Stephanie Maksymiw is one of those avid players. Among the first to take TIAA’s quiz, she understood the difference between stocks and bonds and was confident her knowledge about investing would help her ace the financial questions in the online competition held at her workplace, SRC Inc. But to her surprise, when she took the quiz for the first time, the results revealed big gaps in her understanding, like the definitions of bear and bull markets. Determined to improve her score, Ms. Maksymiw played every day for three weeks, ultimately getting an “above average” ranking compared with her colleagues.

“It was competitive,” recalled Ms. Maksymiw, 37, a quality systems analyst SRC, a military research nonprofit based in Syracuse, about how she and her co-workers tracked their rankings on their retirement plan sponsor TIAA’s public scoreboard.

SRC is just one of thousands of companies turning to online games to engage employees about money and retirement topics. Prudential created the Procrastinator Quiz to help people better identify why they delay making important decisions about their investments and retirement. The firm Voya Financial, formerly ING, presents its retirement planning quizzes, tools and information on a virtual game board that a “player” advances along. Mr. Moto described another visualization exercise in which attendees of benefits fairs are asked to mark the age of the oldest person they know on a large vertical panel to emphasize the importance of planning for long lives.

The stakes of these efforts are high. A report published in May by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve system showed that under two-fifths of non-retired American adults described their retirement savings as on track, and one-quarter had no retirement savings or pension at all.

Preparing for retirement can be a confusing and overwhelming task, and three-fifths of non-retirees reported “little or no comfort in managing their investments” in self-directed retirement savings accounts, according to the Fed report, in which 12,246 people were surveyed. On average, those surveyed answered fewer than three of five basic financial literacy questions correctly.

While there is some question about the efficacy of education alone to improve financial decision-making, investment firms behind the efforts say games can bring more people into a conversation about retirement planning, making it less stressful and dull.