Learning Business Can Be Fun.

How can a high school or college student learn how to be a businessperson? Certainly there are books that teach business methods, such as accounting, marketing and organizational behavior. The problem with book learning for business is that the students don’t yet have any experience interacting with true businesspeople on actual problems encountered in a rapidly changing and competitive business environment. What is a student to do? Modern interactive techniques, pioneered by massive online games such as Doom or Halo, allow high school and college students to learn the techniques of business and have fun at the same time.

Monopoly Used to be the Only Online Business Game.

It was over sixty years ago that Parker Brothers introduced Monopoly as a board game. In recent years, Handmark has offered Monopoly as an online, multiplayer game. While loosely based on business principles—buying land, charging rent and building capital assets—Monopoly was a poor imitator of real business life. Furthermore, the maximum number of people who can realistically play Monopoly online is six, with relatively little true interaction between the players.

Technology to the Rescue: New Tools Available to Learn Online Business.

Business gaming has moved to a new level as new, massively online tools have become available through the pioneering games developed over the past few years.

Business is a social game, requiring living, breathing human beings who react to their environment, form teams with others and come together to solve business problems. This requires an entirely different level of simulation and realism than that available on a board game in the past.

Business simulations, such as that available at www.informatist.net, use many of the new database and interactive tools to develop a new dimension of realism for business simulation. The target is not to reproduce the experience of board games, but to introduce the elements of interaction and environment that a businessperson would encounter in a real business environment.

How to Get Started at the Informatist.

The Informatist business simulation game is free and easy to enter. The first step is to go to www.informatist.net and register. It is interesting to note that there are people registering all over the world—particularly Europe, China, the United States and Southeast Asia. Although different players are speaking different languages, they are nevertheless able to interact with one and the tools are represented in several languages—and are transparent to the user. Thus you could end up with team members from Singapore, Beijing and San Francisco, all speaking different languages, and nevertheless coming together to achieve a common goal or to compete against a common business ‘adversary.’

Once you are registered, you then set up your own company. Of course you are given a few resources, such as people and a bit of land in one of the poorer parts of town. It’s then up to you to clamber up the economic ladder and become a captain of industry. In the meantime, you can then learn important lessons about how business is done.