Gaming in Training: Boom or Bust?

[Bruce Reynolds]

I've been in the training business for 24 years, and for close to 20 of those years I've seen efforts to make training materials feel more like games in order to appeal to students who have been playing games for most of their lives. These efforts started with attempts to create immersive 3D "Doom" environments for students to work through and are now up to examining the use of gamification to meet the calls for incorporating gaming into training.

While I've seen many successful technical implementations of these efforts, I've yet to see one be really successful from a training perspective. Being a cause and effect guy, any time I see repeated failures as an effect, I have to wonder what the cause is. Is the failure the concept of making training feel like a game, or is there some aspect of the implementation of the concept that causing the failures?

I've heard a lot of input from instructional designers on this subject, but I would like to hear the thoughts of gamers as I'm certain what makes a game successful is also what would make a gaming-based training program successful, and if that's not the case then the pursuit of gaming-based training is a fool's errand and we need to start focusing on other ways to improve training. So please let me know, from a gaming perspective, how gaming could be used to improve training.