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Hilton Garden Inn and Sony check into PSP hotel training

By Omar Gallaga | Wednesday, January 14, 2009, 02:38 PM

Pick up a Sony PSP game console, learn how to work at a hotel.

That’s novel idea behind a demo I checked out yesterday at the downtown Austin Hilton Garden Inn, where a summit of several hundred HGI managers were meeting. David Kervella, a senior manager in brand education for the company, showed me a video game the company commissioned that it will distribute to the 450-or-so hotels around the world for employees.

The game, “Ultimate Team Play” will be sent out along with a PSP game system and used by hotel staff to supplement training.

We took it for a spin on a PSP hooked up to a large TV and, while it’s not going to make Kratos of “God of War” worry about his position in the video game hierarchy, the title is clever and well-produced. In it, a 3-D representation of a Hilton Garden Inn hotel is presented. You can choose to work the front desk, housekeeping, engineering or food and beverage.

In the segment we played for housekeeping, you roam the hallways and rooms, cleaning up, vacuuming and sticking to a schedule. The game rates virtual customer satisfaction. In a front desk portion I saw, you can interact with customers using pre-selected dialogue and answer the phones. Scoring is rated as “SALT” (Satisfaction and Loyalty Tracking) on what looks like a video game energy bar.

The game doesn’t affect employee evaluations or raises (not everyone is good at video games, even ones related to their job), but the company thinks the game can be a good supplemental tool to existing training, especially for younger workers who speak fluent Videogamese.

About 14 people worked on the game at the North Carolina-based game company Virtual Heroes. Kervella says it’s the first time Sony has allowed one of its game console to be used as a corporate training tool.

Will we see more of this in the future? I’ll be first in line to buy a personal copy if they ever make a “Whataburger: The Game.” (Though I will probably skip, “Super Newspaper Tech Blogger Brothers.”

(Left to right) Bob Tellez, lead engineer at Virtual Heroes, David Kervella of Hilton Hotels and G. Steven Cattrell, game designer/producer demo “Ultimate Team Play.”