http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7030234.stm

- So, guildleaders may finally get their just rewards for all that planning and stress :D

I saw that this morning. I have to say it creeped me out a bit to think of gaming being used as the latest 'carrot and stick' technique in order to 'motivate' employees in widgetland... because if you've ever worked for a company large enough to generate its own 'Dilbert' cartoons, you know how much, and how cynically, those games are going to *suck* :).

Regards,
Nydia

In a more practical application, I've interviewed a number of surgeons at John's Hopkins University that are doing robot assisted surgery who were picked to try out the first of these devices because they all played video games throughout college and med school and the mechanisms are very similar (joystick and so forth). With these new devices you can get a bypass and go back to work the next day.

Convinced that games can help them thrive some companies have turned work groups into guilds, rewarded staff with experience points when they complete tasks, giving out titles and badges when a guild finished a project and portraying objectives as quests.As a working professional, I think I'd find this very demeaning and insulting. But, I have had the pleasure of never working in a big corporation, and as much as I enjoy Dilbert it hardly applies to my job.

That, and I game to relax. If I come home and plug in, it's usually to escape for a bit and get my mind OFF work. No job should get to steal that joy from me.