Games as a professional development option for workplace training

by Jerry Leeson

http://thinkspace.csu.edu.au/jerry/

Educators and researchers involved in games for learning understand the potential that games offer to develop 21st Century skills that are important for students entering the workforce.  The intent of this paper is to demonstrate the potential of games to build from that base and to show how games may be used to develop skills that are both transferable to the workplace and are specific to workplace environments.

In addition to learning from games and learning within games, elements of games themselves may be brought into the workplace to enhance performance and encourage and enhance workplace learning and training.  Games are used widely in many environments such as the military, health, scientific exploration, marketing,airlines and government to train, advertise and undertake research (Richter, Raban, & Rafaeli, 2015).  In the workplace they are often used to provide training in areas that require scarce, expensive or non-replaceable resources. The paper will highlight successful examples of high-stakes training and investigate what elements of games-balsed learning may be applied in more common-place work environments.

Courtesy Wordle.net

Researchers and commentators have long held the view that in addition to providing learning opportunities for specific subject matter, games also offer the opportunity to develop “soft”/ 21st Century skills demanded in modern workplace environments.  These skills include ICT literacies, collaboration, problem solving and communication (Beavis et al, 2014, p. 573).  Recognising the importance of ICT skills for students entering the workforce, the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) lists them among the General Capabilities dimension of the Australian Curriculum which students will need to be competent in to live and work successfully in the 21st Century (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2015).  Higher education institutions list similar skills as Graduate Attributes for their students.  For example, among the graduate attributes for the University of Adelaide are critical thinking and problem solving, teamwork and communication skills (University of Adelaide Graduate Attributes, 2015).

The development of 21st Century skills within games and the ability to apply them in the workplace provides an example of learning from games.  Beavis et al (2014) found the development of these skills as one of the positive benefits of implementing games in school environments.  One of the most striking examples of the potential for development of transferable skills are the skills and practices developed while playing World of Warcraft.  John Seely Brown discusses how players essentially have to collaborate and form teams in order to progress in World of Warcraft (Brown, 2010).  Players must join guilds if they are going to be able to cope with the amount of knowledge being created.  Teamwork and the application of different skill sets (i.e. cross-functional teams in a business sense) are essential for success in ‘raids’.

Thomas & Brown (2009, p.40) discuss the situated learning that is taking place in environments such as World of Warcraft and raise the concept of ‘the learning inversion’.  They argue that in these types of games/virtual worlds, rather than ‘learning about’ and then ‘learning to be’, ‘learning to be’ takes place first.  Players ‘first learn what the right things to know are’.  The importance of collaboration and communication becomes very apparent and  Thomas & Brown go on to develop the idea of a networked imagination that along with immense problem solving capability, develops cultural and linguistic norms.  They believe that what is happening in games today (in this case, 2009) will be a good ‘predictor of what will happen in the workplaces and societies of tomorrow (2009, p.47).

Guilds in World of Warcraft also perform ‘after-action’ reviews of their performance in raids and have access to create, customise and monitor dashboards summarising their performance. In addition to guild members collaborating with each other, guilds also collaborate on a much larger scale with each other and share knowledge for high-end raids.

Retrieved from ‘Cannot be Tamed’ Blog – www.cannnotbetamed.com

The above image shows part of a dashboard for evaluating ‘Healers‘ (a type of character) in World of Warcraft.  It is sourced from a blog article which outlines in detail how to go about evaluating the performance of raiders in the game. The blog is an example of just one person’s contributions to the development of the knowledge base for World of Warcraft.  For more comprehensive examples of the knowledge that the World of Warcraft community is sharing, see WoWWiki andWoWpedia.  Many companies would be interested in this level of knowledge sharing.  Contributing to wikis and answering questions in forums also provides contributors themselves with learning opportunities. Kuznetsov & Paulos 2010, p. 299) in a related study on the rise of the expert amateur and the importance of online communities found that learning was a key motivator for contributing and that responding to questions helped contributors reinforce their own learning,

Games that focus on areas other than or in addition to entertainment are often referred to as serious games.  These games may be designed to meet a number of purposes. (Grace, 2012, p.77) identifies five different categories:

• advertising products
• social impact
• education and training
• advertising services
• ‘combinations’

One of the more well-known serious games fits into the ‘combination’ category and is America’s Army, developed for the U. S. Army both as a recruitment tool and training tool.  The United States military has been using America’s Army since 2002 as a recruitment tool (America’s Army, 2015).  While it is primarily a political/recruitment tool (the game offers potential recruits the chance to explore facets of the army that may be of interest to them), learning also takes place within the game.  For example, the game offers training opportunities in areas such as first aid, vehicle simulators and in the use of sophisticated weapons (America’s Army, 2015). In the case of first aid/medical training, the game also offers assessment opportunities with players having to pass a virtual medical training course.  The game includes in-game advertising (such as posters for recruitment in training environments and part of the design is to showcase the U. S. military.  In a study into the effectiveness of the game, the Army Research Institute found that retention of procedural knowledge was higher by 12% over retention of factual knowledge (Grace, 2006).

In addition to providing training for specific skills, the game is also designed to instil the values of the U. S. military, those being “loyalty, duty, respect, selflessness, service and honour” (Perez, 2012, p4).

merica’s Army is available over the web and has a significant fan base and in 2005 already had over 4.6 million registered users (Perez, 2012, p. 3).  The Web has also facilitated the building of online fan communities about the game.  Online communities based around games allow for knowledge construction. The largest and most significant example of this knowledge construction are the communities surrounding World of Warcraft (Gee, 2012; Seely Brown, 2010; McGonigal, 2010).

While America’s Army is primarily a recruitment tool with some training and learning opportunities built into it, the U. S. military also uses Full Spectrum Warrior as a more purpose-built training tool.  Full Spectrum Warrior claims a degree of realism not through realistic graphics but through striving to make gameplay tactics as close as possible to real life tactics, including the often mundane nature embodied in much military activity (Perez, 2012, p. 8).  The game had both a commercial version and military training version.  The training version had less focus on the graphics and more on the tactical training needs of army personnel.

Organisations beyond the military have also been using games and simulations for many years.  Simulations for example provide a number of benefits for companies.  Resources may be scarce, expensive and potentially dangerous so providing training through simulations provides economic and safety benefits. Training simulators can be found in many high-stakes environments such as emergency response, mining and pilot training.

One example is the Australian Diving Accreditation Scheme’s Diving Supervisor Simulator.  This simulator provides a safe, economical way to train diving supervisors for offshore drilling platforms.  Training supervisors on the platforms themselves is dangerous, expensive, and has very few windows of opportunity to occur. The simulator can train at any time in any place in a safe, controlled manner exposing trainees to many different types of emergency scenarios.

In these simulations we can see a change in focus from generic 21st Century skills to specific skills and competencies.  Accuracy is a critical factor.  Teachers in the Beavis et al (2014) study also identified accuracy as a potential negative when implementing games in classroom environments. Addressing concerns such as accuracy Van Eck (2006) identified three different approaches to implementing games based learning in educational settings including having the students participate in the design, developing purpose built games and using commercial off-the-shelf games.  Van Eck argued that professionally developed games had met with limited success and had no effective business model.  The investigations of Grace (2012) into persuasive games support Van Eck’s argument to a degree when he discusses the ephemeral nature of many persuasive games.  Many of the games investigated only had limited shelf lives and were no longer available within months of their release.

Return on investment is a key factor in the production of games and game developers need to be confident in that. In high-stakes medical, emergency response etc training the need for accuracy and safety is magnified (as are the costs).  The development of simulators however, while expensive, may be a cost-effective option when compared to the alternatives of putting trainees into dangerous situations and using (and potentially losing) very expensive resources.

For less intense workplace environments, the cost of developing purpose-built simulations and games may be less viable economically.  The Serious Games Group lowers costs by using open source and virtual worlds that provide the basic platforms from which to build training scenarios.  Artefacts built are available via Creative Commons licensing encouraging further sharing and reuse.  Two examples from this initiative are the ‘White Card Game’ which delivers training to achieve the mandatory requirement for working safely on a construction site (CPCCOHS1001A) and ‘Play It Safe’, a game to deliver competency-based training for Occupational Health and Safety in the Engineering sector.

In the corporate world another approach is being taken which rather than bringing elements of the workplace into the game, is bringing elements of the game into the workplace.  This is referred to as gamification.

Gamification for organisations is ‘about understanding and influencing the behaviours of their employees and customers’ (Dale, 2014, p.82).  To do so, it employs game mechanics and game thinking.  Jeanne Gang (2015) in Using Games to Engage discusses using game principles to facilitate designing a new building for a law company.  In order to meet certain demands for the new building she needed to get lawyers ‘out of their offices’ and working together to participate in the design so that they would accept changes that would be coming.  Using a game allowed the lawyers to see the impact of their decisions (trade-offs, benefits) etc.  In this instance the game experience facilitated engagement, participation and acceptance of the new design.  While not strictly a games for learning example, it does illustrate some learning in the sense of starting to understand and accept the implications of their decisions and help them to make good decisions.

Other types of game mechanics used may be rewards, points,achievements (such as badges), social recognition and reputation building, leaderboards, contests, missions and levels (Dale, 2014, p. 85).  Dale discusses gamification’s links to behaviourist theories of learning, rewarding and reinforcing desired behaviours. Bogost (as cited in Perez, 2012, p.9) argues that a simple behaviourist explanation does not adequately focus on ‘interactions with behavioural complexity’ and goes on to combine constructivist principles to develop procedural literacy.  For Bogost, games can ‘teach abstract principles that facilitate general problem solving skills as well as the game’s specific content. Bogost (2011) further develops his views on how gamification can and is being exploited by business.  However, as one of the responders to his post says “if even a few companies develop more delightful and enjoyable experiences without compromising the core value of their offering, it could be good. There needs to more ‘play’ in the world.”

Dale (2014, p. 88) lists a number of examples where gamification has been used to facilitate business improvement including, amongst others:

• DirecTV’s gamification portal to encourage knowledge sharing
• Foldit’s engagement of users to enhance and facilitate complex scientific problem solving collaboratively
• Deloitte used Badgeville’s Game Mechanics in its leadership program to facilitate engagement and retention.

Gartner Inc. is a global IT Research and Advisory firm.  At the time of Dale’s paper (2014), Gamification was listed at the ‘peak of inflated expectations’ in Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Education.  It has since slid towards ‘the trough of disillusionment’ reflecting (according to Gartner) a natural maturation process with any new field.

In a meta-analysis of studies into gamification, Hamari, Koivisto & Sarsa (2014) examined a number of studies to determine whether gamificaton is effective.  Gamification was defined as ‘a process of enhancing services with (motivational) affordances in order to invoke gameful experiences and further behavioural outcomes (2014, Section 2, para 1).  They determined that while the majority of studies reported success with gamification, they were dependent on factors such as the ‘role of the context being gamified’ and ‘qualities of the users’.

Countering the largely positive findings of Hamari, Koivisto and Sarsa, Zichermann and Cunnigham (as cited in Monu & Ralph, 2013, p. 2) raise concerns over business saturating us with gamificaion efforts that ultimately ‘empower amoral advertisers to manipulate the masses not whatever behaviours are most profitable’.  Mona & Ralph, and Hamarii, Koivisto and Sarsa both argue that gamification is still a relatively new and under-researched area that perhaps has been seized upon more quickly by industry rather than the research community.

The examples listed by Dale (2014) have a focus on the motivational aspects of gamification.  The Deloitte case study is an example where the focus was on developing that motivation to improve learning outcomes.

According to commentators such as Van Eck, the application of purpose-built education games initially had mixed results and failed to develop an effective business model.  Over time however, niche needs have emerged where games can be particularly effective (as in the military, emergency services and other high-stakes environments).  Games developers and training/educational organisations have also found ways of lowering the costs of development (such as using open source game engines and virtual worlds) making it possible to use games more generically and in a wider variety of workplace environments.  Companies such as IBM have developed game platforms that are flexible enough to accommodate many different workplace situations and problems, and are able to ingest data from a number of sources to create specific and applicable scenarios to different organisational settings.  This modular, platform approach along with open licensing (such as Creative Commons) and the ability to customise environments with relevant data has the potential to open up games as an effective training alternative for many organisations.

The application of game mechanics and thinking in workplaces also offers companies the opportunity to leverage games to develop staff in any sized organisation. As gamification matures and organisations start to understand it better, elements of game mechanics and thinking offer the potential not only to develop employees, but to make work more interesting and potentially more in line with expectations of those moving into the workforce who have not just life experience with games, but an education in part at least, underpinned by games for learning.

References:

America’s Army.  (2015, May 15).  Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America%27s_Army

Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority. (2015). General Capabilities.   Retrieved 5/4/15, 2015, fromhttp://www.acara.edu.au/curriculum/general_capabilities.html

Beavis, C., Rowan, L., Dezuanni, M., McGillivray, C., O’Mara, J., Prestridge, S., … Zagami, J. (2014). Teachers’ beliefs about the possibilities and limitations of digital games in classrooms. E-Learning and Digital Media, 11(6), 569–581. doi:10.2304/elea.2014.11.6.569http://www.wwwords.co.uk.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/pdf/validate.asp?j=elea&vol=11&issue=6&year=2014&article=4_Beavis_ELEA_11_6_web

Bogost, I. (2011). Gamification is bullshit,  Retrieved from: http://www.bogost.com/blog/gamification_is_bullshit.shtml

Brathwaite, B. (2012). Games for a Change.   Retrieved 15/5/15, 2015, fromhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9Z-3mz3j6U

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Dale, S. (2015). Gamification Making work fun, or making fun of work? Business Information Review, 31(2), 82–90.

Gang, J. (2015). Using Games to Engage.   Retrieved 15/5/2015, 2015, fromhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vW8fEmGijDA

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Grace, L. (2012). A topographical study of persuasive play in digital games. Paper presented at the Proceeding of the 16th International Academic MindTrek Conference, Tampere, Finland.

Jean, G. (2006). ‘America’s Army’ Game Branches Out Into Real Combat Training.National Defense, 90(627), 34-36.

Kuznetsov, S., & Paulos, E. (2010, October). Rise of the expert amateur: DIY projects, communities, and cultures. In Proceedings of the 6th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Extending Boundaries (pp. 295-304). ACM.

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Monu, K., & Ralph, P. (2013). Beyond gamification: Implications of purposeful games for the information systems discipline. arXiv:1308.1042 [cs]. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.1042

Perez, M.  (2012).  Military Advertising and Simulation Training:  U.S. Army’s Use of Video Games.  Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/6823477/Military_Advertising_and_Simulation_Training_U.S._Army_s_Use_of_Video_Games.

Richter, G., Raban, D. R., & Rafaeli, S. (2015). Studying gamification: The effect of rewards and incentives on motivation. In T. Reiners & L. C. Wood (Eds.), Gamification in education and business (pp. 21–46). Cham: Springer International Publishing. Retrieved from http://www.meydalle.info/meydalle/ganit/9783319102078-c1.pdf

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University of Adelaide Graduate Attributes.  (2015, May). Retrieved from https://www.adelaide.edu.au/learning/strategy/gradattributes/

Van Eck, R. (2006). Digital game-based learning: It’s not just the digital natives who are restless. EDUCAUSE Review, (20), 16-18.http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/digital-game-based-learning-its-not-just-digital-natives-who-are-restless

Master of Education (Knowledge Networks and Digital Innovation).
Developed by the School of Information Studies, Charles Sturt University, 2015.

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