Present or Play: The Effect of Serious Gaming on Demonstrated Behaviour

Background

As a start, there was a need to establish a theoretical foundation for this research based on serious gaming and learning literature. The serious gaming literature would enhance the understanding of what is currently known about this topic and help explain the relevance of this research, while the learning literature would help explain different views on learning and serve as a theoretical basis for comparing a serious game with a presentation.

As a first step, the relevant and available serious gaming literature was identified. A systematic literature review was conducted according to the method of Wolfswinkel, Furtmueller, and Wilderom (2011), using the ‘Social Sciences & Humanities’ database of Scopus. Search terms used were games or gaming or serious games or serious gaming. Additional search was done on learning or behaviour or knowledge or training.

In total 433 articles were found. After filtering out doubles, reading abstracts and full text articles, and applying forward and backward citation, 12 articles remained in total. The analysis of these 12 articles has been used as the core of this chapter.

To gain a better understanding on how a learning effect can be created by serious gaming, the learning elements that can be included in a serious game have been examined. These elements are distilled from the articles found. An overview of these elements is shown in Table 1.