Serious game
Serious games for your HR needs
We invite you to discover the definition, the advantages and the use cases of serious games, specifically in the corporate world. We also explain the method our Game Designers use to create the best serious games possible.
Serious game – Definition
Serious Game – Goals
Serious Game – HR uses
Collock’s method
What is a serious game?
Our dear friend Wikipedia defines a serious game as a “game designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment”. It is the lovely match between serious, educational content and video games’ mechanics and storytelling. It is a tool incredibly efficient at communicating educational messages in an interactive, engaging and federating way ; and can be of great use for Managers or HR services: team building activity for a seminar, kick off a new major project, onboard new members, etc.
Inform + Communicate + Teach + Train
Relying on images, sound, video, storytelling and interaction, serious games offer an immersive experience benefiting the players’ learning process, in a way that traditional lectures and presentations cannot reproduce.
Damien Djaouti and Julian Alvarez defined 3 dimensions of serious games
The persuasive dimension
Highlight a message through visuals and audio assets.
The informative dimension
Enable the player to learn by interacting with the message.
The educative dimension
Communicate a message or train a player. The most important one.
Serious games are serious matters
Advergaming
Communicate a message for an educational, informative or persuasive purpose.
Practice serious games
Improve players’ cognitive and motor performances through stimulation.
Training serious games
Teach and develop behavioural or technical knowledge and skills. Also called learning games
Serious games’ goals
Objective 1: Pedagogical effectiveness, practice and exercises
The most obvious value proposition of serious games is the ability to learn through practice.
Thanks to storytelling, observation, experimentation and the absence of sanction to mistakes, serious games offer a guiltfree framework to solve problems and perfect skills. By interacting and being active, the players experience a deeper involvement in their training and better memorize its lessons.
Objective 2: Engagement, drive and cohesion
Games act on individuals’ psychological impulses: trigger curiosity, stimulate strategy, social influence, creativity, etc. These impulses are a powerful motivation drive, whether they are positive (personal development, goal achievement, values, etc.) or negative (curiosity, emergency feeling, fear of loss, etc.).
Gamification, at the core of serious games, is a robust process to engage participants, ease knowledge acquisition and sustainably, positively change behaviours.
The majority of serious games are designed to be played in teams. By putting collaboration at the heart of the gameplay, they contribute to improve teams’ cohesion.
Objective 3: Modernize employees’ experience and employer brand
More and more companies incorporate serious games in their HR processes to modernize their employer brand image, seduce new generations of candidates and retain the talents.
Originating in Antiquity, invented by the Lydians to cope with the distress caused by a famine, games are a transcendental media. They bridge the gap between ages, cultural background, social status, physical differences, political inclinations and so on. Games are one of today’s most federative tools to unite people around the same mission.
Serious games: HR uses
Recruitment
Improve employer brand.
Observe and identify soft skills.
Create a parallel between game and professional mechanics.
Identify collaborative behaviours.
Onboarding
Make newcomers operational faster.
Retain employees.
Increase drive and improve quality of work life.
Foster attachment to the company’s values.
Awareness raising
Open the discussion on sensitive topics.
Sustainably change behaviours.
Make awareness-raising programs engaging.
Training
Engage all employees.
Communicate key messages.
Put collaboration at the heart of trainings.
Diversify your training formats.
Collock’s 5-step method to design a corporate escape room
Discovery
With the client, we list their needs and goals for the project and formalize the specifications.
Formats: brainstorming sessions, meetings and literature searches.
Framing
The game format, storyline, setup plan, project organigram, KPIs and retro planning are approved with all the stakeholders.
Formats: on-site or remote kick off meetings.
Design
Based on the approved framework, our team takes charge of the whole development of your game: gameplay, design, riddles, physical and digital supports, etc.
Formats: creativity sessions, meetings to discuss gameplay, content, hardware and packaging.
Test
Tests are conducted all along the game design process to ensure we your needs, budget and deadlines are respected. We run “paper tests” and “live tests” of the different iterations of the game.
Formats: on-site or remote tests, surveys.
Deployment
Collock takes care of the whole design of the game and its delivery: hardware production, app development, transport logistics, setup, animation, etc.
Formats: game delivery, setup and animation depending on the client’s needs.
Serious games: main applications
Serious games in education
The stigmatization of teenagers’ consumption of video games and its alleged influence on their development created a corrupted image of the media for the public. Though, video games, and games in general, are very good to retain attention and renew the players’ engagement.
Immersion in a narrated universe, fulfilling a mission, progressively mastering tools, acquiring knowledge, social interactions, competition… All these mechanics can be leveraged to improve the results and attractiveness of educational programs. Many teachers already understood that and use games in their lectures, for instance.
Serious games in health and medical sector
Games offer a complete freedom to try and fail, without suffering any tangible consequence. This is particularly useful to put theoretical knowledge to test and practice skills. Always safer to try on a machine rather than on a patient, no?
Foldit is a famous example of how medical research also benefited from gamification. The online platform gathers riddles representing unsolved scientific questions. 3 weeks after the launch, a 10-year long problem was solved! Foldit capitalizes on the scientific community’s collective intelligence and gamification mechanics to drive Research forward!
Corporate serious games
To teach and train employees
Just like in the education sector, serious games can be incorporated by professional organizations in their training processes. They remain a powerful tool to train adults, by making them the actors of their growth, emulating experimentation, bridging theory and practice.
To increase awareness
There are countless reasons to increase awareness amongst your teams: digital transformation, cybersecurity, innovation, safety and risk prevention, handicap, sexism, recycling, etc.
The challenge is to efficiently and sustainably convey critical messages while positively challenge participants’ behaviours. To reach it, serious games offer the players the opportunity to immerse themself into scenarios and adopt the proper actions.
To improve recruitment
Serious games’ formats, contents and mechanics make them a great asset to observe and assess the candidates in your hiring processes. Digital simulations allow you to test their technical knowledge, skills, reaction times, etc. Real life-scaled collaborative games will highlight their soft skills, hard to read in other traditional interviews.
Serious games are a compelling and guiltfree media to assess behavioural qualities such as communication, listening, team spirit, stress management, conflict solving, deadline management, organization, etc.