Aida Azadegan

Serious games adoption in corporate training

Corporate managers are constantly looking for more effective and efficient ways to deliver training to their employees. Traditional classroom methods have been used for a long time. However, in the last decade electronic learning technology has gained in significance. Serious Games are games that educate, train and inform using entertainment principles, creativity, and technology. Serious Games are proven as a learning method for conveying skills on complex tasks by incorporating sound learning and pedagogical principles into their design and structure. Therefore, it is believed that Serious Games have got the potential to be used to meet government or corporate training objectives. However, the awareness and adoption level of serious games by industry is not known. In this research we designed and conducted a pilot survey among UK-based companies. We used the survey in order to assess the level of awareness and adoption of Serious Games in companies for corporate training. We aim to understand what kinds of skills development Serious Games-based trainings are desired by companies and to know what they perceive the benefits and barriers of using Serious Games are in companies. This paper describes the stages of the design of the survey questionnaire, presents and analyses the results and ends with conclusions and a discussion about the future research work.

Serious Games Integration in Companies: A Research and Application Framework

Serious Games are games that educate, train and inform using entertainment principles. Serious Games have the potential for application in companies. However, less investigation has been focused on how to integrate Serious Games in to companies. The authors have developed a classification framework to help understand the different ways serious games can be used in companies. In order to achieve this aim, cases of serious games were identified from experts, conferences, events, developer companies and the Gala Network. These cases were reviewed to identify serious games relevant to business and management. From these, cases were collected of serious games application/use in companies. These were then classified according to the types of use in the classification framework. The identified ways serious games can be used in companies were: in corporate training, for change management, through viral diffusion and Gamification. A case study of each type of use is presented in the paper. Finally, future work towards the refinement of the framework that can add to theory building for research in the use and integration of serious games in companies is discussed.

Collaborative Requirements Elicitation in Facilitated Collaboration: Report from a Case Study

User requirements elicitation is a complex process that requires stakeholders in teams to collaborate, go through decision-making processes and, finally, to arrive at consensus. During the user requirements elicitation processes, stakeholders who have different backgrounds, view points and understandings, need to clarify, capture and uncover user requirements in an efficient and effective manner. Many industry experts have admitted that collaboration among stakeholders in a facilitated workshop, aimed at defining and articulating user requirements, is one of the most difficult tasks in software development. In this research we present a collaborative process for user requirements elicitation. We used the principles of the Collaboration Engineering (CE) to design the process, which consists of Think Lets, as process building blocks. We designed the process to predictably guide the stakeholders through decision-making processes in a collaborative manner. The process is evaluated in a case-study within an industrial IT firm in China.

Measuring the commercial outcomes of serious games in companies: a review

The objective of this paper is to review the work on the measurement of the commercial outcomes of serious games in companies and to provide a framework for their measurement in companies. The literature on the evaluation of training and in particular serious games is presented. A systematic literature review of studies of the impacts of business games in companies was undertaken. The paper summarises the existing studies on measuring the effectiveness of serious games in companies. A search of the grey literature was also conducted to establish what kinds of commercial outcomes have been measured and how. Finally, the paper presents some examples of measuring the commercial outcomes. It also provides some advice on how to measure commercial outcomes.

Serious Games Adoption in Organizations --- An Exploratory Analysis

This paper arises from work ongoing in the GALA Games and Learning Alliance --- Network of Excellence for Serious Games. An exploratory set of case studies were carried out to understand the benefits, barriers and enablers of adopting serious games in companies and non-educational organizations. Serious games are games that educate, train and inform. It could therefore be expected that serious games would play an important role within corporate training, but this seems not to be the case. Five exploratory case studies of SG adoption were collected. There was use of serious games for training three cases and for corporate change interventions two cases. Most of the organizations commissioned the SG from an external party and only in one case did the organization itself develop the serious game. The key finding was that senior management support was critical for serious game adoption in every case. SG adoption was typically limited to a single department or branch/subsidiary of the company.

The Move Beyond Edutainment: Have We Learnt Our Lessons from Entertainment Games?

Serious games (SGs) have been used in the education of students and professionals for decades, but still have not reached their full potential, despite the large consensus they have gained recently. The entertainment game industry is a rapidly developing phenomenon, with a high market potential, enabled and enhanced by technological innovation. The question examined in this paper is: Did serious game designers learn from Entertainment Game (EG) designers in building a successful game? This paper presents three case study examples of games that have good learning outcomes to explore this question. This paper discusses the salient aspects and the differences between the examples and suggests how SGs could learn more from successful EGs.