All gamification slide decks should look as good as the one ESDC has put together

Before young people decide what to do with the rest of their lives, they might want to play the field a bit first.

That’s the basic premise of a PowerPoint presentation created by a social media team at Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) that recently surfaced on the PostMedia News network. After being roundly criticized for shutting down Service Canada youth centers last year, ESDC is apparently considering new ways to get more people under 25 making use of its vast job-related data. If they go ahead with the idea that’s outlined here, it could become a case study for gamification researchers across the country.

This story was highlighted in our weekly CommerceLab Review a few weeks ago, but I’ve now had a chance to look the whole thing over more carefully myself (there’s a link in the PostMedia story to download the presentation). In just 20 slides, the ESDC deck explains how the agency has so much information at its disposal — including details on student loans, training, and labour market stats — that young people could apply to shaping the career of their dreams. Unfortunately, it’s a lot easier to enter search terms on Google than it is to browse through Government of Canada Web pages. That’s why the notion of a gamification project may make sense for this demographic.

“A serious game would allow youth to try careers, fail and succeed, to get as real a sense as possible of what their lives would be like for a chosen career,” the notes on one of the slides says. “For example, youth could try out life as a doctor with life-like simulation, and using real-world data on admissions, tuition, rent, part-time jobs, and available jobs upon graduation etc…but with NO negative impact on real life.”

Besides including a lot of details about how young people tend to play games already and several prominent examples of where gamification has worked elsewhere, the ESDC deck points out that the government took a similar tactic many years ago, creating a “Real Games Series” of board games. It’s one of the few times I’ve seen anyone frame gamification as less of a gimmick than a best practice that can be improved upon with current digital and mobile technologies.

There’s also a pragmatic tone to the overall presentation, with the suggestion of a one-year pilot and multiple alternatives for approaching the design. Some slides focus on how gamification can accomplish many things, from teaching to changing behaviour. The potential described here is obvious and compelling.

Even if this proposed initiative never leads a single young person to a new job (which is doubtful), and even if ESDC doesn’t end up pursuing it, this is the kind of pitch that more researchers should be making. If you want to commercialize you’re doing with gamification, you have to show how you can get the job done.