Over the last several years, Microsoft has employed dozens of games and game mechanics in its software development process. Forrester, Forbes, and others have covered this work. Table 1 illustrates the areas where productivity games can be the most impactful. Focusing either on expanding skills in role, or “organizational citizenship behaviors” - OCB’s - that require core skills – is the best way to ensure the success of a productivity game.  Player motivation is a key component of the success of a productivity game.

The global economy is in the midst of dramatic change. The information architecture and speed of transmission is radically transforming global society. Those who live in a rural village in an emerging market and now have internet access - or employees of a multi-national corporation, have felt the impact of the increased speed at which information now flows. These changes lay the groundwork for a future that involves – or perhaps even requires – the use of productivity games. Gaming, play, and fun offer a tremendous opportunity to engage the “gamer generation” as they enter the workforce. The spirit of play, fun, and creativity are key elements of a successful, innovative organization – and yet, they are getting lost in the high tech, high pressure, highly reactive world. The future looks to be a world where “playing at work” is not an oxymoron – or a demerit at performance review time.

“Perhaps it's called the end of the world because it's the end of the games” - Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game, p. 74. The decision to implement a “Communicate Hope” productivity game for the Microsoft Lync 2010 beta program caused a redesign of the Feedback Portal to implement game play elements, support for ad-hoc feedback and a consistent site appearance that emphasized the focus on Microsoft Lync 2010, Microsoft IT’s involvement and “brand” of the productivity game.

The basic goal of a productivity game is to motivate and entice participants to complete productive work in order to participate in the game. With the emphasis on disaster relief, the specific goal of the Communicate Hope productivity game was to motivate participants to complete beta feedback tasks and earn points for completing those activities. Playing on behalf of a disaster relief agency team, the points earned by all team members determine the final distribution of the available sponsored funds. The goal was to appeal to the altruism of players and for them to view their participation in the Microsoft Lync 2010 beta program as a win-win (and –win!) opportunity that provides a fun experience for participants, generates actionable feedback to improve Microsoft Lync 2010 - and helps disaster relief agencies with much-needed donations.

Here are a few comments from Communicate Hope game players:

“Because it is such a huge opportunity to be part of a more generous action that could give more than what we could ever give thru personal gifts... This is an amazing and what a nice idea!  I would like to say thanks you for this opportunity to give thru communicate hope game what we could never give without that!  This is an opportunity to get the feeling to be useful thru this program! Thanks again.”

“The game really made it interesting and feels like there was added purpose to the beta [program].”

“It's cool to help Microsoft improve products and also help other people in need. It feels good!”

“Is a good cause and is a nice bonus for helping out internally - we get to help out externally too.”

“For a good cause and it seemed fun with teams competing against each other and being able to see to a degree your own contribution to that (points) - totally original and very cool.”

“It was an ingenious way to learn about the software and provided a fun environment to play in.”

“It is a way to reward the extra work of giving feedback and gives me a good feeling of having done something special - I love rewards like this and it seemed to me Microsoft in the past did not make a point of doing this. This is like a "thank you for your work", but it comes from the heart and not just from your mouth.”

“It is a fun way to know that my testing efforts were going to something more than a software product.”

Participation in the Communicate Hope productivity game was voluntary. Not everyone participated in the game and this provided the opportunity to contrast the productive work contributed by “gamers” and “non-gamers”. Analyzing the beta feedback provided by the “gamers” compared to the “non-gamers” demonstrated the impact of the Communicate Hope game and the potential of productivity games. Fully, 67% of the gamers send ad-hoc feedback versus just 3% of the non-gamers. Also, for the ad-hoc “Send Us Feedback” and the directed scenario surveys, gamers are about 10 times more likely to participate than the non-gamers. For the most heavily promoted survey, gamers are 2.4 times more likely to participate than the non-gamers.

Upon conclusion of the program, 97% of the participants said they would participate in another beta program. In previous beta programs, these numbers range from 50-75%.

The Language Quality Game

The Windows Language Quality Game has been a successful Productivity Game. It addresses organizational citizenship behaviors by calling on employees within Microsoft to apply their core native language skills to help assess the quality of Windows translation efforts.

The traditional business process uses specific language vendors to perform translation work, and then a secondary vendor to assess the quality. The business challenge has been that, for some languages and locales, finding two independent vendors can be difficult and costly. To address this problem, the Language Quality Game was developed to encourage native speaking populations to do a final qualitative review of the Windows user interface and help identify any remaining language issues. The goal was to ensure a high quality language release and using the diverse population of native language speakers within Microsoft has enabled the pre-release software to be validated in a fun and cost-effective way. The list of Windows languages can be found on Microsoft.com.  Table 2 illustrates the success that the Language Quality Game achieved as run against interim builds of Windows 7.  A more detailed description of gameplay can be found below in a later section, but the goal of the game was to achieve reviews of screenshots and dialogs for translation accuracy and clarity.  Native language speakers were encouraged to play from across Microsoft’s diverse, international population.  The results here demonstrate an immense amount of effort applied to the game.

Success in the game was defined as the amount of coverage of screens across the 36 languages tested. With the incredible response, most languages had several reviewers provide feedback per screen. Because of the latency in reviewing the feedback, defect reports were not included in players’ scores. But, for the Windows International Test Team, defect reports were the most valuable output of the game.

Logistically, the massive amounts of feedback were handled by the international team with tools specially designed to display aggregated feedback. The “Moderator” role was filled on a per-language basis from the ranks of the international team, and allowed the review of multiple pieces of feedback per screen quickly and easily. Where there was obvious consensus from the game players, a defect report would be created. Reviewed screens lacking consensus were quickly reviewed, but at a lower priority and more quickly, such that the screens with the highest likelihood of fixable defects were handled quickly and efficiently.