Can Employees Learn Using Online Games?

Educators have long known that games are good models for teaching teamwork. Employers however often view these games as ice-breakers and entertainment – in other words, a waste of time.  But MMPORGs- Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game - do a better job of teaching teamwork, problem solving, analytical thinking and collaboration skills among adults than do traditional classroom workshops because they more closely replicate the complexity of a typical office environment. 

It's easy to know what's best for the team when everyone is wearing the same color shirt, climbing a rope, and trying to kick the ball in the same direction.  But it’s much harder to be an effective team player in an environment with competing priorities, limited resources, divergent goals, and a whole slew of personalities.

MMPORGs force participants to make choices.  To be successful, the first thing a participant needs to do is select a team.  Choosing which team to join or which team members to recruit, and knowing when/if/how to leave that alliance or individual, has interesting parallels with the workplace. 

For example, consider The River City project. Recently developed at Harvard, River City has the look and feel of a multi-user video game. The idea behind River City is to create scientifically literate citizens who are able to think critically, make sense of complex data, and solve problems. The training is also designed to teach collaborative skills. Students who use River City enter a town that is beset with health problems. They then form research teams to figure out what’s making people sick. They can track clues, develop controlled experiments to test hypotheses, and make recommendations based on their lab work.

River City represents a new trend which has significant implications not only for schools but for business training as well. The trend is built around what online application developers call a MUVE, which stands for multi-user virtual environment.

In this intersection of business, education, and technology, there exists another looming trend of equal importance:  how the Web itself is going to disrupt the conventional training models. 

A whole generation of young people, the next generation of workers, has grown up with iPods, iPhones, and computers.  Many, if not most, need training on the spot.  In fact, many tenured employees need re-training today – not tomorrow, not next week, not next month, but now.  They need answers and skills when … well, when they need it.   The once a year or once a month sheep dip model of training just doesn’t work anymore.  Multi-day and even one-day trainings, what I like to call “drive-by workshops,” are costly, disruptive, and ineffective.  Companies are so lean that removing employees from the workplace for extended hours to train them literally halts business productivity dead in its tracks.  Unfortunately the alternative - not training employees - is a poison pill.

Comments

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Great idea...you have some of my favorite people contributing to your blog. I enjoy it a great deal. I'm still working out how to do links neatly but in the meantime will keep it as a post...up now.

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Looking forward to getting back into blogging and what better way than doing this challenge to raise awareness. Thank you for hosting!

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I agree with you. This type of projects should be encouraged and I think that these type of projects are the projects for the future. . . . .

[taniska082011]

Collaboration skills are in the body as well as the mind, and the human body needs repetition and recurrence to really embody new collaborative and team skills. With their "same game with tremendous variability and complexity" design, online games can be an ideal platform to "develop the body" for collaboration and teamwork, without the political and economic consequence of trial and error in the workplace.

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[Phillip Crockford]

Great post Ira. This trend is coming fast. We will need some new distinctions to make it really work for us though. The simulation itself can provide opportunity for individual knowledge and skill development, but it won't always get results in the relationship / collaboration domain unless some key dimensions are included. One such dimension is that of reflection: participants can be in a simulation repeatedly and still be slow to learn collaboration skills. However, when well-structured /coached individual and group reflection is added, the skills develop much more quickly. Without the reflection, it's just a game (often with the potential to become boring or addictive). With skilled reflection, progress can be very quick, because all the other ingredients of complexity,choice, skill level, risk, consequences, emotional involvement etc are there in the game.

I agree completely about the failure of the primitive "sheep dip" approach. One-offs don't do it because they don't have the recurrence that is necessary to produce embodied competency. Collaboration skills are in the body as well as the mind, and the human body needs repetition and recurrence to really embody new collaborative and team skills. With their "same game with tremendous variability and complexity" design, online games can be an ideal platform to "develop the body" for collaboration and teamwork, without the political and economic consequence of trial and error in the workplace.

Fernando Flores and the team at Pluralistic Networks are some of the leading exponents of using games-based methodologies in a business context. They emphasize the value of these methods for improving collaboration across cultural, geographic and generational boundaries: a great example of the disruption to conventional models that the web is bringing.

One thing that may be slowing the adoption of these methods -- the general corporate attitude to training in general as a necessary evil, rather than an essential ingredient of success. Perhaps the fact that these methods require far less time "away from real work" will start to shift the mindset of decision makers. In addition to savings, early adopters may enjoy strategic advantages in terms of agility, customer focus, and talent retention.