By Nilesh Bhagat, CHRP

As video games and apps become increasingly proliferate, a brief history of five key games offers an innovative lens and lessons for the workplace.

Pong (1972)
Pong began as a concept for a training program, and resulted the birth of the video game industry as we know it. Its success illustrates the appeal of extraordinarily simple design.

Lessons for the Workplace:

• Design with simplicity and purpose.
• Enable mastery through game design – a driver for sustained engagement.

Tetris (1983)
With its always turning, colourful cascades of multi-shaped tiles requiring rapid and orderly alignment, Tetris found mass appeal with both genders and multiple generations. Today, nearly half the gamer population is female.

Lessons for the Workplace:

• Engage with purposeful function and growing challenge
• Create culture of immersion formed around simple principles

The Sims (2000)
The Sims used life as a template to manage ongoing interactions, choices and consequences without explicit goals. The game shows how to use stories, rather than performance targets, to engage over the long run – over 150 million users worldwide as proof.

Lessons for the Workplace:

• Use existing contexts to leverage engagement platforms
• Create stories to connect and engage

World of Warcraft (2004)
The most popular MMORPG on the market—that’s massive, multi-player, online, role-playing game to the unfamiliar—World of Warcraft uses communities, challenging environments and socially-visible achievements as platforms for reward. A strong central story and abundant tangential narratives celebrate the unique differences between characters in common goal pursuit.

Lessons for the Workplace:

• Leverage the social community to achieve individual and group goals
• Integrate story lines which align at every level to create meaning, purpose and buy-in

Grand Theft Auto V (2013)
GTA V broke six new Guinness World Records in 2013, including highest revenue generated by an entertainment product in 24 hours and the fastest entertainment property to gross $1 billion. However, given its less-than-moral storyline, could its popularity be a reflection of a mass market actively disengaged from the broader good?

Lessons for the Workplace:

• Use ‘intelligent’ stories to unite and engage
• Be mindful of the purpose and presentation of the stories

For further exploration, read Game On: Working in the Value of Play or Video Games as a Metaphor of Organizational Development.

(PeopleTalk Winter 2013)