How many ways could your business benefit from having a simulation game made based on the business itself?

In the words of Roger Rabbit, "Let me count the ways...."

According to those clever people over at Flurry (now owned by Yahoo), more time is spent on mobile devices playing management/simulation games than any other game genre.

This chart also suggests that women play more than men do, which you might find a little surprising.

Before highlighting the benefits, let's first explain what a simulation game is. From Wikipedia...

"A simulation video game describes a diverse super-category of video games, generally designed to closely simulate real world activities. A simulation game attempts to copy various activities from real life in the form of a game for various purposes such as training, analysis, or prediction."

What this definition doesn't cover off, is that they can also be a lot of fun!

Now, back to the benefits of making a simulation game based on your business. There are many and this kind of game can be very powerful for all these reasons:

Onboarding - what better way of helping new employees understand your organisation. They could even play CEO for a day or compete with the real CEO. They would have an environment where they could learn and fail without any impact on the real business. 

Learning - of course, it's not just new employees that need to learn. A simulation game could be made for a specific part of the business or to improve a specific skill set, attitude or knowledge base. We all know that fun learning is effective learning too!

Staff Engagement - by letting staff play with a simulation of the whole business, they will start to understand other people's roles and responsibilities better, encouraging empathy and support for each other. 

Customer Engagement - Customers are often intrigued by a business and want to understand it more. Especially in a B2B situation, with agents and resellers, etc. Having a simulation game will help to drive learning and engagement. It's a really great differentiator too!

Modelling - Simulation games, especially when you are gathering player data in volume, can help you identify typical behaviours across the organisation in given scenarios and this can really help with decision making. What happens if we close on a Friday, for example?

And finally, by going through the process of designing and developing a simulation game around a business or part of a business, all stakeholders have to take a really good look at how things work and they find that the process itself can be very enlightening. 

Perhaps the biggest benefit of all is that you don't have to choose which benefit you want, a well designed business simulation game can achieve them all!

Sounds like a good idea? It is. Contact us and kick of a real conversation about your simulation game. We can support you every virtual step of the way!