Thinking Games Useful For Corporations

Most video games hold my attention for about 3 hours. That’s not 3 hours at a time, that’s 3 hours total. The one exception is strategy games, which I can play into the wee hours of the night. Civilization is my all-time favorite, mostly because it absolutely destroys me, but there are several other “thinking” games out there, and now they are being used to do good instead of evil–unless of course you find corporations evil, in which case they continue to do evil.  Then again, that probably makes you a communist, so evil in your eyes is probably good in mine.

Now video games are making their way into corporations. These “serious games”—the term that’s been kicking around the last few years to describe games that are learning tools—use the same technology as the latest PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 titles, but they’re not targeted at Doritos-munching 14-year-olds

The Rise of Corporate Games.

Oh yeah…Rock Band 2 Comes out in September.

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3 Replies to “Thinking Games Useful For Corporations”

  1. i’m exactly the same way. Civ III might be by all-time favorite. now if we can just convince them boss-types to let us play games during bidness hours, we may be on to something.

  2. Heh, I love Rock Band but own a Wii so only get to play when my coworkers meet up once a quarter (yes, we relax in a hotel room playing Rock Band until management shuts us down– I live a charmed life).

    This swell of serious gaming has been going for years and shows no sign of stopping. I happen to teach game design part-time and have finally seen the emergence of the medium as a serious platform for expression and a valuable learning tool. If done right, naturally.

    The biggest challenge *now* as opposed to say, the 80’s or 90’s, is that “serious” games don’t have the resources to compete with AAA titles. The Hilton game looks promising, but without a real look at the production values, well, it’s probably about as “good” as the training videos I saw in the 90’s: comically underproduced.

    There are still so many avenues to take this, however. What about an alternate reality game for training? One might say a ropes course is a close equivalent. Board or paper-based games have been used for years as a creative ideation tool. It doesn’t have to just be video games, although that is certainly the emerging dominant entertainment medium for millenials.

  3. Billymac…If you’re able to convince a boss-type to let you play games at work I’d love some pointers.

    Victor…I actually really like the direction games are taking with stuff like Rock Band (which is available on Wii) that actually can be used to teach you to do something like play the drums.

    The problem with a game that has you doing something like managing a hotel instead of trying to dominate every inch of land on earth is that, well, I really WANT to dominate the earth. However, I have no interest in running a hotel. 😛

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