Gen V

There’s a reason young people no longer play Pong or other ‘DOS era video’ games. Sitting here on the plane I have observed a youngster playing a rugby game on their iPad and the speed and sophistication of play is astounding.

One day if that young person follows the path laid out by well-meaning but uninformed parents and career advisers they will likely find a large part of their life engaging with a spreadsheet or menu-driven enterprise application.

It is very unlikely that tomorrow’s worker will entertain or even make sense of dry columns and rows of data. The latter is likely true of today’s workers unless they have become skilled in memory retention parlour tricks.

A gamified user interface by virtue of its intuitive design not only serves to keep staff engaged, it also accelerates skills acquisitions because the rules of the game don’t allow certain actions (eg. offering credit to first time customers) and because there is a very visible correlation between activity and results.

So it is inevitable that the animated, graphically rich front end of today’s video games will be the next jump in user experience. And it will be driven by Generation Video.