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Quickly, now: What's the
median age of the video game playing population? 10?
14? 17? No, no, and no. Try 29. In other words, half of
the video game playing audience is over the mature age of 29. And that's just
for the intensive X-box and PlayStation role-playing and shooter game crowd. The
median age for casual computer gamers is 37. These are the people playing Solitaire
and puzzle games. 37. That's one year older than the
median age of the U.S. work force. And what's more, 65% of these casual gamers
are women. Meanwhile, legions of elementary school kids are busy supporting families,
balancing their check books, finding jobs and getting lives - all by playing SIMS.
Clearly, gaming has finally come of age as a mainstream
form of entertainment. However, most people go from a Jetsons home to a Flintstones
workplace each day. A majority of companies across the U.S. and beyond remain
chained to century-old, top-down, assembly-line command models, with training
and communications dispensed via faceless, formal, one-way, artificially objective
decrees from the top. While much of what companies do has been ported to emerging
online and electronic channels, little has been done to actually improve the quality
of the training and communications. Put another way, "progress" hasn't
actually resulted in a lot of progress. If your seven
year-old child can learn to fly an airplane or build a profitable entertainment
park with a video game, why couldn't the same kind of engaging technology be used
to teach your sales staff to sell consultatively or your managers to read a financial
statement? If 24 million Americans are carrying their iPods everywhere they go,
why can't they listen and learn more about their jobs through those devices? If
the average American is spending 40 minutes of work time a day reading blogs (as
one recent study suggests), why can't they use that time to blog about work-related
issues with their colleagues? The challenge is to custom-develop
games and podcasts (and videocasts and vlogs and whatever application emerges
next) for particular job tasks. Job skills have to be learned in context - generic
off-the-shelf programs only work for employees of generic off-the-shelf companies.
Every company must learn to design its own training (in-house or with outside
help) to create the maximum competitive advantage. Fortunately,
the price points for developing blogs and podcasts for internal training is less
than almost any traditional communication or training method and the cost of custom-developing
game-based simulations is dropping dramatically. These developments are inspiring
a new generation of blended learning. It's no longer about trivializing knowledge
into sound bites that are mechanically disseminated and robotically regurgitated.
Instead, next-gen learning is embedded into everyday work, always there when you
need and where you need it. It's entertaining and engaging. It's immersive and
experiential. It's about reflection and practice instead of memorization and cramming.
In many respects, training and internal communications
are the last frontiers for organizational improvement. For a function that's largely
responsible for a company's human capital and customer-interface performance,
it has received remarkably little executive attention or investment. The time
has come for business executives to take a long, hard look at their learning and
internal communications organizations and seriously question whether they're receiving
an adequate return on their investment. The emerging phenomena of blogging, podcasting
and game-based simulations might just be the engines required to drive the next
generation of strategic business innovation.
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