State of the art of serious games for business and industry

Abstract

This paper arises from work ongoing in the GALA (Games and Learning Alliance — Network of Excellence for Serious Games). As part of GALA, a comprehensive state of the art analysis of existing serious games for the business and industry domain (loosely defined) was undertaken. A categorisation of the identified serious games was developed in order to analyse the characteristics of the serious games — the aspects they covered and those they do not cover. Of primary importance were the level, topic and skills mediated by the identified serious games. The simulation means the level or amount of the world that is simulated in the or serious game. This is a hierarchy starting with the World/ God/ Universe — in which level whole worlds are simulated, for example, in games such as Civilization. The hierarchy then proceeds downwards from nation, industry, inter-organisational, business/ organisation, intra-organisational/ processes, group/ team, discipline, techniques to games addressing the individual. Second the skills to be transferred by the serious game were also analysed. From this an analysis of the gaps in coverage of serious games was carried out, leading to identifying opportunities for, and recommendations of, serious games to be developed for the business and industry domain.