November 4, 2026 · View in browser

The Insightful Leader

BY KELLOGG INSIGHT

Leadership advice from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University

Good morning,

I worry sometimes that my kids spend too much time playing video games. But then, in those rare moments when everyone’s out of the house, I can’t resist putting in a little Xbox time myself.

Maybe I shouldn’t feel so guilty. Video games, after all, are a $200 billion industry and a cultural force equivalent to movies and television in today’s world. Gamified experiences are now common in schools, workplace training, and personal finance.

This week, we hear about Kellogg research on an “edutainment” mobile game and on video-game reviews, and the lessons they offer businesses and business leaders.

Finding the win–win

Video games that aim to teach face a dilemma. Push the education part too hard, and players might check out. But dial up the fun factor to increase engagement, and the educational mission could get lost.

Kellogg researchers Alexander Jensen, Sébastien Martin, and Karen Smilowitz studied this trade-off using the mobile game PowerZ, a wizard-themed educational game that offers math, English, and social-studies content to kids ages six to twelve. The study gave players three different versions of an educational module within the game: one that was optional, one that offered a reward, and one that was required for players to advance in the game’s storyline.

To their surprise, the mandatory version was the most successful at increasing player engagement with the game. With smart design, forcing an educational lesson didn’t backfire.

Martin, an associate professor of operations, believes these insights could apply beyond educational gaming to the broader world of operations.

“A company is a complex environment with many things happening, like a video game,” he says. “But you can create a positive feedback loop, a system that actually influences people in a good way.”

The decisions teams and leaders make are full of apparent zero-sum trade-offs—just like the trade-off between learning and playing in a video game. In this study, that trade-off turned out not to be as intractable as it seemed, which may be the case in other scenarios, too.

“If you look deeply at how things are organized, sometimes there are win–win changes you can make,” Martin says.

More experience, more credibility?

Steam is the largest PC video-game marketplace in the world, with over 200 million active monthly users. That makes Steam user reviews a life-or-death battlefield for many games’ success.

Because Steam is a platform for both purchasing and playing games, it can display the amount of time a reviewer played the game alongside their critique. Kellogg’s Nalin Shani, Achal Bassamboo, and Maria Ibanez used this feature to study what makes a review helpful to others.

“Most people would expect that the longer someone has played a game, the more credible they are—that their review’s helpfulness should automatically go up,” says Bassamboo, a professor of operations. “Interestingly enough, we find that it’s not that simple.”

Among positive reviews, users who had either the shortest playing time with the game or the longest playing time provided the most-helpful reviews. But for negative reviews, users with a moderate amount of playing time wrote the most-helpful reviews.

The team believes that this pattern is at least partly dictated by people’s expectations. When a reviewer has only played the game for a short amount of time, readers instinctively set a low bar for the review’s quality and credibility. But if a user spends a lot of time playing the game before writing a negative review, it’s seen as incongruent, if not disingenuous.

Beyond Steam, the findings offer practical guidance for businesses and managers hoping to optimize the use of their customer reviews. Companies should avoid relying on a single rule that treats more experience as inherently better, the researchers say. For positive reviews, platforms may want to surface a mix of perspectives: fresh impressions from customers with little experience and deeper assessments from customers with extensive experience.

“When you get into any kind of analytics,” Bassamboo says, “it is worthwhile disentangling [the data] because it gives you better insight into what’s happening.”