Out of This World: A Learning Game for a Global Fast Casual Restaurant Company
When a global fast casual restaurant company set out to reimagine how they train managers in safe, respectful, and inclusive workplace practices across its global system, the challenge was as ambitious as it sounds: create a single learning experience that would feel relevant, engaging, and culturally resonant for learners in 78 markets speaking 43 languages simultaneously.
We were proud to partner with their team and an expert game development studio to help bring their vision to life.
The result is a game set in a restaurant located in outer space, a deliberate design choice that sidesteps a trap that has long plagued global training: the distraction of hyperlocal detail. When the setting belongs to no single culture or market, learners everywhere can focus on what matters: the gray-area situations managers face every day around harassment, inclusive language, and supporting crew members through difficult moments.
The experience unfolds across six short games, each running four to five minutes, so managers can complete the full module in roughly 25-30 minutes or move through it at their own pace. Scenario-based decision points anchor the learning, asking players to decide on a next step for a manager at a critical moment or assess how a manager handled a situation. Each decision causes the force field protecting the crew to weaken, maintain, or strengthen, turning a required training into an engaging experience about what it means to strengthen your team.
The launch itself marked a significant milestone: for the first time, a single global deployment went live across all participating markets on the same day, complete with subtitles and AI-generated voiceover across all 43 languages, representing, in the client's own words, "a significant step forward in accessibility, consistency, and scale."
What made this possible wasn't the technology. It was the design thinking behind it. Curiosity-Driven Design™, our methodology rooted in learning science, starts with the premise that context isn't decoration: it's the mechanism through which learning happens. The same principles hold regardless of the delivery mechanism, whether the experience lives in a game, a simulation, or an AI-enabled platform. Good design leads; technology follows.
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