Gamification of Learning: The Benefits
Actual games are still taboo in most organisations where the stereotype of the work-avoiding employee cracking new high scores in Minesweeper has given gaming a bad name. In addition also, the corporate executive playing games to improve his or her strategy-making skills is still rare. Therefore the authors think that the next generation strategy games will finally be able to prove a real business case. Visual materials are great to foster intellectual understanding, but they are not interactive and do not reflect the reality of busy schedules and declining attention spans. While coaching or mentoring approaches have great merits for personal development, but are hard to scale. Games on the other hand, can create an experiential, interactive and tailored understanding of strategy at low cost and in a scalable manner. They also allow managers to suspend normal rules in an acceptable way and they provide an effective multi-variate medium for absorbing ideas.
