Maersk Releases 'Quest for Oil' Computer Game

Maersk is widely known as a shipping company, but less known as an oil company. Nevertheless, today, two of the global conglomerate’s most important business units – Maersk Oil and Maersk Drilling – are making big news with the launch of ‘Quest for Oil,’ a first-of-its-kind computer game that allows players to experience the stresses and strains of successfully managing an oil company.With the oil industry as a whole suffering from a lack of transparency and an employee recruitment crisis, Maersk felt that new times called for new measures. The novel idea of developing and distributing a game is part of the company’s larger plan to engage and educate the public about oil and gas exploration, and to inspire younger players to consider employment in the industry down the road.“By playing the video game you can learn some basic and more advanced aspects of our industry: how to combine data from different sources and make very difficult decisions on high value or high cost, so risk based decisions based on a variety of incomplete information. If you’re successful, you can see how you can grow the business through this game,” said Jakob Thomasen, Maersk Oil CEO. “The idea of the video game is to introduce the players to the industry and there are secrets in the industry, but we try to give away whatever we can give away and be very transparent about how we do our business.”The game is available for free at www.questforoil.com.