The Matrix For Businesses

An anonymous reader writes "The idea of using virtual reality and gaming technologies to create training exercises and business simulations has been around for years. But recent advances in computer graphics, interfaces, and massively multiplayer online (MMO) games have made it commercially viable to pursue simulations in the business world. Novel, a venture-backed startup company, is about to launch a new MMO role-playing game, called Empire & State, with an unusual goal: to use the technology and the lessons it learns from the game to create simulations for big companies that want to improve their human resources and hiring efficiencies. Imagine assessing employees' leadership and teamwork skills by jacking them into a virtual, multiplayer business scenario. That's the goal, but Novel will face challenges of all sorts — business, social, and technical — in its efforts to sell MMO technologies to the corporate world."

WHO THE -

[Monkeedude1212]

THAT'S MINUS 50 DKP!!!!

Trust me, if Leadership in MMO's is going to translate into management positions, just kill me now.

Is Novell reinventing the square wheel?

[De_Boswachter]

Leading virtual world provider Linden Labs just laid off 30% of their employees, all of whom were working on a similar concept. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/09/linden_labs_lays_off_30_per_cent_of_staff/ [theregister.co.uk]

Re:Obligatory

[Hylandr]

My Wet dream is to become CEO of a large corporation and immediately give all of HR the pink slip.

Seriously, I fantasize about this. For most companies this would be an immediate jump to the black.

My biggest beef with HR? Refusing to consider anyone that doesn't posses a degree that basically proves they acquired a certain level of book knowledge while marinating their brain in the toxic waste of micro-organisms ( yeast ) . They have No real operative knowledge on what the position requires hiring by alphabet soup and degree instead. They are lazy lazy people contributing jack squat to the bottom line.

Re:Free-to-play model kills games

[Opportunist]

All right, but this game should model a real world experience. And in reality, that's pretty much how it is: Your rank in a game depends on how much money you (are able to) spend.

Games like this not only stand a chance, they're pretty much the model our world works on currently.

From Novel

[dyamanoha]

Hi everyone, my name is David and I'm the lead engineer at Novel Interactive. I would like to hopefully clear up some of the confusion related to the article posted here, which was recently published in Xconomy. Although technically similar, Empire & State and the business simulations are two entirely different products. While Empire & State is an MMORPG, you can think of our business simulations as being an MMO hr solution. These enterprise hr solutions are rooted in our MMO technology, but are tailored specifically towards helping to solve HR problems! For those of you who are interested in Empire & State, I encourage you to sign up for our alpha test http://www.empireandstate.com/pages/signup [empireandstate.com].