Exploring Gamification in Oil & Gas

For a while now, I’ve been fascinated by the potential of?gamification?in Oil & Gas and Energy.

It’s a vast space with many possibilities—from simple knowledge-testing games to complex decision-making challenges involving negotiation, resource management, and strategy.

The creative opportunities are huge, which is why I’m reaching out to those who might be interested in getting involved. But to make it work, we need to start simple.

At this stage, I’m not thinking of a complex, graphics-intensive console game like those on PlayStation or fully developed 3D apps. Rather, I envision something simpler—like a plain-screen, Q&A-style game. This is just to get the ball rolling.

Twine: A Tool for Interactive Narratives

Let me introduce Twine (twinery.org), an open-source platform for creating interactive, nonlinear stories and games.

With Twine, you can craft branching narratives without any coding knowledge—a perfect tool for developing educational, text-based adventures.

• Users make choices that shape the story’s outcome.
• The experience becomes dynamic, engaging, and tailored to their decisions.

Twine is incredibly user-friendly:

• Stories are made of passages linked together like a flowchart.
• Click, write, and connect—it’s intuitive and takes minutes to learn.
• Games can be exported as HTML files and shared to run on any browser.

A Quick Demo

To give you a flavor, I built a simple 5-level Twine game: PetroQuest: The Engineer's Journey.

You’ll face ethical dilemmas, technological innovations, environmental concerns, and stakeholder challenges. Every decision shapes your journey, highlighting the delicate balance between profitability and responsibility, innovation and practicality, and leadership and collaboration.

After designing the levels, challenges, and the interactions between the branches, this is what the Twine map looks like:

Each box in the image represents a passage where the user faces a question and must make a decision based on the alternative answers provided. Each answer leads to a different box, representing the various paths available depending on the user’s choice. On the front end, this is what the user sees on their screen.

You can try the demo and have a quick click-away game on my CrowdField website.

Again, I want to emphasize—this is not a fully developed game but merely an example with a few stages to showcase the kind of dynamic that can be created with minimal resources. All it takes is imagination and creativity to put your skills to work and craft an engaging narrative for users.

Launch Game ?? https://www.crowdfield.net/narrative-game

Where Can We Take This?

The potential applications for gamified learning tools are enormous, from training programs to leadership development. Here are a few examples for inspiration:

1. Educational Training Programs

• Reservoir Simulation Pathway: Navigate choices around porosity, permeability, and modeling to see how decisions impact production forecasts.
• Drilling Troubleshooting Adventure: Respond to real-time challenges like stuck pipe or lost circulation to practice decision-making under pressure.
• Petrophysics Challenge: Interpret well logs to identify hydrocarbon zones, sharpening evaluation skills.

2. Leadership Workshops

• Field Development Strategy Game: Plan wells, allocate budgets, and see how your decisions influence success.
• Crisis Management Simulation: Handle a blowout or environmental incident while managing teams and communication.
• Stakeholder Negotiation Role-play: Balance competing interests with regulators, partners, and local communities.

3. Decision-Making Games

• Exploration Investment Dilemma: Allocate budgets across prospects with varying risks and rewards.
• EOR Pathway: Choose techniques like waterflooding or gas injection based on reservoir economics.
• Reserves Compliance Challenge: Book reserves while adhering to ethical and regulatory standards.

4. Soft Skills Development

• Ethical Dilemmas: Face decisions on data integrity and stakeholder transparency.
• Mentorship Pathways: Simulate mentor-mentee interactions and their outcomes.

5. Onboarding Programs

• First Day on the Field: Explore workflows from seismic data acquisition to production monitoring.
• Safety and Policy Orientation: Navigate company protocols to avoid simulated accidents.

6. Collaboration and Communication

• Cross-Disciplinary Project Workflow: Manage communication between geologists, reservoir engineers, and drilling teams.
• Data Integration Journey: Integrate seismic, log, and production data to build coherent reservoir models.

So many possibilities!

A good story draws people in, makes your message clear, and keeps them interested. How could you turn your work into a story worth hearing?

Keen to Collaborate?

I’m looking to explore this space with anyone interested in narrative game design and its applications in Oil & Gas—whether in the areas mentioned above or beyond.

I believe 'Gaming in Oil & Gas' as a value proposition has yet to find its place in the industry, and exploring new possibilities could lead to something truly exciting.

If you’re interested, let’s connect and start building!