Welcome to the GoVenture World demonstration for educators.
GoVenture World is the most realistic and authentic business education and Entrepreneurship training experience ever created. It's part MOOC, part game, part simulation, but it's all about experience and gaming experience.
GoVenture World is a global business game that reimagines how business education can be delivered, measured, assessed, and credentialed. Players run virtual businesses while competing and collaborating with others around the world. Players can start manufacturing, retail, or Transportation businesses. They can choose to be a lawyer protecting intellectual property and mediating disputes between players running businesses in the world. They can be marketers helping companies promote their products and services and doing real world marketing inside the game. They can also be investors providing debt and Equity financing to other businesses or trading stocks and bonds on the secure market.
The game uses of real world map and economics. Now let's take a look at how the game actually work. Go Venture world is open for anyone around the world to play. All you have to do is go to go Venture world.com and launch your company by entering the company name and your email address and then following the step-by-step process to get started. If you've already created a company you can come back and login anytime to continue your progress. The game is always running whether you're logged in or not so you only have to come back and login to make decisions and continue building your business. New players have to complete start up business training which takes about 15 to 20 minutes that review the tutorial to learn how the game fundamentals work.
Once the tutorial is completed players can now begin making decisions about their business. Now before they start an operating business players can review the interface, check out the real world map, see competing businesses, maybe check out the economics of each country and they can also buy stocks and bonds issued by other companies.
What we're looking at here is the boardroom Screen. Here we can see the name of our business, our logo, how much cash we have available, our equity, and our bxp. bxp represents Business Experience points. So every time we take positive action in the game we are awarded business experience points and some activities require us to have earned a certain amount of business experience points before we can undertake those activities. Along the top is our progress window, it serves as our current date and time in GoVenture time. So GoVenture World simulation advances 12 times faster than the real world, so 2 hours of real-world time is a day in GoVenture World. A month in real life is a year in GoVenture world. On the boardroom screen we can review tutorials of help, we can review the world map and we can see the various holding companies that are already established by their players. We can use a legend to turn on other icons and turn off icons so we can see where manufacturing and retail businesses are setting up. We can also roll over each individual country and check out the market demand and other economics that maybe be available within those countries.
We can bring up business reports so we have access to all financial reports that a real business owner would have access to, like a balance sheet, or an income statement and cash flow. We also have market research reports and so on. Players can collaborate using a built-in chat or mail messaging system.
We have a virtual smartphone we can turn on. Our smartphone lets us access additional features within the game including achievements and so on to help players learn the fundamentals of business. There's a comprehensive help function built directly into the smartphone so as we navigate to different areas of the business with help turned on, our virtual business advisers will give us business advice as we play. WE also have challenges. Challenges are mini games and activities that players can undertake in order to gain BXP, and all the challenges are intended to help players learn certain business fundamentals from basic terminology to processes and other valuable information. We also have courses and special offers so if players find themselves uncertain about key business fundamentals like reading financial statements or how to negotiate better deals they can take a mini course which generally only lasts 20 to 40 minutes and gain the knowledge that they need to be more successful in the game and in real world experience.
We navigate the game using the building menu along the left, for example since we don't have a business actually operating we can go directly to the world markets and check out the stock market and these are actual stocks issued by other businesses, other players run businesses in the world and we can buy and sell those stocks ont he stock market. Those players can also decide whether they want to issue dividends in order to improve the value of their stock, we can also review bond markets and each individual company can also float bonds to raise money and we can buy those bonds and earn interest ont hose investments. The world markets also provides us with mroe information about government policies, duties, taxes in various countries. We can also review trademarks so players can hire lawyers who are other players playing the roles of lawyers who can register trademarks that can mediate disputes that can act as escrow agents and more. The core of the simulation is actually operating your own business so when you're ready to do so you can complete a second tutorial which explains how an operating business functions and that takes about 10 to 15 minutes to review that tutorial and then you can start an operating business. For example, I have a manufacturing business that's located in Romania and it's an automotive manufacturing business and you can choose a few types of products to manufacture like automobiles, smartphones, and pharmaceuticals. So I'm operating an automotive manufacturing business and my manufacturing line is actually running right now and I can see cars being manufactured so I can scroll down and I can make a variety of decisions by using the boxes below. For example I can review my production and I can see that I currently have a production in process. If I didn't have a production in process I can issue a production order and cars would immediately begin to be produced. Now it might take a few hours or even a day or longer for my production to complete so I could issue a production order now by simply clicking a button and then log out, go back to my daily life and maybe come back some hours later or even the next day to find my inventory available then be able to sell that inventory. Other choices I can make are investing in the manufacturing or research and development related to my product by investing in these areas and turning on additional manufacturing or R&D stations which improves the features and the quality of my product which makes my product more valuable in the marketplace. I can invest in efficiency which allows me, potentially, to manufacture more products in a shorter period of time by investing in raw materials or automation and so on. I can also review my orders once I start selling and if I get orders I can decide when to ship my products, I can review sales that are happening in real time through other retailers.
So an important element of GoVenture World is that players have to collaborate to set up supply chains. So I'm a manufacturer, I cannot sell my product to the end consumer, I can only sell my product to a retail business, which in this case would be a car dealer and then the car dealer can sell the product to the virtual consumer. So I'm forced to interact and collaborate and set up the supply chain with car retailers or car dealers and then I can monitor their particular sales of my products and see how successful sales of my product are once I have enough product in inventory. Let's take a look at how we can sell it, so we can go up to management and sales and we have two choices: we can sell products on the open market, or a direct sale. So a direct sale is where I contact another player in the game, so maybe it's somebody I actually know in the real world or maybe it's someone I don't know but I can do some research on them and discover them within the game and reach out to them and make them an offer to sell my cars, my products to them, the open market allows me to post products on an open exchange so I don't have to directly communicate with other players. I can post my products on an open market and then other players can come and buy my products from this market based on a set price that I've already set. Now, if I do use the open market sometimes it can be a little bit more convenient but tends to cost a little bit more because there's broker fees that I have to pay and I have to wait and see if my product is going to sell and I'm competing against a number of other postings of products that other players have set. In most cases it makes much more sense for me to set up direct supply chains with players and of course that takes a little bit extra time to do so, so the game does allow me to move more slowly at the beginning if I choose by not directly interacting with others but then eventually if I want to do even better in my business I will want to make that interaction happen.
So this is the open market, now the other types of businesses I can operate are retail businesses. So we walked about potentially a car dealer, there's one option or a pharmaceutical business or a smartphone business as well and I can operate multiple businesses so as I expand my profitability and I gain more cash I can also gain more cash by requesting a loan from an investment bank which is another player who's running an investment bank. An investment bank provides loans or equity or even underwrites an IPO so you can actually do an initial public offering of your company to raise money, but to do so you have to find another player, an investment banker, who was willing to underwrite your IPO. Again, very authentic, just like the real world. So i can manage multiple businesses, different types of businesses.
We also have transportation businesses so when I do sell a product in a direct sale to another business I have to arrange for shipping of that product and shipping costs money and it also takes time, so the further our businesses are from each other. So for example, if I'm manufacturing in China I don't want to sell in the United States, that's quite a bit of distance so it'll cost me more to ship my products and it'll take more time for those products to be delivered. I can choose different transportation companies which are also run by businesses and they're competing for your business by offering different prices and different services so different transportation businesses will serve different routes within the world map and offer different shipping speeds and different prices so even the transportation business is highly competitive in the game.
We can go to the marketing screen and conduct marketing campaigns. We can do direct mail campaigns which are like email campaigns which are sent to players in game, and we have an email system that's build inside the game so you can do direct mail within the game and we also have banner advertising which is based on an auction system. So what you're seeing here is one-hour time slots, for example this one is midnight to 1:00 am and then 1:00 am to 2:00 am and so on for all 24 hours in the day and players are bidding on these ad spots. For example I can click on here and I can see that multiple players have bid on this particular ad spot and the winning bid for this timeslot is 5000G's, so you can see that players are bidding on future ad spots that are yet to come. Once you win an ad spot you can design a banner ad inside the game itself or you can do something externally and then it will appear right above the smartphone here so players are actually designing ads to target and attract other real players so it's highly authentic advertising method and you're learning about real world advertising by trying to attract the actual behavior of real human players.
We can go the finance section and here we can review invoices so when we make a sale and a purchase order is created and issued and invoices are created and issued so it's up to players to pay each other so it's quite possible that I could ship my products, my cars, to a retailer and that retailer may not pay me as quickly as I'd hope and then I have to take steps to actually request that payment. Eventually, if a player does not want to pay another player you could hire a lawyer to try and mediate that dispute and you can do lawsuits so if players are not acting with integrity players can hire lawyers in the game to use other players, and there's even more to the gameplay but one other thing we should look at is the assessment.
So as we play the game the game is actually assessing the decisions we're making and the success that we're achieving and we have dozens of achievement badges that are awarded based on the accomplishments that I achieve in the game. So you can see the variety of things that are measured on and even that's in color or has little numbers next to it are things that I've achieved and some of the achievements can be achieved multiple time so there's actual date stamps that identify when each item is achieved we also have leaderboards as well for world leaders. For example I can see who has the post profit in the game and how I rank amongst the game leaders. And this achievement system is used to assess and grade the performance of players within the game itself. So we have an external system that also allows me to track a group of players, so for example if I made an instructor and I have 30, 40, or even hundreds of students who are playing in the game and my students my be competing against other people around the world. We have a groups dashboard that allows me to monitor my students so they're still competing and playing in the global game but I have my dashboard that makes it easy for me to see accomplishments of just my students and then I can easily assign grades and do other assessments based on those achievements so player behavior is actually tracked, measured, assessed and credentialed directly in the game.
Whenever players need help we have a help function that brings up videos, we have a very detailed, very comprehensive user guide and a player community where players can help each other and game admins can also assist wherever is needed. So that's GoVenture World, a highly authentic global business game that reimagines how business education can be delivered, measured, assessed and credentialed.
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