SOA Meets Gaming?

At their recent SOA-centric conference called "IMPACT 2007," IBM announced a new system called Innov8 -- a 3-D gaming environment aimed at teaching people the skills they need to intelligent deploy SOA and BPM initiatives.

Thumbs up for creativity (which is no surprise, really, since Innov8 came out of the IBM Case Study competition courtesy of some grad students at Duke and UNC), but I'm just not sure if this will really work. When you think about it, the very people who would be drawn to learning things via a gaming interface are also the kinds of people who probably don't need a lot of "re-education" about concepts such as SOA and BPM...they are already predisposed to "getting it."

This would almost be like creating a PlayStation game aimed at teaching your older relatives how to fix the flashing colon on their VCR's LCD display -- if they don't get the one, they certainly aren't going to get the other, and conversely, if they can figure out how to do one then they wouldn't need it to teach them how to do the other.

So, it's an interesting concept, and it certainly shows that SOA and BPM are getting so pervasive as a concept that people are trying to attack it from just about any angle, and it buttresses the idea that SOA and BPM really do go hand-in-hand. But, I'm just not sure if it will really have the kind of IMPACT (no pun intended) IBM is hoping it will have.

Here are some screenshots from IBM of the Innov8 interface:
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/photo/21564.wss
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/photo/21565.wss