There’s a short article on BusinessWeek, “On-The-Job Gaming” (Link), that’s mildly interesting. From the piece:

“Video games teach resource management, collaboration, critical thinking, and tolerance for failure,” says Ben Sawyer, who runs Digitalmill Inc., a game consultancy in Portland, Me..

The market for corporate training games is small but it’s growing fast. Sawyer estimates that such games make up 15% of the “serious,” or nonentertainment market, which also includes educational and medical training products. Over the next five years, Sawyer sees the serious-games market more than doubling, to $100 million, with trainers accounting for nearly a third of that.

With all the talk about avian flu and people hunkering down for weeks isolated from the world, I’ve been wondering how these kinds of games and tele-education are progressing. This doesn’t really answer that, but it does reinforce the thought.