunities.
…and if you know anything about gaming or the serious gaming community, just skip the second page of the article.
“Skills you develop in game worlds solve real-world problems”
ORLY?
