There are no wizards, monsters or swords in IBM's new video game, but Big Blue hopes students of information technology will find Innov8 much more rewarding than a weekend devoted to World of Warcraft.
Innov8 is an interactive, three-dimensional educational game designed to teach graduate students a combination of business and IT skills.
Armonk-based IBM Corp. is offering it free, starting today, to more than 2,000 universities around the world.
While Innov8 might look and play like a traditional video game, its goal is much weightier: making dry lessons taught in books come alive in a medium that is familiar to nearly every college student.
Just as pilots use flight simulators to learn to fly airplanes, students of information technology management can benefit from simulations of business problems, said Sandy Carter, vice president of IBM's Service Oriented Architecture and WebSphere strategy, channels and marketing.
"You get 80 percent greater retention when someone does a task versus reading about it. The concept is to get students to experience the task in a fun way," said Carter, a Chappaqua resident who works at IBM's Somers campus.
A student playing Innov8 enters the game as a character named Logan, who gets an assignment to solve a business problem from her company's chief executive officer.
The first scenario involves improving operations at a call center, where workers are taking too long to solve problems and have poor documentation.
Logan meets other characters along the way, including a chief information officer named Sam, a business analyst named Stavros and a call center veteran with a gruff personality named Stella.
"The fun part is you are a character," Carter said. "You have to find clues as you would in real life. You have to talk to the other characters. You click on a video and learn about how to do things. You can click on posters and the posters come alive. You can run upstairs and discover certain rooms and find out things about the company itself," she said.
The idea for Innov8 was born out of a sort of real-life simulation: IBM's yearly business-case challenge that pits students from two colleges against each other.
In January, Carter asked students from Duke University and the University of North Carolina to figure out how to develop skills that combine business and technology know-how.
Forty of the 44 teams competing came back with the idea of using a video game.
Carter recruited several of the students, and in May IBM said it was developing Innov8. Big Blue enrolled more than 30 colleges in a pilot program, including Pace University.
Jim Lawler, an associate professor of information systems at Pace, said he plans to use Innov8 in a spring class on global program and project management.
"It's called a game, but I call it a tool," Lawler said. "There's a lot of intelligence behind it."
Lawler has been playing with the game for about a month and has found it easy to use, a key concern because he didn't want learning the game to detract from learning the coursework.
"When I first learned about this tool, I was skeptical about it. The question was how long it will take me to learn it and how long it will take to teach my students. But I mastered it in a day," he said.
Lawler, a teacher for 25 years who remembers courses that were taught entirely for mainframe computers, said the video game would appeal to today's generation.
"Almost all these students were brought up with this metaphor. It brings the course into the 21st century," he said. "Enrollment is lower in computer science and information systems nationally. This is what schools have to do, integrate these kind of games and tools."
Fuad A. Mahmood, a graduate student at Brandeis International Business School in Waltham, Mass., has been testing Innov8 for about a week.
Mahmood, a player of popular games such as Command & Conquer and Age of Empires, said the interface was very familiar.
"It was very entertaining and educational at the same time," he said. "It's very much like a conventional game. The only difference is you are running a company."
He said the call center scenario was realistic and challenging.
"Information was coming in real time, and I had to manage labor in terms of high skills and low skills and manage work outsourced to partner call centers," Mahmood said.
Preeta M. Banerjee, assistant professor of strategy at Brandeis, said students could gain practical experience without actually being on the job.
"They are learning in a low-risk environment. There is even a simulated teleconference with people around the world, which gives them a good sense of what a meeting like that might be," she said.
More corporations and especially the U.S. government are starting to see the potential of games to teach serious subjects, said David Rejeski, director of the Serious Games Initiative at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.
People used to think the idea of "serious games" was an oxymoron, Rejeski said, but there is increasing awareness of the potential for games to become teaching tools.
The Apply Group, a high-tech consulting firm, predicts that one in five of the Global Fortune 500 will adopt gaming for learning by 2012.
"The thing about games that's really nice is you can fail softly. The military became interested in this a long time ago because failure (in war) means death," Rejeski said.