Get Ready to be Game-ified

Kids and young adults are attracted to video games like flies are to light. And while it may seem kids are being lazy when connected to their Wii or Xbox, in reality kids are paving the way for business training and education.

How? It's part of a growing trend called gameification. If you think back, you'll see that many of the greatest technological advances in business have been spawned from the game world.

A business concept or technology often begins with kids and gaming. To see the migration of how a concept moves from kids and games to adults and business, just look at the evolution of social media.

At first, young people were the predominant users of Twitter and Facebook. As adults eventually took more interest in social media, many companies made formal policies forbidding employees from using Twitter and Facebook at work. Now the opposite is happening-it's many people's job to use social media for brand management, marketing and collaboration. Many now host Twitter feeds and Facebook pages.

Granted, video games and social media are different, but the migration is still the same. And with game controllers like the Wii and Xbox Kinect giving people new ways of interacting with technology, the business world is on the threshold of being game-ified.

Just as gaming evolved from sitting in front of a computer or television and using some kind of joystick to the interactive Wii, where players move as part of the game, so has business technology.

After Microsoft released a software development kit for the Kinect that allows programmers to create new applications, university students started writing programs that allow users to control business software using hand motions. If you want to go to the next page, you sweep your hand across the screen without touching it. Think back to the movie Minority Report where the police were able to maneuver data in the air without touching anything. Today, that's rapidly becoming more fact than fiction.

The Core of Gameification

The heart of the trend is using interactive gaming as a tool to transform training and education. Based on 25 years of research, I've identified five core elements that can dramatically accelerate learning:

Self-diagnosis. In the world of gaming, you receive greater challenges as you accomplish new feats. When you power down, the game remembers where you left off. When you return to the game, you still have your capabilities and all the things your character has previously learned.

In the case of business training, if you learn something, there's no need for a trainer to re-teach it. Yet many times have you sat through training where you already learned many of the concepts, but you hung in there to gain knowledge on a few key items? How much time did you waste? A better idea is for business training to have a self-diagnostic component. An adaptable model can track where you left off and offer next steps from that point only. This is the best way to achieve individual training and learning.

Interaction. For centuries, education and training have been, for the most part, passive. Someone stands in front of a group and talks. The audience sits and listens-taking a few notes here and there. If there is a lab, they will receive some hands-on application, but those labs are not the norm in everyday education and training. Regardless of someone's inherent learning style, training is much more effective when you're interacting with material. When you learn by gaming, you're playing with information and concepts. You're moving things around, you're manipulating items, and you're actually doing things. It's no longer passive training.

Immersion. We've seen 3D TVs where you wear special glasses to make  images pop out at you, but that's because TVs have a lot of viewers sitting in a room spread out. When you're playing a game on a small screen like a tablet or a smart phone, the viewing angle is such that you can have images appear 3D without special glasses. Video games use interspatial 3D, taking you into worlds instead of images popping out at you.

That's how games on the Xbox 360 and others have been working for years. This sort of technology gives an immersed affect, which is more engaging. To apply this to business, if you're training salespeople on a particular manufacturing tool they need to sell, why not have them see the tool in 3D and virtually manipulate the tool rather than have them read spec sheets about it? This will give them more insight into the tool, thereby making selling it easier.

Competition. Humans are naturally competitive. We want to sell more, be more productive, innovate faster and be smarter than the next person. When you're sitting in class learning, there's little competitive value. You're all there for the entire timeframe whether you've learned the materials in one hour or three. No one advances until the class is over. When you're competing in a game, there's an adrenaline rush that keeps you engaged and focused. In an effort to win, people master concepts faster so they can be first.

Focus. When you're playing a game, you're forced to focus. You have to do A in order for B to occur. If you don't do A, then you won't get far in the game. Focus is the result of interactivity, competition, immersion and self-diagnosis. When you can focus, you can learn virtually
anything fast.

Accelerate Learning

Using all five core elements is key to accelerating learning. With more and more to learn, it is increasingly important to game-ify both business and education. Those companies that adopt early will be winners.
So here's your homework assignment: Get together with a kid and play one of their games. While you're playing, think Wii or Kinect for business. Think of the five core elements and how you could reinvent learning with tools like these.

Since businesses spend large sums of money on training and education, any tool that can accelerate or enhance learning will save both time and dollars.

Daniel Burrus is a leading technology forecaster and business strategist, and founder and CEO of Burrus Research, a Wisconsin research and consulting firm that monitors global advancements in technology to help clients understand how technological, social and business forces are converging to create opportunities. He is the author of six books, including the national bestseller Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible." For more information, visit www.burrus.com.