In games, players immediately take action, make meaningful decisions and volunteer to spend more and more time finding treasures, defeating villains, or getting game characters to work. Meanwhile, many corporate e-learning experiences are less than engaging. The learners are reading objectives, listening to talking-head videos, or skimming introductory text. Instead, instructional designers need to steal ideas, techniques, and methodologies from game designers and incorporate them into our designs.
Game designers have made some of the most mundane human activities interesting and engaging. Case in point: The Sims. A person playing The Sims literally spends his or her time getting the Sim out of bed, feeding them, getting them to the bathroom to get clean and dressed, and then sending them off to work. Not once but over and over again throughout the game. Somehow, the boring, daily routine that we all do transforms into an engaging and interesting game.