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eLearning Games - It's All About Learning Motivation When I was about 9 years old a large dump truck backed into our yard and dumped a mountain of dirt over a large portion of our back yard. I grew up in a family with nine children, we had a large backyard that we used for everything from football to tag. So we were horrified to hear that Dad was going to turn about half of the back yard into a vegetable garden to teach us something about gardening. As part of the effort he brought in dozens of bales of hay as well. One day he found me and my friends behind the house building a two-level "fort" out of the hay bales. For some reason, what he said when he saw us back there working so hard has always stuck with me: "You know, if I had asked you to build that, and even offered to pay you money, you'd be complaining the whole way through." The lesson is obvious enough. When work is a game, motivation goes through the roof. Fast forward about 25 years. I was the Training Manager for a software company in Washington. This company had been around for over 15 years by the time I came on board, but they were still doing new release training for customer support by having the top developer in R&D come to the large training room and drone for three hours about "Now let me explain feature 3.2.4...". Everyone dreaded those annual "training" meetings and the long feature document that came with it. Consequently, support personnel knew very little about the new features that the customers began implementing. At that time I was the only training person in the training department with no budget. What to do? I decided to implement a Knowledge Bowl format competition between customer support teams. Every week for four weeks we had support teams come down and compete against each other in the training room. Even I was surprised at the result.