After studying the virtual worlds in games like “Second Life” and “World of Warcraft,” a question naturally arose for Communication Prof. Byron Reeves: can these complex and immensely popular interaction systems be used for anything other than entertainment?

Enter Seriosity, a company dedicated to applying the ideas and economics of popular online games to real-world workplaces. Founded three years ago by Reeves and venture capitalist Leighton Reed, the company aims to bring popular gaming features into the workplace to increase the enjoyment and efficiency of workers.

The two founders met on a local pool deck, when both of their daughters were on the same swim team. After about a year of tossing ideas back and forth about game psychology as applied to serious work, Reeves and Reed decided to form a company to focus their ideas into products.

“We had all kinds of ideas about how sales teams or call centers might actually go to work in one of those environments,” Reeves said. “Lessons learned from these online games can be applied to the workplace, making it more efficient, and even more fun.”

Due to the complexity of the gaming systems, as well as security concerns, they began on the other end — rather than bring work into the online games, Reeves decided to take pieces of the games to the workplace.

Seriosity is currently perfecting its initial offering, an email application called Attent. Simon Roy, CEO and president of Seriosity, explained that while Attent looks very much like email, there is a change to the system that makes traditional email more effective and efficient by introducing a virtual currency — the “serio” — that can be attached to emails to denote importance.

For example, in a business setting each employee is allotted 100 serios per week and can use them to accentuate certain particularly important emails in the inboxes of colleagues. If employees run out of serios, they can still send email, just not with the added importance of the virtual serio coins, Roy explained.

While employees can borrow serios from their co-workers, or simply send emails without a value attachment, the addition brings an important economic change in the very nature of email, according to Roy.

“You need to think about how you use your serios the way you would think about money,” Roy said. “By introducing scarcity, you make sure that people don’t overuse the signal. It brings economic order to email.”

In the early stages of development, and through the program’s implementation, serio usage patterns will be tracked by economists to ensure that real world economic problems — like inflation — don’t occur. The economists can implement various taxes to even out any problems that arise.

The idea is that lower importance emails — like FYIs or reminders — will be given less attention via fewer attached serios, thereby placing emphasis on more important emails with more attached serios. Attent aims to reduce something called “informational overload,” a term used to describe a situation in which people are presented with entirely too much information to comprehend, thus hurting their productivity, Roy said.

The use of serio leader boards and various achievement badges mimic a gaming feedback system without becoming too “gamey,” Reeves said.

Currently, Seriosity is still in beta testing with a number of Fortune 500 companies, Roy said. Seriosity has yet to go public and Roy declined to reveal specifically which companies have begun to use Attent, saying only that they included technology, hardware, consulting and financial businesses.

Many students were intrigued by the idea of changing the workplace to resemble a game but some held doubts as to the effectiveness of Seriosity’s new Attent program, especially in their own lives.

“I don’t know if [Attent] would make it easier on me, because most of the emails I get aren’t labeled as important anyway,” said Ben Dallas Trammell ‘09. “I can pretty much sort it out.”

“Why is it important to make someone pay more to send an important email,” he added. “What if it’s last minute and you don’t have the coins you need”

Trammell, who claims to receive 1,000 emails a week, said that often a subject header is enough to indicate any pressing importance.

Seriosity is already looking to the future of virtual applications for the workplace. Reeves noted that in the modern business world, and even in modern society, collaboration can be difficult or even boring. By using virtual methods of communication, society can adapt and benefit from collaboration.

“Our goal is to change the nature of work, to make work more fun, more productive,” Reeves said. “But you can only change things one application at a time.”