Changing the Game reveals how leading-edge organizations are using video games to reach new customers more cost-effectively; to build brands; to recruit, develop, and retain great employees; to drive more effective experimentation and innovation; and to supercharge productivity. It is written for a general audience, and includes a wide variety of case studies, practical tips, and warnings of pitfalls to avoid when creating or using video games for business purposes.

Reviewed positively in The Economist, Inc. Magazine and The Financial Times, it’s written by David Edery (pictured), Worldwide Games Portfolio Manager for Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade and Ethan Mollick,  studies innovation and entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management. You can order it here.

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In Changing the Game, we explore several different ways in which organizations can use games to boost productivity.

One of these ways involve incentive systems that are now common in many games and game platforms. Although many businesses have attempted to harness elementary competitive elements in order to improve morale and productivity (“the first sales team to move 100 units wins a prize!”) few have leveraged leaderboards to the extent that games do, and almost none have experimented with achievements and virtual item-based rewards.

However, we have begun to see tantalizing hints of the potential for these mechanisms in business environments. One of the best examples can be found within the walls of Microsoft – but not within its Xbox division. As it turns out, the engineers behind Windows Vista are far ahead of Microsoft’s own game gurus when it comes to play and corporate productivity.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and the Vista development team certainly had its fair share of need. As the next version of Windows, Vista was guaranteed to hit the desktops of millions of people in a fairly short period of time post-launch. For obvious reasons, the Vista team needed to catch as many bugs as possible before the software was released.

One of the most practical ways to do this was to rope as many Microsoft employees as possible into helping test Vista on their own PCs. Ross Smith, Microsoft’s Director of Test for the Windows Defect Prevention Team, knew that the typical volunteer recruiting process just wasn’t going to cut it. He explained that, “Typically, any project cycle starts out with the team that needs help sending out a mail asking for help. Five people sign up. So the team asks a manager for help, and he sends out a mail, and ten more people sign up. This goes on and on, until the team reaches out to a Senior VP, and he sends out a mail to his entire division. Then 100 more people sign up. It’s understandable; people are busy doing their own jobs and this stuff can be a hassle.”

So, with the help of several different groups across the Vista organization, the Windows Defect Prevention team set out to change the bug testing paradigm at Microsoft. They created an extremely simple game called The Beta1 Game.

To play, all you needed to do was install an early “beta” version of the Vista software. Doing this would earn you a “b.” Voting on the version would earn you an “e,” and running your version overnight would earn you a “t,” and so forth. Everyone who participated in the game could see the letters earned by everyone else who participated.

And that’s all there was to it.


Beta1 certainly doesn’t sound like much, but according to Smith and his colleague, Robert Musson, it quadrupled participation in typically-troublesome facets of the Vista testing effort. Smith, who has since become a dedicated proponent of games in the workplace, notes that, “We didn’t do anything special to promote Beta1. We sent the same email we always do. But because there was a game and there was competition, participation skyrocketed. People were talking smack in the halls and bragging about their status on the leaderboards. VPs would run into my office and yell, ‘where's my E? I earned it last night!’”

The Windows Defect Prevention team was so encouraged by the success of Beta1 that it followed up immediately with The Beta2 Game. Beta2 expanded on the original concept by awarding points for a wider variety of activities, instead of five fixed characters. Like Beta1, it had leaderboards, but it also had prizes and random drawings. Players could also earn wristbands, which served as physical representations of their success in the game. Once again, participation in the test regime quadrupled.

By all accounts, Beta1 and Beta2 were a remarkable success. As games go, they may have been quite simplistic, but they cost almost nothing to develop and accomplished their objective. Smith and Musson believe that with a bit more time and expense, they could have developed games that were even more effective. They did not, for example, have an achievement system to go along with the leaderboards, which might have helped focus players’ energy even more effectively. Or imagine if all Microsoft employees had avatars that were prominently featured within the corporate intranet. What might have happened if Beta1 and Beta2 players could win virtual items for these avatars, especially rare items awarded with low probability, as is the case with MMOGs like World of Warcraft? 

 Avatar-based productivity games may seem like a giant leap, but such games are already finding their way into consumers’ homes. Handipoints, a virtual world launched in November 2007, enables parents to award virtual currency, as well as real-world rewards like physical toys, to children for completing chores, brushing their teeth, and eating healthy food.

Kids spend their points on virtual items for their avatar, or to watch cartoons and play minigames within the virtual world. In five months, Handipoints has attracted 150,000 users, about one-third of which are parents and two-thirds of which are children

Handipoints is not the only startup hoping to use virtual currency to improve productivity. Seriosity, IBM’s research partner in the MMOG leadership study we cited earlier, has developed a system called Attent, which basically boils down to a virtual currency, the “Serio,” that can be attached to corporate email.

The more important you believe your message to be, the more Serios you attach to it in hopes that recipients will take the message seriously. Seriosity, which is still privately testing Attent with initial partners, claims that users of Serios have already demonstrated improved response times when replying to important emails. And while Attent’s potential effectiveness seems somewhat limited in the absence of other virtual world elements that lend meaning to virtual currency, it is not hard to imagine how Attent, and other corporate systems like it, might someday evolve to more closely resemble Habbo Hotel and Handipoints than anything currently on the market.

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