Osaka factory design firm turned to Epic Games for advice on its motivation-boosting system.

Located in Wakayama City, Maruwa is a linen service company, supplying clean bedsheets to hospitals, hotels, and other facilities. Inside the company’s processing factory you’ll see machinery for cleaning and prepping the fabrics, staff members operating the machinery…and what looks to be monitors with video games being played?

The game characters can be seen mining for ore, harvesting crops, constructing a village, and doing many of the other gameplay loop activities found in cozy farming/light survival games. None of the employees are secretly sneaking in gaming time during their shifts, but they’re still controlling the characters, albeit somewhat indirectly.

▼ Video of the Maruwa factory interior

So what’s going on? Every time an employee finishes prepping a set of sheets, pushing the button on their machinery workstation to finalize the process also fills up an action meter for the character representing them within the game. That character then starts mining, harvesting, and crafting for as long as they still have energy remaining, and their meter gets refilled when their worker finishes their next set of sheets. As the game goes on, they can uncover rare items and erect grander architecture, with all of the staff’s characters pooling their resources to build their in-game community.

The system, called Real Focus, is the brainchild of Nissho Elektron Co., a factory systems design and consulting company based in the town of Izumino, Osaka Prefecture. The company developed Real Focus with the hope of making factory work, particularly repetitive tasks, feel more vibrant and engaging, with the end goal being more motivated, productive, and satisfied workers.

However, Nissho isn’t a game developer, so even after they came up with the initial concept, the company’s president was worried that they’d only be able to craft, in his words, a “kusoge” (“shitty game”). So they went looking for advice, contacting none other than Epic Games, the makers of Fortnite. After Nissho explained that the game they’d be making wouldn’t be a consumer entertainment product that would compete with Epic’s offerings, they agreed to give Nissho some pointers, and the result was Real Focus, which appears to have had its first release in the summer of 2023 and has had multiple updates since.

▼ More video of Real Focus in action

Nissho says that among companies that have implemented Real Focus, there’s been an average productivity increase of around 8 percent within the first week, with some employees’ surging by as much as 18 percent. From a management data perspective, Real Focus can also calculate average and peak productivity levels for employees, helping managers determine things such as where bottlenecks are occurring or which workers may need additional support.

Real Focus looks like it’s being well-received by Maruwa’s workers, who in their interviews in the above video say its interesting and entertaining to see the village grow as work gets done. Especially when high-repetition work processes are involved, there’s a risk of losing sight of how all those little tasks are contributing to overall progress, and compared to “I prepped sheet set number eight,” “I found some diamonds and we upgraded the village” is probably more likely to give a quick dopamine hit.

Source: TBS News Dig via Otakomu, Nissho Elektron Co.
Top image: Pakutaso
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