WorkShifter

Commissioned by the Austrian Demographic Consulting, WorkShifter is a game about knowledge transfer.

You start as a senior employee at an industrial company, someone who spent day after day at the same machine and knows all its ins and outs and knows the production process by heart. That's why you know exactly what buttons to press, levers to switch, wheels to turn, valves to open and in what order.

Then you switch to playing the junior employee. A rookie, fresh to the job. All seems lost, as they have no idea what to do. Hundreds of buttons and no direction which one comes first, a wrong turn taken and the whole production failed.

It is your job, as a player, to transfer the knowledge you gained as a senior employee to doing the same task as a junior employee. Can you remember all the steps and their order?

Purpose

The problem pictures in this game is a real demographic challenge. How do you make sure the knowledge inside a company is kept and the business keeps functioning, even when the older generation of employees retires or loses the physical ability to do their old job?

Development

This game was commissional work done for the ÖSB Consulting GmbH as a special tidbit for their website after the end of their project 'Demografieberatung für Beschäftigte + Betriebe'.

Budget and time contraints were tight, but we managed to make a game we're proud of. We had a lot of fun making the game, for example the many subtle animations strewn throughout the game.

You can play the game directly on their hompage.