What is serious game training?

Serious game training offers an exciting way to engage, educate, and inspire your teams, but how do you define a serious game? What are the benefits of serious game training? Could your business benefit from incorporating serious game training in your approach to learning and development (L&D)? In this article we’ll give you a thorough grounding in serious game training, and look at ways they can be utilised across different business functions.

Defining a serious game

A serious game is a game geared towards a specific purpose as opposed to being purely for entertainment. In the context of most businesses, serious games will have some form of training at the core of their design. Different types of serious games can be focused on acquiring knowledge, practising skills, assessing aptitude, or providing an employee with a simulation of a challenging experience they’re likely to encounter in their job that they need to be prepared for.

Whatever the purpose, for the serious game to be effective, it must also be “fun,” or at least engaging and interactive. Serious games utilise many gamification elements in order to engage participants, such as psychological levers and game mechanics, but a serious game is a distinct concept that’s not interchangeable with gamification. Gamification is the use of game mechanics to make typically less playful tasks more engaging, whereas with the serious game, the game is designed and developed around a serious purpose.

The benefits of a serious game

Online serious games offer a lot of utility to businesses. Because they can be accessed from any modern device, any employee or team member is able to play them both at your place of business, but also remotely. Online serious games also allow instant feedback and data collection, so they can make it very easy to identify skill gaps and areas for development, or even identify a high performer with unflagged potential.

A less labour intensive, more efficient way to deliver training

With a lot of businesses moving to hybrid and remote working patterns, a programme of serious game training can prove to be a far more efficient method of training teams than traditional methods. Rather than an instructor needing to be present, and X number of employees having the same free spot in their diaries to make the training cost effective, online serious games allow everyone to play through interactive experiences and learn as their schedules allow.

In addition to removing the need for a physically present trainer (or digitally present trainer on remote calls), it means important training modules don’t get pushed back as the numbers required could jeopardise a function of the business, and it also means no team member is compromised in their ability to perform their duties by being absent due to sickness or holidays.

A method to incorporate testing, collect data, and analyse progress

Serious games offer employees an interactive learning experience to participate in, and they offer employers not only an opportunity to engage their workforce, but also opportunities to test, collect data, and analyse progress in a low stakes, simulated environment.

Even when working in an environment with some gamification elements applied, a mistake can cause problems and have consequences. By contrast, in an online serious game, there is built-in repeatability. There’s an opportunity to make mistakes, play again, and ultimately learn from those mistakes. The serious game will always be pulling on the psychological lever of a player’s appetite for challenge, so when this is leveraged effectively, it encourages the player to master the relevant skills or situational knowledge that will serve them when a mistake could mean consequences.

Easily customisable games for any business function

In the early days of serious game training, implementing online training experiences represented a huge financial investment for businesses, effectively making it the reserve of large multinationals. As technology has come along, and the practice has proven its worth, the accessibility of online serious game training puts it at the fingertips of organisations of all sizes and all budgets.

Through the Drimify platform, you can access tried and tested game engines to customise serious game training for any function of your business. Adapting a learning pathway such as the Dynamic Path™ gives you access to all of Drimify’s game engines. This allows you to customise a series of modules that can take your teams through a targeted course of interactive learning. This e-learning component can replace some of the more labour intensive blocks of training, not only creating efficiencies, but also giving your teams a break from lectures and classroom work.

A classic and well proven approach is to use a mix of informative content, such as videos, infographics, or text, to give participants pertinent information, and then use Question & Answer Games such as the Quiz to simulate possible situations that could arise in the course of their workday. Their answers, be they multiple choice or open, allows you to assess how they would tackle problems they’re likely to see in the course of their jobs. All the content can be customised, so this format could be adapted to anything, from running a plant with lots of heavy machinery, to people management, to more or less any specialty you can think of.

Adapting to a digital native workforce

The current and future workforce at this stage is largely made up of digital natives, who are not only accustomed to e-learning through their education, but are also very comfortable playing video games. The older, more traditional methods just aren’t as effective with how the modern employee learns and develops, and the efficacy of those more traditional methods will become slightly less with every new crop of graduates that enter the workforce.

Implementing a serious game training strategy is one way of future-proofing your training methodologies. The amount of data you’re able to capture from each game allows you to analyse what works and why, identify what doesn’t, and identify areas for improvement. This aspect means that if due consideration is put into your serious game training strategy, your corporate training programmes can improve year on year almost autonomously.

Serious game training really comes into its own when a mistake on the job can have serious consequences, be they financial consequences, safety consequences, or PR consequences. Serious game training gives your teams a safe environment in which to experiment and learn, and gives you feedback and data on their readiness to perform their duties.

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