Cold Stone Creamery, a Brewing Company and…the DOD?

The article “Video Games can be Highly Effective Training Tools“, published by Science Daily, incorporates both conversations about casual gaming and games as a representation of reality. Galloway categorizes video games into “fantasy world” games and realistic games. The article published in Science Daily is about realistic games because the purpose of the study is to determine the effectiveness of video games as a training mechanism. Interactive games have been used by Cold Stone Creamery, a Brewing Company, and the Department of Defense as a way to enhance the workers’ performance and ingrain a particular task into the employees’ brains. Nevertheless, the games for each company or agency differed greatly, but there was a common element within each training game. For example, the game for Cold Stone taught its employees the correct amount of ice cream that should be used in each scoop; the Department of Defense used video games to teach soldiers and sailors how to react to disaster scenarios. Each of these games were created with reality in mind because the information one learns within the games were going to be applied to real life scenarios. Also, the Cold Stone and Brewing Company games were meant to be casual games because the level of difficulty is significant in the repetitive play by employees. One of the study’s results found that the game as a training tool is more effective if the game is primarily interactive, rather than instructional. This study demonstrates the realistic application of video games, for it was found that “organizations using video games to train employees end up with smarter, more motivated workers who learn more and forget less”.