Someday, you may be playing video games to compete for jobs. A Dutch law firm is already doing it!
Dutch law firm Houthoff Buruma teamed up with Ranj Serious Games to create “The Game” to help the firm find the most talented students, based on the premise that grades often don’t fully reflect the talent and future success of a law student.
Players of “The Game” — graduating law students in the Netherlands — are given a complex legal scenario wherein they must represent a Chinese state-owned company as it plans to take over a Dutch family company. The players are split into teams of up to five people, given 90 minutes to confront problems as they arise and persuade enough shareholders to sell their shares. The fast-paced legal challenge ascertains how lawyers cope with stressful situations, bombarding them with CNN news flashes, video and text chats, film clips, e-mails and more than 100 fictional documents. Once the game ends, the results are displayed, and each team is given the opportunity to justify its solutions.
I believe something along these lines would work wonderfully in an Advanced Legal Research course. What are your thoughts?
W. Blake Wilson, Instructional & Research Services Librarian