This month marks the fortieth anniversary of my favourite gaming series of all time; The Legend of Zelda. Over the last two decades of my life, I’ve gleefully lost countless hours exploring dungeons, fields and forests to save the titular character from all manner of apocalypse-flavoured scrapes. At the start of my career in online learning this would have been more confession than boast but, in 2025, it’s estimated that almost half the world’s population are active gamers - turns out half the globe is speaking my language!
The emergence of casual mobile gaming and the rise of several generations of workers and leaders that grew up with a controller in their hands, has meant that this gaming culture has permeated the way we work and learn - with good reason and to positive effect.
When done well, gamification and simulations in learning have been proven to improve engagement and learning outcomes when compared to more traditional methods. However, designing an effective game or simulation experience is a balancing act and any buyer or practitioner attempting to reap the benefit of these experiences needs to be careful not to create a fun but pointless (or even damaging) distraction. You’ll have likely seen experiences that fall into these “pitfalls” where designers have become more concerned with creating narratives and whizzy graphics than addressing the performance need they were tasked with. The worst offenders will even attempt to just recreate their favourite video game!
In my seven years at Learning Pool, I’ve had the privilege of seeing our award-winning content development team create games and simulations for some of the biggest organisations in the world on both sides of the Atlantic. Across pharma, retail, NGOs, engineering and finance, these game-inspired experiences have been effective by sharing three important features. So, inspired by Zelda reaching middle age, here’s Learning Pools ‘Triforce’ of effective learning simulation design. These three ingredients can help you make sure you’re creating the learning experience equivalent of Ocarina of Time… and not the Ward of Gamelon (if you know, you know).
Real-world mechanics
Many learning games are designed to act as a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine (of new onerous information and expectation) go down. You’ll see this most often in quiz-style games where the game format may have only a tenuous connection to the topic being covered.
Much greater learning value can be generated by experiences that use game mechanics to directly recreate or underline the behaviours you expect of your audience. For the Learning Pool team, this principle was crucial in the designing of a simulation for gas engineers which required players to navigate a property looking for and fixing dangerous gas leaks.
From the way that players used their tools to the order in which they completed tasks, every element was carefully crafted to feel like a faithful recreation of the real-world task.
As well as enabling learners to practice an approach safely, one exciting aspect of this type of design is creating interactions that feel tangible to a learner. Our award-winning work with Lidl featured a number of these novel moments that contributed to a measurable shift in learner retention and job performance.
Replayability
Repetition has long been a valuable tool in the educator and learner’s toolkit. Thanks to their engaging nature, games and simulations are a perfect way to encourage repetition and ensure key messages are driven home repeatedly. There are a number of techniques you can employ to create games that encourage repeated plays such as multiple paths, hidden extras, random events and challenge.
The award-winning Virtual CEO experience we created for Schlumberger contained all of these elements allowing sales staff to deal with the types of challenges their buyers would be handling in their day job. A deep scoring system and random events ensuring two playthroughs were the same led to learners retaking the experience to gain a better score - aided by the kind of healthy competition you’d expect in any world class sales team. This all meant that learners were repeatedly exposed to key messages and built a greater understanding of the considerations their buyers would have.
Emotional engagement
The final piece of the puzzle is emotional engagement. There’s no single correct way of creating this connection between a learner and a piece of content and much will depend on the subject matter. In our work with Prudential, we honed in on their workforce’s passion and interest in the history of their organisation, filling a multi-level game experience with hidden Easter Eggs telling the company’s storied history.
Our award-winning Vulnerable Customer series with LBG took a different approach by using interactive video simulations to drive home the impact colleague conversations and actions could have on vulnerable customers.
The key to this element of your game or simulation is to understand your audience, content and purpose to find a hook that will work for this particular requirement.
With the Triforce now in your possession, you have the perfect starting point to start creating games and simulations that can actually deliver a real impact in your organisation. Of course, Learning Pool are always available to help you on this ‘quest’.
For more information about the games and simulation experiences, get in touch.
