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Corporate Gaming Is Good For Business
The Economist is running a story about how gaming is on the rise in corporate environments, and how games are also becoming a popular tool for advertising. From internally developed games to commercial offerings to simply creating a framework in which employees can interact, game-based competitions and community building are leading to increased productivity, even for Fortune 500 companies. Quoting:
"Take Microsoft's own experience. Before it releases a new version of its Windows operating system, it asks staff to help debug the software by installing and running the system. In the past, project managers had to spend a great deal of time and effort persuading busy Microsoftees to help them with this boring task. So for Windows Vista, the system's latest incarnation, Microsoft created a game that awarded points for bug-testing and prizes such as wristbands for achieving certain goals. Participation quadrupled."
Awarding points for participation is rarely the most effective way to get people involved. Modded +5 insightful
I know a good game, one that really motivates me to work more. It's called "Show Me The Money".
I thought they would speak about the need for good 3D cards in office boxen for lunch-time BF1942 smash-up between coworkers. This is boring. Corporate games as they describe it, are for suckers.
-- Home is where you eat your heart out.
Participation may have quadrupled, but what about productivity or tangible results?
FreeBSD.org - The power to serve
just fine.
See how good Vista is?
One place I worked we had 'suggestion drives'. You got prizes for making suggestions, and such. The only result is that we got deluged with worthless suggestions - and we'd have to spend days writing justifications for denying totally boneheaded ideas.
I'd love to see the quality of the bug reports they got as a result.
I can only assume the Microsoft example is meant to serve as an illustration as to why you shouldn't entrust your QA to whatever random employees you can convince to run your software in exchange for lame prizes.
> I'm not really sure how to take the news that bug testing in Vista was quadrupled.
That's not exactly what they said. They said that employee participation quadrupled. Since employees are not focused testers, they likely hit the same bugs, resulting in many reports for the same, easy to find top level bugs resulting from mostly normal use.
The amount of effort hitting deeper levels likely didn't change much.
Note that the focus of this article is that the rewards upped participation. Microsoft's direction of focusing that increased participation may not have been ideal, but the method clearly accomplished its goal.
I'm gonna write me a new minivan this afternoon!
So, google has this for employees, and microsoft gives away wristbands?
Explains a lot.
"A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of coloured ribbon" - Napoleon
The concept has been long-observed that people will work their asses off for a symbol of accomplishment.
Anything a company can do that shows they aren't just a replaceable grunt leads to better morale. A good company will make great efforts to express their gratitude to the employees for being there and making the company what is has become. More often than not, though, you have companies who treat their employees as thin mints. Use them for a while, then spit them out, because, "you can always be replaced." Picnics, luncheons, gift cards, on-line game tournaments...if this is what it takes to encourage more productivity, then do it! Productive workers make a company more money.
Bearded Dragon
Reminds me of this: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Defect-Black-Market.aspx
"You're older than you've ever been, and now you're even older."
What they're talking about is that it is more productive to present some boring task in game form than it is to just require people to do it.
A spoon full of sugar does indeed make the medicine go down...It's about time corporations clued in to this basic facet of human existence. Work is work, and play is play, and if work can be a little like play, people will work more.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
It did marvels for Vista indeed.
What planet are you from? When did humans ever do work they didn't have to do because they were supposed to do it? It's not like the company doesn't play the same game in reverse. They may keep you at a lower wage by promising retirement benefits, but then outsource your job to another country before they have to pay those benefits. There's no altruism in business, and there never has been.
There is a difference between a "bug" and a poor design decision. For a Windows release, Vista isn't all that buggy, it's just user-hostile. You certainly can't blame them for the driver issues that caused most of the bugs early on.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Back when I was fresh out of college (graduated in 1978), I found myself constantly having to learn new operating systems (mostly mainframe and minicomputer), new editors, new compilers (and languages), and so on. Heck, in my first year out of college, while at General Dynamics/WDSC, I worked on four different computers (CDC mainframe, Perkin-Elmer minicomputers, a Harris hybrid analog/digital computer, and some other mini-computer that I can't remember at the moment -- other than that I could tell what stage the compilie/link process was in by the noise the hard drive [5 MB and occupying a box the size of a 2-drawer file cabinet] was making).
So, one of my 'coming-up-to-speed' techniques was to write a program that interested me. In this case, I wrote a program that would randomly roll up and print out D&D monsters and NPCs, complete with stats. By the time I had that program working, I pretty much knew how to use the system and how to do software development on it. I think I still have some of those printouts in my files at home. ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
Only 5? Hmmm... You know, I really want my employees to express themselves. If you think that 5 pieces of flair is enough just because you're getting by and doing the bare minimum, I'm a little disappointed. We really want to encourage team players. ;-)
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Yeah, I'm wondering if those "bracelets" were the shiny metal kind that take keys... and that's how they kept Vista testers at it. I can't imagine any other way to get people to actually use it :-)
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
The problem being that the accounting department has been grinding productivity marks all day, and now are fully clothed in epic accounting gear.
Now we in the engineering department can't go to the water cooler without being ganked. :P
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
At least they're not teabagging you...yet.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I spotted 100 bugs for Vista and All I got was this lousy wristband.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact