You will create agencies and other services

"Your mission, if you accept, will be to create a bank in a populated orbital city of strange aliens." You will create agencies, and other services. You will take the right decisions to satisfy your customers, your shareholders and even employees. The Bank will no longer secrets for you! "Starbank the Game is a video game of some particular kind: on the model of the so-called games builders, like SimCity, it was launched the month last by BNP Paribas to enable new recruits to discover and understand the banking group."

"Similarly, the Moonshield game online in October by Thales resembles is mistaken is a"real"video game." A comet has struck and destroyed the planet Mars: a rain of asteroids threatening to destroy the Earth! The player must build a lunar base to save our planet... ", explains Jean-Louis Onnis, responsible for recruiting at Thales." Objective, known to students from around the world the Group technologies: radar, sonar, missile launchers, medical equipment, transport... A few months, 40 000 parts have already been played.

The "serious games" arrive in the company. Appeared a few years ago in the United States and Australia, these "serious" video games, allowing to immerse yourself in real time in a 3D environment, were until now reserved for the military or medical fields: it is adaptation of war or games simulators primarily used to practise the practice of certain activities.

Today, corporations are interested very closely to their training programmes, especially France. L ' Oréal has been pioneer in developing such a program two years ago to introduce its hairdressers to customer relations. Air France, Total, Renault and Axa have used to train their managers in assessment interviews, and their business or their customer advisors. Learn by playing is not only pleasant but especially more effective. "Thanks to the technologies of video games based on sophisticated mathematical models, the serious games can understand systems or very complex organizations in a short time: three hours just for BNP Paribas game!" This would be much longer, if not impossible if it had been necessary to consume a several hundred pages manual ", explains Yves Dambach, founder CEO of KTM Advance, the company that designed Starbank and Moonshield."

The market is booming. As companies realize that the new entrants to the labour market have been biberonnés to video games: this type of learning is for them all natural. What teacher is not one day dreamed of capturing his concentration, or even addiction, that young players are on their consoles This type of training is however still reserved for large groups: to develop a serious game, it takes, according to Yves Dambach, a minimum budget of 150,000 euros (and up to 1 million for the more sophisticated). Step if expensive, compared to the cost of conventional training. "Given the size of the group, this type of approach is for us very profitable", reflects Monique Benaily, head Assistant of the formation of BNP Paribas.

"Predicted at the world market for the serious game a turnover of EUR 50 billion in the coming years, against 10 billion estimated today", said Laurent Michaud, responsible for the division digital entertainment at the Institute of audiovisual and telecommunications in Europe (Idate). If today, the sector is still largely dominated by Anglo-Saxon companies, there are thirty very dynamic companies like KTM Advance, NetDivision, Daesign, Symetrix or even Interaction in France. Which should largely take advantage of the announced boom.