A Letter from the Author

Dear friends and colleagues:

The gamification of corporate learning has become a hot topic of discussion over the past year in industry publications and blogs, and certainly among talent development professionals.

Why is there so much interest? Of course, everyone will have their own point of view on that question. Mine is this: despite the allure of traditional elearning from a cost and ease-of-deployment perspective, numerous organizations’ workforces have not consumed that training with much gusto.

There seems to be a lot of consensus in the industry that most traditional elearning provides only modest learner engagement. That’s a big problem for talent development professionals and the workforces we serve. We know engagement is a critical success factor in skill development, and without it very little performance improvement is likely to result from the training.

Most of you who are currently thinking about game-based elearning are doing so to address the engagement issue. But what about the learning results? What about the comparative performance impact of game-based elearning versus the traditional elearning most organizations deploy today?

In this white paper, we will explore those questions, and provide a rationale that I believe many of you can use to benchmark the impact of game-based learning in your organization.

Bryan L. Austin
Chief Game Changer