Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC 6128, ZX Spectrum+2, MSX…
Probably, for most of the young audience of this Blog, these terms belong to the Cretaceous period, but others grew up with these machines, having the time of our lives with our first contact with the digital era, dreaming of becoming great video game developers one day.
The technology is available and affordable, the content developers are experts, and the applications unlimited.
Nowadays, we live surrounded by video games, from the simplest of them that allows us to prove our skills behind the wheel and get a medical certificate to renew our driving licence to powerful flight simulators or digital adventures that take us back to the XVIIIth century to have a first-person involvement in the French Revolution.
There are few aspects of our present life which are excluded in this trend. One of them, until relatively recently, has been the industry world for which the term gamification has been recently coined, defined as the application of design and dynamic animation techniques typical of video games for purposes that are not strictly ludic aimed at resolving real problems.
In an initial overview, the industry was not specially receptive to these kind of techniques, maybe because the benefits of applying them to productive processes were not conveniently visualised or because the person proposing them was afraid of appearing naive or informal in front of his/her collaborators and clients.
This initial objection is increasingly being overcome and gamification is being introduced in the industry world in general and aerospace and astronautics in particular. Of course, results are immediate in training sessions for repetitive tasks, in tasks requiring a high level of accuracy, in those where quick decisions are necessary and in those where high economic costs do not allow for an error margin and, obviously, they are also applicable to activities such as e-training, motivation or team work.
The technology is available and affordable, the content developers are experts, and the applications unlimited. I do not know about you, but I have decided to start playing:
LOAD “Gamification”
SEARCHING FOR Gamification
LOADING
READY
RUN…
