The Game That Made McDonald's a Learning Laboratory

There's a moment in 2016 when something remarkable happened at Wells Fargo that should have changed everything we thought we knew about workplace learning.

Despite comprehensive ethics training across 265,000 employees—millions of dollars invested in courses, workshops, and compliance programs—the bank found itself at the center of a scandal involving 2 million fraudulent accounts. The Department of Justice settlement eventually reached $3 billion.

The most puzzling detail wasn't the scope of the misconduct. It was that every single employee who participated had completed extensive training on ethical sales practices. They knew what they were supposed to do. They'd passed the tests. They had the certificates.

So what went wrong?

This is what we might call the Learning Paradox: well-intentioned organizations invest heavily in training, employees dutifully complete it, and yet the intended behaviors don't stick. It's not that the training was malicious or poorly designed—most corporate learning programs are created by smart, capable people genuinely trying to help their organizations succeed.

The problem runs deeper. American companies spend $98 billion annually on employee training, yet most programs achieve completion rates as low as 15% while leaving 90% of new skills forgotten within a year. We've become extraordinarily good at building sophisticated delivery systems for information that doesn't seem to create lasting change.

But hidden within this apparent failure is a more interesting story—one that reveals why some companies achieve extraordinary results while others struggle with the same challenges. It's a story about the surprising power of play, and why the most effective learning often happens when it doesn't feel like learning at all.

It begins in the most unlikely place: a McDonald's restaurant in the UK.

The Accidental Discovery

In the early 2010s, McDonald's had a problem that every fast-food chain faces. Training new employees to use the complex point-of-sale system was taking too long, costing too much, and producing inconsistent results. Traditional approaches—manuals, shadowing experienced workers, practice sessions—weren't moving the needle. Employee turnover was high, customer wait times were unpredictable, and management was frustrated.

So they tried something that seemed almost frivolous: they turned till training into a game.

The game was elegantly simple. New employees navigated virtual customer interactions, earned points for speed and accuracy, and watched their names climb leaderboards. There were no lecturers, no manuals, no mandatory training sessions. Just play.

The results defied expectations. Service time dropped by 7.9 seconds per transaction. Revenue per receipt increased by 15 pence. Across the UK, this translated to £23.7 million in additional revenue annually.

But here's the detail that should make every training manager pause: 50,000 people played the game in the first six weeks. Most of them voluntarily. In their own time. At home.

McDonald's had stumbled onto something profound: when learning feels like play, people don't just participate—they compete to participate.

The Science Behind the Magic

What makes this work? The answer lies in what neuroscientists have discovered about how our brains process different types of learning experiences.

Traditional corporate training typically engages what researchers call "declarative memory"—the part of our brain that stores facts and procedures. We remember only 5% of what we hear in lectures and 10% of what we read. This information sits in our heads like books on a shelf: accessible when we actively look for it, but not readily available in the moment we need it.

Play-based learning activates something entirely different. When we learn through social interaction—solving problems with colleagues, competing with peers, teaching others what we've discovered—we engage multiple brain pathways simultaneously. We remember 90% of what we teach others, and games naturally create these teaching moments. When you're playing with colleagues, you're constantly explaining strategies, sharing discoveries, and helping others improve.

The largest academic study on this topic reviewed 225 separate research projects and found that active learning produces significantly higher performance than traditional lecture-based approaches. Students are 1.5 times more likely to fail under traditional passive learning methods.

We've known this for decades. Yet most corporate training still involves people sitting in rooms, listening to other people talk.

The Character Advantage

But there's another element at play here, one that recent research on role-playing games has begun to illuminate. When people learn through characters—whether in a video game, a simulation, or even a business scenario—something interesting happens to their willingness to take risks and try new approaches.

Our research team studied professionals participating in tabletop role-playing experiences designed around workplace challenges. What we found was striking: participants were far more willing to experiment with new leadership styles, communication approaches, and problem-solving strategies when acting "in character" than when asked to role-play as themselves.

Dr. Megan Connell's research on therapeutic role-playing games reveals why this works. When people act through a character, they experience what researchers call "psychosocial moratorium"—a space where real-world consequences are significantly lowered. The character serves as what she calls an "avatar" or "stand-in," creating emotional distance between the person and their actions.

This distance is liberating. A manager who might hesitate to try a more assertive leadership style in real life will experiment freely when playing a fictional team leader. An employee who struggles with public speaking will practice presentations enthusiastically when it's their character giving the talk.

A 2020 study by Homann and White found that people who role-played professionals in desired positions felt more confident about taking on those roles in real life. The research showed that acting "as if" you already possess certain skills can facilitate what researchers call "bleed-out"—the transfer of in-character learning to real-world behavior.

The Culture Code

McDonald's success wasn't just about making training fun—it was about creating a culture where improvement became visible, achievement was celebrated, and excellence spread naturally from person to person. When your score appeared on a leaderboard, when colleagues cheered your progress, when helping others succeed became part of the experience, learning became woven into the social fabric of work.

This is what was missing from Wells Fargo's ethics training, and from countless other well-intentioned corporate learning initiatives. They were designed to transfer information when they needed to transform culture. They checked compliance boxes when they needed to build learning communities.

The most successful learning programs don't just teach people new skills—they create new social norms around growth, collaboration, and continuous improvement. They make learning feel less like obligation and more like opportunity.

The Path Forward

Traditional corporate learning approaches are struggling not because the people designing them lack good intentions, but because they're solving the wrong problem. They treat learning as information transfer when it's actually culture transformation. They focus on completion rates when they should focus on retention rates. They prioritize content delivery when they should prioritize behavior change.

Meanwhile, organizations experimenting with play-based learning are achieving remarkable results across every meaningful metric. Lower dropout rates, higher engagement, better knowledge retention, and stronger team cohesion.

The research from role-playing games offers a particularly intriguing insight: when people can experiment with new behaviors through characters or scenarios, they're more likely to adopt those behaviors in real situations. This isn't just true for individual skills—it works for team dynamics, leadership approaches, and organizational culture change.

The choice facing organizations today isn't between effective and ineffective training. It's between training that feels like work and training that feels like play. Between checking boxes and building capabilities. Between information transfer and culture transformation.

The Learning Paradox has a solution. It's been hiding in plain sight, in the way children learn naturally, in the way adults engage voluntarily, in the way communities form around shared challenges and mutual growth.

The future of workplace learning won't be found in more sophisticated content delivery systems or more comprehensive compliance programs. It will be found in rediscovering the power of play—not as entertainment, but as the most serious tool we have for human development.

After all, in a world where 90% of traditional training is forgotten within a week, perhaps the only real risk is continuing to do what we've always done.

Ready to give your team the mental reset they didn't know they needed? At Once Upon a Roll, we design roleplaying adventures that unlock team trust, collaboration, and culture through story-driven experiences where your colleagues practice stepping into new roles, reading the room, and thinking on their feet—no experience necessary. Whether you need a 2-hour spark or a full-day transformation, we tailor every adventure to your goals because modern teams aren't failing due to lack of strategy—they're struggling because they're too mentally maxed out to use it.

Let's design your game →