Many professionals in eLearning are attempting to use gamification and serious games to spark employee engagement and drive learning retention. Everyone is working to make the best serious game that will enhance the learning objectives and retain learning.

In order to provide top-notch customer service, call center agents are required to master an ever-growing number of knowledge and skill sets during training, including sales skills, enterprise tools, products, and policies and procedures. As traditional assessments are often limited to isolated application, facts, or memorized data at lower-level thinking skills, they tend to fall short of testing whether the agents can actually apply their learning and perform on the job.

To support development of a graduate course on serious games at DePaul University, a yearlong study examined the questions to be addressed by this new mode of learning and assessments. Can you encourage people to experience failure in the spirit of learning? Can you build reflection and feedback loops into the learning process? Can you help people further develop their capacities for social interaction and collaborative problem-solving?

Many L&D professionals have found that the traditional approach to online courses doesn’t always generate consistent quality when it comes to learning outcomes. Because of this, it’s tempting to try new approaches to solve this dilemma, such as gamification and other strategies. But without a deeper understanding of how to apply these new approaches in a meaningful way, you could end up just using superficial applications of them and miss out on their ability to increase knowledge transfer.

In retail banking, like many regulated industries, the entry-level customer service employees have complicated jobs combining relationship skills, compliance with complex regulations, and adherence to frequently changing policies and procedures. Conventional wisdom still says these skills are difficult to learn effectively with online learning technology, particularly if the learning is self-directed.

Keeping employees engaged isn’t easy, especially in today’s easily distracted and multitasking workforce. And that’s where a solid gamification strategy comes in. Rather than approaching gamification by applying cookie-cutter, meaningless game mechanics to a program, you need to use a proven process to create cohesive, challenging, and collaborative gamification experiences.

Serious games and simulations have the potential to bridge abstract concepts and real-world applications. But too often, simulations limit themselves to lower-level skills like memorization, resulting in glorified quizzes that are expensive to produce but feel disconnected from real decision-making. And when serious games try to engage higher-order skills, they often do so ineffectively. The decisions that are rewarded may be subjective and arbitrary, leaving learners frustrated and disempowered.

When you say the word “game,” you might think of first-person shooters, slaying dragons, racing cars, and fighting battles—all of the things that your manager does not want to hear. If you are uncertain of how to plan, design, and develop a serious (business) game, then this is the right session for you. Making a “serious game” acceptable to management and fun for the player is the goal.