How simulation and gaming software are helping companies train and assess new recruits

It is around noon and six colleagues at a basement office in Delhi are quietly playing a war game on their desktops. The boss saunters by and watches with interest as he sees battle tanks getting demolished by rival missiles on one terminal after the other.

Viplav Baxi, a broad-shouldered, bespectacled man, leans over one of the counters and smiles genially as he sees his employees furiously press the game buttons. Although it may not appear so, Baxi’s team is hard at work.

Atelier, the company he heads, is in the business of selling simulation training software and is working on a prototype that would help companies train newcomers faster than ever before. “We play these games every day in office. It’s part of our work culture and helps us build better simulation platforms,” he explains.

Entire Office on Your Desktop

The simulation software being designed by Baxi and his team captures the real-life ambience of an office on the computer screen of the trainee. If the application is meant to be used by a sales trainee, for instance, then an imaginary client pops up on the screen. The trainee has to then service this client using the available options.

So if the trainee is supposed to ask for the salary details of the customer, she is given four options. These range from the polite “Good morning sir. May I have your salary details as this would help me serve you better?” to the blunt “What is your salary?”.

A computer, printer, telephone, fax are all available on the trainee’s screen so that she can virtually make verification calls, issue forms, take printouts and so on while interacting with the customer. The software being designed by Atelier has 500 such situations that a sales person would have to deal with.


The trainee using the software is given points for every right option. In order to review her performance, the trainee can recall each of her responses and compare with the ideal answer that would be provided separately. Several companies in India are today harnessing the potential of virtual reality and gaming to deal with everyday problems in business. These are also being used in education and health care sectors.

Baxi is optimistic about the potential of Learn 6, a software he is developing, as several of the top banks in the country and a few BPOs have already shown interest in the product. Many of these companies have indicated that they would be willing to use the software on a pay-per-use basis as and when the project is completed by Atelier.

Train Them Fast and Early

“In many sectors such as banking, BPOs and financial services, companies are facing attrition in the range of 20-30%. In many of these companies, 80% of recruitment are for 0-2 years’ experience. This means that many people have to be initiated into the company and then trained and put to work at a rapid pace,” says Baxi. Atelier says a trainee who uses its software can walk into office two hours early and practise before getting to work.
“This would save companies the trouble of planning training schedules and precious manhours that are lost to training. Moreover, in the traditional training format, the ‘learning to do’ element is missing as trainers usually rely on theory, leaving the rest of the learning for later — when the trainee starts work,” says Baxi.

Atelier started business around a year ago after Baxi and co-founder Jatinder Singh Bahrey met Jeyadev Parthasarathy at the Power of Ideas contest. Jeyadev, who was Baxi’s mentor during the contest, was impressed with his vision and signed up to join the company as a director for business development.



According to Parthasarathy, who has been with IIM-Ahmedabad’s Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship, one of the virtues of simulation training is that it acknowledges the fact that today people are wary of exposing their ignorance or limitations in front of others.

“Nowadays trainees are cautious about voicing their doubts as they do not want to be seen as inferior in a group. I noticed that whenever I gave lectures on entrepreneurship, no one in my class would raise their hands but as soon as the lecture was over, they would meet me at the door to clarify their doubts.”
Show Your Game Face

Several start-ups are also selling gaming-based solutions for employee training, apart from medical and general education. Mumbai-based Indus Geeks sells gaming-based products worth around Rs 3-5 crore every year. Two years ago it collaborated with a US-based company to develop a gaming-based solution called CliniSpace to train medical students and paramedics.

A trainee nurse can log into the gaming programme and attend to virtual trauma cases, for instance. The game allows a paramedic to respond to an emergency and records her response to a life-and-death situation. If it is a guided programme, then the CliniSpace mentor would correct the paramedic at every step.

However, if the game is being used to test the ability of the paramedic at the end of a course, then it would respond only at the end of the session, when individual gamers would be awarded scores. The geek-in-chief of the company, Sidharth Banerjee, 31, is a college dropout. Banerjee says Indus Geeks’s platform Metamersive is used by companies to assess leadership potential and to improve the skills of their executives.

He recalls that a top IT company, for instance, had asked Indus Geeks to design a leadership-test game that would be played by their top executives across the world. “These executives based in Japan, South Korea, India and other parts of the world now regularly divide themselves into teams and compete to find virtual customers, to sell better to them and to improve their virtual margins,” he says.

The promoters of another well-known serious gaming company Vitabeans Neural Solutions have been invited to join a 14-nation cruise for the most promising technology companies in the world. Vitabeans has a platform that allows schoolchildren to play interactive games with their teachers that would help them learn better. These games mostly cater to students in Classes I to V.

“In one game, students wield a bat virtually and guide an incoming ball onto a glove behind the stumps. The teacher can change the friction and elasticity of the cricket ball. This would help students understand the basics of physics,” says BR Amruth, the 25-year-old founder of the company.

Despite the fact that most products being launched by simulation training and serious gaming companies have caught the attention of banks, schools and medical colleges, policymakers have yet to appreciate the potential of such tools.

Baxi says that recently, while participating in a meeting to chart out the role of technology in higher education, he proposed including serious games in the curriculum: “Most people did not know about serious games. Some asked me to explain. I think we are at an early stage in understanding the role of technology in education and other sectors.”