Using Business Gaming to Train Workers

Leah of WTRI talks about business gaming and its benefits

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/engage-expo-wtri-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the Engage Expo and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Lia: Lia DiBello.

Interviewer: What systems do you work on that applies gaming?

Lia: We work on any 3D virtual platform.

Interviewer: What is it used for?

Lia: Business gaming, so that you can rehearse strategies for success in business gaming and see if they are going to work before you go live with them.

Interviewer: What exactly is business gaming? Most of the audience is familiar with casual gaming and more of the entertainment gaming. What exactly is business gaming?

Lia: It’s really rehearsing. So, we do have to attach a lot of business technology to the virtual world just like you would attach business technology to a real work place. We use the same technologies, and we see what the flow of the play is in a virtual world in compressed time before we go live with it in a real business.

Interviewer: So, a scenario would actually be a business needs to train the user or train their workers to do something new, and they would use your simulator or your system to model that new behavior, and then the workers would come and actually use it.

Lia: Right. They would do that, and they might also even go as far as making decisions about how to deploy work processes. They might change them as a result of what they see in the virtual world, or they might make decisions about which technologies to use to manage them, what information technologies to use.

Interviewer: What game mechanics do you use then to help modify these workers’ behaviors?

Lia: What do you mean by game mechanics?

Interviewer: Like either point systems, feedback systems, achievements, leader boards, anything like that to help?

Lia: Embedded feedback, yeah. So, we embed either messaging that goes right to that person’s Avatar so they can see it on their heads-up display, and we have some central boards throughout the sim that tell the whole team how the whole team is doing with the goals. And then, we have an ideal goal and an ideal trend that we want them to match, and they can see how far or close they are to that at any moment.

Interviewer: How long does it take then for workers to go through this training system until they’re finally done?

Lia: It’s only two full days, and then they get about 18 months worth of learning in that 16 hours.

Interviewer: Have there been any surprises that you’ve seen using this technology or this gaming system to help business workers train?

Lia: Actually, we’ve been surprised at how easy, how effective it is. We’ve done other kinds of gaming for 12 years, and we weren’t sure virtual worlds would cut it but particularly when people don’t speak English or speak the same language as their employer.

Having it be visual and be quantitative with embedded quantitative feedback really overcomes all that. People really learn very quickly by doing and getting the embedded feedback, even if they don’t understand the instructions. It’s really overcome that.

Interviewer: Any other surprises?

Lia: How attached people get to their Avatar so much they really feel like they were there. That’s a big surprise. I didn’t think that would happen.

Interviewer: These are popular for simulations, but some people talked about business gaming and actually applying it while people are doing the actual work.

Lia: Oh.

Interviewer: Is that something that you guys are looking into? Is that something that you think…

Lia: I think actual work is going to be done more and more in virtual worlds. I think the line is going to be blurred, and I think it already is. There’s a lot of people that we work with as alliance partners that are never physically met and we feel like we have.

I think this also prepares people for that possibility. They need to have a skill to be present and aware and effective in virtually or in real life and have it not make a difference.

Interviewer: Where do you see then the future of business gaming going?

Lia: I think, I hope business gaming is the rule, that you don’t do anything drastic in your business without gaming it first because I think we save people millions of dollars by them gaming it first. And I think that rather than training people or telling them what to do, they should game everything, and it would save a lot of time and money and grief because people would know what they’re supposed to do because they’ve rehearsed it first.

Interviewer: With that said, your systems are geared toward bigger companies, and they have a lot bigger budgets. What do you think is going to need to happen so that this actually become accessible to either smaller companies or a lot of the small businesses that can use this?

Lia: The reason we work with big companies is because they can afford us. I think what’s nice about virtual worlds is that we don’t have to build a virtual world for each company. We can reuse worlds and reuse platforms, so I think it’s going to be like PCs or anything else, it’s going to get cheaper and more widely available as time goes on. We think that’s a good thing.

Interviewer: Where can listeners find out more information about your service?

Lia: Go to the website, wtri.com or Google on us, and we’re the only ones who do exactly what we do, so we’re pretty easy to find.

Thank you very much.