New Game: Start a company on your PSP?
New "game" title explores what it's like to start a business.by David Karlin, 02/16/2006
In a bit of an odd twist for PSP content, the company Kokuyo announced that their first game in their consumer game product lineup is called Business Experience Series: The Path To Starting A Company.
In the game, which plays as a text adventure, players take on the role of Shingo Adagiri, an employee at an advertising firm. Soon after the game starts, Shingo decides to quit his job and rather than look for a new job, he plans to start his own company. Shingo's journey will take players through the excitement, fears, and joy of starting their own business complete with a wide array of possible outcomes depending on the choices made throughout the game.
Though it is an adventure game at heart, the title is being touted as having three selling points to it. First of course is the educational experience of creating a new product and marketing it correctly. Next is the "Terminology Mode" where players can get detailed explanations of all the real-world business terms littered throughout the dialogue. Last is the "Test mode", which, as the DS Brain Training games do, puts players through a wide variety of educational tests at the end of each chapter. These tests reflect on the ideas and terms introduced in the chapter and are meant to increase the business smarts of anyone who passes them.
The goal of this software, Kokuyo representative Akihiro Kuroda explained, was not to influence people in their late teens through 30s to quit their jobs and create new enterprises, but rather to increase creativity and work ability of those currently in the work place. Kuroda explained that the reason the game is on PSP is because after conducting several surveys, Kokuyo concluded that most employees don't want to play game-type software on a PC. Instead the survey showed that the most desirable place to play games for those in the workforce is on their cellphones. Thinking that the PSP was the closest game system to a cellphone that would be accessible in a business environment, they decided to create their product for it. Kuroda then encouraged companies to buy the game, saying that at Kokuyo, they plan to have all their employees play the product in hopes of increasing work production.
While it's an interesting proposition, one has to wonder if passing around the game about "quitting your job and finding a better life" is really such a good thing to be doing at a company.
Source:
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