Abstract:

Enterprises have understood that an effective technological strategy is crucial to the business’s bottom line, to engage and retain the millenials workers. Millennials will expect a workplace technology ecosystem that includes social networking, instant messaging, video-on-demand, blogs and wikis. These social tools will enable this generation to instantly connect, engage, and collaborate with cohorts and managers in ways that are natural to them, leading to better productivity across the enterprise. But beyond their technological reflexes, it is also their working mindset that has been reshape thru their gaming experiences.
Based on examples, this lecture will explore why the gamer community is slowly changing the practices of working and learning.

To understand how videogame can inpact learning and acting processes, we must bring back the cognitive process of a gameplay loop development:
Video games allow players a fantastic experience by offering gameplay based primarily on the virtuous spiral of acquisition of expertise.
A good video game player is distinguished by:
– Knowledge of the game objects (over which he has control): he knows the complete list of game characters, the compositions of the guilds, everyone's powers and all the maps, he can solve the puzzles, succeed in the missions, etc..;
– His abilities to master the successive challenges he faces.

The good player «knows» and «can do». He combines knowledge and skills. In this, he is a true «expert» on his game. In general, and no matter what the domain, expertise is acquired through repeated cycles of practice that eventually become automatic, until a new problem destabilizes part of this expertise. In this case, the expert mobilizes his ideas and new skills to incorporate the new data into the old cycle of practice, and gradually expands his expertise. This cycle of acquisition of expertise is the same no matter what the field and level of professional activity: the master saucier holding his spoon, the pilot observing the wobble in the tail rotor of his helicopter, the ornithologist banding birds, the banker building a real estate loan file ... and nobody can deny the pleasure found in the mastery of a subject, pleasure which combines feelings of both power and authority.

A good game cycle works on the permanent re-investment of skills obtained to climb to higher levels. In a simple form, the game Tetris is a good example of simple gameplay and ruthless efficiency: few are those who, after playing the game once, have not tried it a second and a third time. The rules of the game is easily understood, the temptation to replay is almost automatic.
The aim is clearly to become better, thus gaining skill. It is precisely this trick that is exploited in video games, and all gameplay, from the simplest to the most complex, are ripe with the ingredients for a cycle of the acquisition of expertise. It is this cycle that triggers the great seductive power of video games for their players, by touching their deepest emotions.

Video games have trained since the 1990’ a generation of workers, providing them with new intellectual mechanics of problem resolution: optimizing, comparing, taking risks and decisions with uncertainty, dealing quickly with enormous amounts of information, … . All these abilities are crucial in order to survive and succeed in the evolving and ever transforming tasks they are assigned at their workplaces today.

Keywords:

Videgames, e-learning, gameplay loop, cognitive abilities.