Popular Science has published a delightful article that describes how 2010 Honda Insight (a hybrid vehicle) uses some principles of video games to encourage more fuel efficient driving behavior. The car’s multi-information display includes a progress meter — a (leafless) virtual plant. The plant’s empty branches grow leaves over time, as a result of efficient driving behavior recorded by the car’s onboard computer. The multi-information display helps teach the driver how to drive more efficiently (and thus, gain leaves) by signaling the impact of excessive stopping and starting, inefficient acceleration, etc.

This isn’t a short-term game, either. Over the car’s entire lifetime, a thrifty driver can earn a second tier of leaves, then a flower on each branch. The screen will eventually display a trophy if a driver performs well enough for a long enough period of time.

What I like about this idea is not just that it makes fuel-efficient driving more fun. No, what I really like about this is that, if Honda is smart, they could turn this into an incentive to purchase more Honda vehicles in the future. After all, when the time comes to purchase another car, you wouldn’t want to lose the virtual trophy that you had worked so hard to earn, would you? Well, why should you have to lose it? Just purchase another vehicle from Honda, and all the trophies you earned in your previous vehicle can be transferred over to the new one! Of course, it would work better if you could earn trophies for more activities in addition to efficient driving (and it would work better still if the accumulation of trophies led to concrete real-world benefits, like a 5% discount on your next vehicle, a t-shirt with the Honda logo on it, etc…)

February 24th, 2009 | Category: Marketing & Advertising, Solving "Hard Problems" | Comments (1)

According to the LA Times, over half of the teams in the NBA are using NBA Live 2008, the popular basketball game, to simulate potential trades and evaluate personnel.  The general manager of the Houston Rockets said, “I don’t play EA Sports as a game. I use it as a tool. Say if you’re thinking about acquiring Ron Artest.  On the game, you can see how adding Artest can change the dynamic of your team. You can program it to run offensive sets with Artest and any combination of your players.”  As the complexity of games increases, they become less toy and more tool.  We expect to see much more of this, in areas beyond sports, in the near future.

December 2nd, 2008 | Category: Recruiting & HR, Solving "Hard Problems" | Comments (2)

There is ever more evidence that video games are great pain management tools. The latest: Snowy Game, a “basic 3D environment where the players move along a snowy path and fire snowballs at nonmoving targets. They wear a virtual reality headset that ensures the patients aren’t viewing their therapy, and the challenge focuses their mind on aiming instead of the physical discomfort. The cool imagery takes their mind away from the burning pain, and the “shooting” keeps their minds occupied. This sort of pain management benefits not only the patients, but the staff dealing with burn victims. (Emphasis on the last sentence is mine. BTW, for a fascinating insight into burn-related pain and the way it causes psychological pain to both victim and hospital staff, I refer to Dr. Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational, who wrote a remarkable paper about his own experience as a burn victim.)

November 28th, 2008 | Category: Solving "Hard Problems" | Comments (1)