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Can gaming make you a better worker?
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Gaming in the workplace might sound like an oxymoron, but there are proven benefits that gaming actually makes you more productive.
 Courtesy of Snowfly. |
Candystand.com’s recent “All in a Day’s Play” survey of 1,418 working Americans nationwide found that 64 percent gamed online at least once a day while at work, with 35 percent reaching gaming multiple times a day. 32 percent admitted to turning to the online gaming world for "entertainment value."
There is evidence that gaming can be good for workers. When scientists from the University of Utrecht studied the effects of game playing on 60 employees at a Dutch insurance firm, they found an improvement in how they felt about their job and their work.
The identify theft company LifeLock employed Executive Command's Empire Earth II, a strategy game, to teach managers how to improve their strategic thinking and teaming skills. The game features four different roles: generals (front line employees), operations and intelligence officers (middle managers), and commanders (executives). Interestingly, the commander doesn't actually play the game, but rather uses a whiteboard to plan strategy and relies exclusively on his operations and intelligence officers to relay conditions in the field. The game is as much a stress test as it is an educational tool. Thanks to Empire Earth II, 96 percent of LifeLock's employees indicated they knew how their role helped the company succeed. With an 80 percent retention rate, LifeLocks calculates a savings of more than two million dollars
Snowfly, a company dedicating to helping employers create tech-based motivators for their employees, uses the carrot approach to encourage productivity through its Capstone system. Regence Blue Cross/Blue Shield's IT department in Portland, Oregon, IT awards virtual tokens for performing certain tasks. These tasks can be spent on slot machine like games that convert the tokens into points, which can in turn be redeemed for prizes or cash. Snowfly claims this approach has a 95 percent approval rating from its users.
According to Candystand's survey, 18 percent of employees use games as a source of stress relief. In PopCap's survey of 2,842 white-collar workers, 84 percent said games made them feel less "stressed out." Monterey Bay Area paramedics are allowed to play casual games on their mobile devices to keep them from falling asleep.
"The challenge," said Henry Jenkins, director of comparative media studies at MIT in an interview with Harvard Business Review, "is to take knowledge that is lying inert in a book or a manual and make it compelling by turning it into a role, or an activity, or a goal that a player can achieve."
Ultimately, gaming may eventually be incorporated into work in a such a way that its is indistinguishable from other tasks. The idea, according to Beck and Wade of Got Game, is that not only does gaming make you a better office worker, but the traditional grind of team-oriented tasking, recognition, and advancement are all part of a bigger meta-game anyway.
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