Towards a Grid for Characterizing and Evaluating Crisis Management Serious Games

Abstract

Over the last few decades, interest has grown in the use of serious games (SG) and their assessment in almost every sector. A privileged application domain of SG is crisis management (CM) in which these tools improve crisis behavior and/or management in a safe environment while reducing training costs. However, it is difficult to characterize and evaluate such specific SG. This article proposes a comprehensive grid defining features for description, analysis and evaluation of Crisis Management Serious Games (CMSG). First of all, the authors introduce SG, CM as well as evaluation and assessment concepts, and discuss their particular challenges by highlighting the need of using assessment and evaluation techniques to support learning and/or training. Then, the authors present, classify and compare the most relevant techniques dedicated to address this need by encompassing the state of the art of learners' assessment and evaluation approaches used in CMSG. Finally, this article presents in detail the proposed grid and discusses the major findings and contributions.