Video games are normally known as big
time wasters. But Vikram Agarwal, a businessman in Bangalore, has found
innovatively applied gaming concepts in business.
Agarwal's pet peeve
was his marketing team, which travelled constantly and considered emails their
worst enemies. "My team used to go overboard with useless emails, thus burying
the few important ones somewhere within. And sadly, thanks to the overload,
replying to those few important emails would take forever," said Agarwal, "On
the other hand, they loved video games. So when I found an email solution that
borrows from games like World of Warcraft, I knew I'd struck
gold."
Aggarwal's innovation Attent uses simple concepts to drive up
productivity. The motto is turn the world into a game. Adding a little
competition to mundane-but-important tasks such as emails can turn them into
something exciting. The concept came from the game 'World of Warcraft', in which
the characters give a lot of importance to its artificial currency of gold
coins. In fact, they spend hours completing boring tasks just to earn the
in-game money. This is exactly the idea Attent puts to use for business emails.
It has created a system where users earn virtual currency by using emails
wisely.
In the system, every employee is given virtual tokens (such
as 200 each week) that they can attach to the emails they send. It cuts down the
amount of unnecessary emails being sent since everyone wants to save their
tokens.
Another example where video game concepts are being applied
in real life is the game on cancer developed by HopeLab called Re-Mission. It
combines video games with the reality of cancer, to help children get a sense of
power and control over their sickness. The game is a thirdperson shooter, where
the kids control a robot called Roxxi who goes blasting the disease out of
various bodies of young cancer patients. The robot in the game has weapons such
as radiation, chemotherapy and antibiotics. Initially, this used to just give
kids a sense of power over their disease, but research has found that kids start
to believe in their medication and willingly go for therapy after seeing the
"miracles" in the game.
Social networking has also started encashing
on the gaming fever. A good example is Foursquare, a location-based social
network which tracks you as you visit public places like coffee shops or
restaurants and informs your friends of your location. Foursquare uses game
concepts such as assigning 'points' for visiting different places in a day. You
also get special badges for going far away from home. They also have a top of
the week leaderboard where the person who has travelled the most is named as the
leader. The people behind the network say this encourages people to go out and
socialise.
Nike, the sports goods company, is also using gameplay to
promote exercise. Nike and Apple came out with a product called Nike Plus, a
pedometer that measures your footsteps, and syncs them with your iPod. The fun
part is that the pedometer uses this information to build various games. Another
example where gaming and exercise go together is Wii Fit series.
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