Let’s establish one thing first – business is serious. Dead serious. Businesses must demand respect from their consumers, from the public, and most importantly, from their employees. Businesses have a reputation to uphold, one of prudishness, stringency, and absolutely no fun allowed. And since rogue ideas like “Casual Friday” and “working from home” have threatened this paradigm in recent years, businesses have had no choice but to crack down elsewhere in order to preserve what is left of their shattered reputations. But if I may tug once at the thread of the sweater of casualness, if I may pull one block from the Jenga tower of business in order to build it up higher, I propose that a particular technology may give these organizations an inimitable edge, not just in spite of its associations with informality, but because of them. I propose that Virtual Reality, a technology widely used for unbusinesslike Gaming, will prove an immensely powerful and profitable tool for industry, if we can only learn how to stomach the abominable G-word.
Admittedly, virtual reality has had a troubled history with industrial applications, even in recent memory. At the start of the 2020’s, a wave of VR popularity happened to coincide with the COVID-19 pandemic, offering a huge opportunity for VR to supplant actual reality in many industrial settings as remote work became the norm. Unfortunately, it was a missed opportunity. VR virtual meetings failed to deliver any significant value that video meetings couldn’t already fulfill, and thus VR could not justify the expense of its own adoption, not just the monetary expense of the headsets nor the time expense of the IT department to network and secure the new hardware, but also the cognitive expense of learning how to navigate a new technology.
However, VR has come a long way since then, and has demonstrated its business utility in one area in particular: training. Much can be said about the utility of VR technology applied to industrial training programs. Its easily repeatable nature drives down costs over time, its accessibility from anywhere in the world cuts travel costs to zero and improves scheduling compatibility, and even its non-real nature is a boon, since real systems no longer have to be taken out of production to teach trainees. As the growing number of VR training consulting businesses confirms, the chemistry between VR and training is undeniable.
Training, especially in an industrial setting, values two things above all else: competence and safety. A training program is successful if it produces workers who know what they are doing, who are competent in the subject matter they have been trained in, and who deeply understand the systems they trained on. A training program is only viable if and only if the workers do not get injured while they are training, and do not damage the expensive equipment that they are interacting with for the first time. We want workers to learn to use complex systems, but they do not start off with any knowledge of how those systems work. Fundamentally, a worker must begin training with little or no competence, yet the systems they interact with may be powerful and, by extension, dangerous if misused. There is an answer to this, to simply disconnect these systems from their consequences, but that takes away from the realism of the training. In short, training in real life can be competent, where workers see the consequences of their actions and can determine exactly where the line is between function and malfunction, or training can be safe, wherein workers will be protected against damaging themselves, each other, or company assets, but cannot draw fully accurate lines of causality between their actions and the supposed results. This is the fundamental paradox of actual-reality training: the more immersive it is, the more dangerous it is, and the more safe it is, the more disconnected from its application. This is a tradeoff that virtual reality does not have to make, because virtual reality has the unique advantage of offering maximum immersion in perfect safety.
Virtual reality offers as close a facsimile as possible to the real thing, with the distinct advantage of being unreal. In an unreal environment, there are no financial or safety-related consequences for making mistakes. As Greg Meyers from ForgeFX Simulations so eloquently put it when I met him at Industrial Immersive 2025, being in a simulated environment offers the unique opportunity to fail. Failure allows trainees to understand the process on a deeper level, to know exactly what to do, and more importantly to know WHY to do it, to know in intimate detail the consequences for straying too far from the prescribed protocols. Let your trainees fail, in a safe, controlled, virtual environment. In video games, players are usually punished immediately for their mistakes – a factor which hooks deeply into two fundamental aspects of human psychology. Firstly, the immediacy of the consequence following the misstep helps us better draw a line of causality between the two; and secondly, the certainty of the punishment matters much more than other factors, even the intensity of the punishment, in deterring unwanted behavior. These punishments need not be harsh – even something as simple as playing an obnoxious tone, frustrating the trainee by forcing them to wait a few seconds, or docking their score – all of these will drive home the point that breaking the rules has negative consequences.
The act of gamifying job training, or making it more gamelike, has numerous other benefits besides allowing the unique experience of failure. Although games might seem to be primarily focused on recreation, they are actually all about learning. Video games require the player to engage with their controls, and often reward the player for engaging more skillfully. Most video games even have a dedicated tutorial section, where the player is explicitly taught how to interact with their virtual environment. The fundamental concept that most video games rely on is that they teach you skills (though usually largely useless skills, like how to press a certain combination of buttons when you see a certain stimulus on a screen). Games reward you for mastering different levels of skill with story progression, or multiplayer rank, or in-game items/abilities. They gatekeep progression until a certain skill level is mastered with the game mechanics, which is perfectly analogous to how job training gatekeeps career progression until a certain skill level with the training material is achieved. A gaming approach breaks down the learning material into different subjects and tests the player on each one until it verifies that all are mastered. A video game does this all autonomously, with no live instruction and with unlimited patience to allow players to try and retry each section as many times as they need to comprehend the material. In addition, a single game can be played by millions of players, whereas a live training session has a finite number of attendees. This is just a small sample of the advantages of gamifying job training. Adding the element of VR unlocks even more potential.
VR has evolved from a technology with very little business applications to one with unique and unparalleled advantages in spite of, and sometimes because of, its gaming attributes.
What can gamified virtual reality training do that real-life training cannot?
-Allow trainees to build highly accurate models of the systems they will be working on
-Eliminate both danger and equipment downtime
-Scale infinitely
-Pull from a pedigreed history of intuitive tutorials
-Gatekeep progression behind performance
-Fully or partially automate learning
-Allow trainees to redo training sessions as many times as they need
-Allow synchronous cooperation from around the world
-Provide perfect audio fidelity and language translation-Incentivize trainees socially by keeping “score”
Let’s forego businesslike seriousness, and get down to serious business. All these benefits are ours for the taking, if we can only tolerate the onerous G-word.