The validity of simplifying gaming simulations

Simplifications of the real world affect the validity and reliability of gaming simulations. This challenges the application of gaming simulations as an instrument for experiential learning, reflective practices and data collection. This study investigates the effects of simplification on extracting tacit knowledge from human behavior by...

The Tacit Knowledge in Games: From Validation to Debriefing

Game sessions consist of three phases: briefing, gameplay, and debriefing, with the latter being considered the most important feature of games. Nevertheless, given that games are considered by many to be more of an artistic form rather than a scientific artifact, a question that rises is: Can game sessions in general and debriefing in...

Improving the decision-making qualities of gaming simulations

Gaming simulations (games) for policy and decision making have been the neglected “sibling” of educational and training games. The latter have experienced a widespread usage by practitioners and researchers, while the former have had limited, yet slowly increasing, adoption by organisations. As a result, various issues developing and using these...

Do Gaming Simulations Substantiate That We Know More Than We Can Tell?

Background. Revealing tacit knowledge often is seen as very valuable for organizations, although it is usually challenging to enunciate and share this type of knowledge. Methods. This study uses a participatory design and the application of a board gaming simulation as instruments to extract tacit knowledge. To illustrate this application,...

An Institutional Approach to Peri-Urban Water Problems: Supporting community problem solving in the peri-urban Ganges Delta

Water resources in the Ganges delta are undergoing drastic change as a result of urbanisation. Increasing demand for water due to urban expansion around cities like Kolkata (India) and Khulna (Bangladesh) is affecting groundwater access in nearby peri-urban communities. Peri-urban areas lie outside the formal purview of urban institutions, while...

An inquiry into gaming simulations for decision making: From design to knowledge management

GAMING simulations (games) have been closely relatedwith systems, and particularly with systems characterised as being complex. There is a long history on the evolution of systems from simply technical and social, to socio-technical (STS) and all the way to complex (adaptive) systems (CAS). Within this ever-increasing complexity, an important...

The Game Between Game Theory and Gaming Simulations: Design Choices

Background. The abstraction of complex systems, which is required by default when modelling gaming simulations, is a convoluted and time-consuming process. For gaming simulations to be efficient and effective, the problem of the real system they imitate needs to be narrowed down and simplified as much as possible. Additionally, even after...

Capacity Building for Water Management in Peri-Urban Communities, Bangladesh: A Simulation-Gaming Approach

Peri-urban areas in the global south are experiencing over-exploitation and contamination of water resources as a result of rapid urbanisation. These problems relate to the ineffectiveness of the underlying institutions in this dynamic, multi-actor context. Institutions need to be considered during problem solving; however, peri-urban...

Assessing gaming simulation validity for training traffic controllers.

Background. The Dutch railway company ProRail is performing large-scale capacity upgrades to their infrastructure network. As part of these upgrades, ProRail uses gaming simulations to help prepare train traffic controllers for new infrastructure situations. Researching the validity of these gaming simulations is essential, since the conclusions...

The Debriefing of Research Games: A Structured Approach for the Validation of Gaming Simulation Outcomes

Debriefing is an overlooked topic in the gaming simulation literature, especially in the context of gaming for applied research and design. Building upon existing frameworks, mostly in the fields of policy and educational games, and linking the design of the debriefing with the intricacies of innovation in complex networked infrastructures, we...

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...

Introducing gaming simulation in the Dutch railways

Innovation in the Dutch railways in the domain of capacity management and traffic control is increasingly difficult to implement because of the large interconnectedness of all processes and separation into different institutions and organizations. Meanwhile there is a push for quality improvements leading to more robustness and resilience as...

The Power of Sponges: High-tech versus Low-tech Gaming Simulation for the Dutch railways

To facilitate innovation in transport systems there is a need for simulated environments to experiment with new configurations, ideas and solutions. Gaming simulation is such an environment, and this paper presents the approach applied in capacity allocation and traffic control innovation for the Dutch railways. Both hightech and low-tech games...

A Ten-Step Design Method for Simulation Games in Logistics Management

Simulation games have often been found useful as a method of inquiry to gain insight in complex system behavior and as aids for design, engineering simulation and visualization, and education. Designing simulation games are the result of creative thinking and planning, but often not the result of a rigorously applied design method. Design...

Coordinating distributed work: Exploring situated coordination with gaming-simulation

Organizational work has become more and more distributed nowadays. Information and communication technologies (ICT) provide opportunities to improve coordination of distributed work, but in practice many organizations struggle with integrating new organizational structures, new work practices and ICT. In this dissertation we present a design...