Content area
Full Text
We were sitting in a restaurant after an early breakfast. Marc Prensky was just closing his laptop after showing me what he'd been up to lately. The busboy leaned over and asked if we were building a new computer game. He was more than a little intrigued. Had we let him, I suspect he would have plunked himself down for half an hour-and learned more than he ever expected about derivatives.
Prensky is a principal in Corporate Gameware, a subsidiary of Bankers Trust in New York. On his laptop was a demo of a computer-based training program intended to teach bankers about BT's corporate policies. Included in the program is a game adapted from Doom, one of the most popular computer games ever. Yes, you read that correctly: Doom for the banking industry. "It's about taking the driest thing we can think of and making it fun," says Prensky.
Ask anyone familiar with Doom-the shoot-'em-up computer game where you blast an assortment of grisly monsters with a variety of even grislier weapons-if he can imagine it being adapted to train bankers, and you'll get an incredulous laugh. Even Lt. Scott Barnett, who helped develop another Doom spinoff to train Marine Corps fire teams, found that premise a bit of a stretch. Nevertheless, five minutes with Prensky's program and I could imagine it: Doom can be modified and used to help teach principles of banking and investment. And if that's true, one wonders if there's any limit to what can be done in merging the addictive elements of computer games with effective instruction.
If you're wondering why anyone would want to adapt computer games for training, wake up and smell the burning toast. The virtues of self-paced, computer-based training have been trumpeted for years, but the majority of actual CBT products have always been disappointing-as flat and boring as a really bad lecture or an even worse workbook. In these "page-turners" you merely progress from screen to screen, reading text, answering questions, and occasionally biting your own flesh in order to stay awake.
If CBT is on the coma end of the engagement spectrum, computer games occupy the other end. In fact, video and computer games became Americans' second favorite leisure activity-right behind television viewing-according...