Igor Mayer

The Gaming of Policy and the Politics of Gaming: A Review

This article examines the foundations of gaming and related concepts, such as policy exercises and serious gaming, in a public policy making context. Examining the relevant publications in Simulation & Gaming since 1969, the author looks back at the development of gaming simulation for purposes such as public policy analysis and planning, and reviews the underlying theories and empirical evidence. The author highlights the recognition that the success of gaming for policy making derives largely from the unique power of that gaming to capture and integrate both the technical-physical and the social-political complexities of policy problems.

Perspectives on Policy Analysis: A Framework for Understanding and Design

As made clear by the discussion in Chap. 2, policy analysis is a multifaceted field in which a variety of different activities and ambitions have found a place. Some policy analysts conduct quantitative or qualitative research, while others reconstruct and analyze political discourse or set up citizen fora.

The research and evaluation of serious games: Toward a comprehensive methodology

The authors present the methodological background to and underlying research design of an ongoing research project on the scientific evaluation of serious games and/or computer-based simulation games (SGs) for advanced learning. The main research questions are: (1) what are the requirements and design principles for a comprehensive social scientific methodology for the evaluation of SGs?; (2) to what extent do SGs contribute to advanced learning?; (3) what factors contribute to or determine this learning?; and (4) to what extent and under what conditions can SG-based learning be transferred to the real world? In the Netherlands between 2005 and 2012, several hundred SG sessions with 12 SGs were evaluated systematically, uniformly and quantitatively to create a dataset, which comprises data on 2488 respondents in higher education or work organizations. The authors present the research model, the quasi-experimental design and the evaluation instruments. This focus in this paper is on the methodology and dataset, which form a sound foundation for forthcoming publications on the empirical results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Balancing Play, Meaning and Reality: The Design Philosophy of LEVEE PATROLLER

Most serious games have been developed without a proper and comprehensive design theory. To contribute to the development of such a theory, this article presents the underlying design philosophy of LEVEE PATROLLER, a game to train levee patrollers in the Netherlands. This philosophy stipulates that the design of a digital serious game is a multiobjective problem in which trade-offs need to be made. Making these trade-offs takes place in a design space defined by three equally important components: (a) Play, (b) Meaning, and (c) Reality. The various tensions between these three components result in design dilemmas and trilemmas that make it difficult to balance a serious game. Each type of tension is illustrated with one or more examples from the design of LEVEE PATROLLER.

Towards a Comprehensive Methodology for the Research and Evaluation of Serious Games

Abstract The author presents the methodological backgrounds and underlying research design of an on-going scientific research project concerned with the scientific evaluation of serious games and/or computer-based simulation-games (SG) for advanced learning. The main questions of this research project are: 1. what are the requirements and design principles for a comprehensive social-scientific methodology for the evaluation of SG? 2. To what extend does SG contribute to advanced learning? 3. What factors contribute to, or determine this learning? 4. To what extend and under what conditions can SG- based learning be transferred to the real world (RW)? Between 2004 and 2012, several hundreds of SG-sessions in the Netherlands with twelve different SG were evaluated systematically, uniformly and quantitatively to give a data-set of 2100 respondents in higher education and in work-organizations. The author presents the research model, the quasi-experimental design and evaluation instruments. This focus in this article is on methodology and data-set to establish a proper foundation for forthcoming publications on empirical results.

Designing a Course for Stimulating Entrepreneurship in Higher Education through Serious Games

Enhancing the offer for entrepreneurship education is an important challenge for the nowadays knowledge societies. The eSG project is addressing this issue by analysing the added value that could be contributed by employing serious games (SGs) as a tool for allowing students – in particular technology students - to become familiar, mainly through practice, with basic concepts of entrepreneurship and company management. This paper presents the main requirements for the course and SGs obtained by surveying literature, entrepreneurs, students and teachers. We represented the requirements in a table template keeping into account usability, pedagogy, the entrepreneurship skills expressed by state of the art models and three major axes for entrepreneurship education at universities. These table descriptors were then used to assess validity of SGs and choose an appropriate mix for the courses. We have also defined a set of metrics to evaluate the advancement of students during the course. Based on these tools and knowledge, the next steps of the project will involve extensive user testing in the actual courses that are being performed in Genoa, Delft and Barcelona.

Gaming the future of an urban network

Abstract Scenario and gaming techniques have a number of complementary characteristics. In this article, the design and evaluation of a gaming–scenario experiment for the exploration of development planning in an urban network in the Netherlands is presented. Two gaming sessions were held using two long-term scenarios (2030) as varying contexts. The combined gaming–scenario approach made it possible to evaluate the impact of external future developments and trends on the administrative and spatial development. Evaluation results of the gaming experiment indicate that the gaming–scenario approach generated new and critical insights on development planning and the future of the urban network. Through the game, the principal, the game leaders but most of all the stakeholder-participants experienced and realized that the management of development planning in urban networks is a very difficult task and is full of pitfalls.

Gaming Rail Cargo Management: Exploring and Validating Alternative Modes of Organization

Stakeholders in the Netherlands’ rail cargo sector exhibit strategic behavior that causes irregularity and unpredictability in freight trains. This leads to the suboptimal use of scarce rail capacity. The authors present the results of a research project that used gaming to explore and validate alternative organizational methods for the management of rail cargo capacity with decision makers and subject matter experts from ProRail, the Netherlands’ railway infrastructure manager. Various scenarios for the organization of rail cargo capacity management were played out, tested, and extensively debriefed in three project phases. The gaming sessions demonstrated that open information sharing among stakeholders does not depend on the introduction of price mechanisms and is, indeed, a more effective way of managing capacity. The authors conclude that it is vital to introduce gaming gradually and build up organizational acceptance for this method. However, once acceptance has been achieved, gaming can generate valuable insight into strategic behavior and the performance of sociotechnical infrastructures.

The INFRASTRATEGO game: An evaluation of strategic behavior and regulatory regimes in a liberalizing electricity market

The authors used the INFRASTRATEGO simulation game to examine strategic behavior in a liberalizing electricity market and the effectiveness of different regulatory regimes in dealing with this strategic behavior. The game simulates the Dutch electricity market in the years 2002 to 2006. The game was played eight times with about 400 players, both professionals and students. Two regulatory regimes defined by (a) the policy-making model and (b) the regulation by negotiation model were evaluated. The authors found several patterns of strategic behavior, such as regulatory capture, sometimes with rather disturbing effects with regard to the settlement of rates and long-term capacity planning.

Learning in a game-based virtual environment: a comparative evaluation in higher education

The authors define the requirements and a conceptual model for comparative evaluation research of simulation games and serious games (SGs) in a learning context. A first operationalisation of the model was used to comparatively evaluate a suite of 14 SGs on varying topics played between 2004 and 2009 in 13 institutes of higher education in the Netherlands. The questions in this research were: what is the perceived learning effectiveness of the games and what factors explain it? How can we comparatively evaluate games for learning? Data were gathered through pre- and post-game questionnaires among 1000 students, leading to 500 useful datasets and 230 complete datasets for analysis (factor analysis, scaling, t-test and correlation analysis) to give an explorative, structural model. The findings are discussed and a number of propositions for further research are formulated. The conclusion of the analysis is that the students’ motivation and attitudes towards game-based learning before the game, their actual enjoyment, their efforts during the game and the quality of the facilitator/teacher are most strongly correlated with their learning satisfaction. The degree to which the experiences during the game were translated back into the underlying theories significantly determines the students’ learning satisfaction. The quality of the virtual game environment did not matter so much. The authors reflect upon the general methodology used and offer suggestions for further research and development.