FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

What kinds of topics are best for Digital Game-Based Learning?

Thiagi maintains that games can be used to teach "anything to anyone at any time," and I tend to agree. However given limited resources, Digital Game-Based Learning is best used where additional motivation is needed. This is typically because the topic or subject matter is either boring (the politically incorrect term for dry, dull or technical) or extremely difficult, and not intrinsically motivating to the employees. Although some academics maintain that learning should be motivation "in and of itself" and that all workers are eager to learn --out of a sense of pride in their work --whatever they need to do to do their job better, most teachers, trainers and business people I know are more realistic, and admit that many, if not most topics we train on are not self-motivating. In fact if they were, and people learned them on their own or on the job, we would not even put them in the curriculum.

A competitor of Bankers Trust once told me he liked to hire BT's derivatives employees because they were so well trained. BT however, couldn't get those people to a training class to save their lives. They learned derivatives on the job because they were interested, and those were the people BT looked for and hired. The auditors at PricewaterhouseCoopers, on the other hand, have to know about derivatives because of changes in accounting regulations, but probably don't find them as intrinsically interesting as the rocket scientists at BT. Yet the subject matter is extremely complex. A game works well in this case.

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