More people around the world are playing video games, with 3 billion players in 2016. These games have the ability to enable collaboration, break down barriers, build rapport, inspire imagination, and create empathy. They allow strangers to come together and work as a team to achieve a goal – even if they don’t speak the same language, they’ve never met before or live in different parts of the world, or don’t have different abilities.
Sarah Bond, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Xbox, talks about how work will change in the future. As the digital world continues to progress, people are starting to realize that it is not one-on-one communication that is important, but engaging with other team members and sharing information cross sectors. Perhaps this will be the key for workers when corporations finally realize that their job is going to be a much smoother process.
This episode is the perfect opportunity to learn what can happen when companies try to get ahead of the game. As they look at new ways to enable teamwork, including how they can do it in the metaverse, they are learning a lot about how they should proceed with their strategic plans.
In talking to the folks at Marketer, these are three big takeaways for us.
“It’s a great thing that because you failed, it doesn’t stop you from trying it again. That’s how games teach you how to get better by overcoming challenges. There is something really addicting about that,” said Bond, who believes that one of the most important aspects of playing video games is learning that even if you don’t succeed, what matters is striving to improve yourself every time in order to continue succeeding.”
Many companies are struggling to create their own virtual worlds and metaverses, but Bond stresses the importance of making sure that there’s a compelling and non-toxic experience at the center of it. “It’s not just about creating an avatar and putting it in a virtual world. It’s about there being a reason for being there, and that’s what games give you. They give you a motivation, something that you could accomplish, and it’s also about creating a safe space where people can express themselves in a way that is inclusive.”
Games are the only medium where you can accomplish something in coordination with other people that you have never met, but you don’t know what they look like or speak. The breadth of the different cultures and experiences our society encounters is wider and more varied than it ever has been before. In business, so much of what we’re investing in are tools to enable that same sense of community and collaboration.
At Microsoft, we value diverse inputs and insights from a wide range of people. That said, the opinions and findings of those we interview are theirs and don’t represent Microsoft’s opinion or research on that topic.
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Here’s a transcript of the discussion in Episode 3.
This is WorkLab, the podcast from Microsoft. I’m your host, Tonya Mosley. On this show we hear from leading thinkers on the future of work, economists, technologists and researchers all sharing surprising data and exploring the trends transforming the way we work.
VR opens up the potential for new types of experiences which could never be had in a physical location. A metaverse is a digital world that’s always immersive, gathering thousands of people who share individual stories and emotions. The real-time interactions between VR users also make it better suited for certain types of activities. Microsoft knows how to make games, so it has all the capabilities needed to build an amazing metaverse experience.
