Methodology for Review of Serious Games in Project Management

As part of my research on the development of games for learning for management professionals, in August 2010 I reviewed current software developments in games, simulations and other highly-interactive environments. This is the second of three posts on the topic, the first one being about definitions, this one being about methodology, and in the third I will discuss my results.

As a consequence from the review of definitions, four main streams are considered to be of interest. These are the traditional three perspectives towards games, as referred by (Edwards 2001) and (Lindley 2003): games, simulations and interactive narrative, along with the slightly more different perspective of virtual worlds.

Without doubt the most widely adopted approach is the one of simulation games – environments that inherit properties of simulations (e.g. the predominantly realistic game environment) and games (e.g. competition, user-friendliness, etc.). The development of simulation games about project management has followed the wider trend of development in educational games. A number of courses, based on simulation games have gained recognition by e.g. PMI, delivering the most widespread project management certification procedures. One crucial feature of the branche is the two rather disjoint streams of development: one of scholarly development processes and publications; the other – of market- and revenue-driven industry development.

The applications that I have reviewed encompass examples from both that in some way have received a better coverage online. The method used here was to search for “project management” in combination with “game”, “simulation”, “virtual world”, “second life”, “digital storytelling”, “interactive storytelling” subsequently. Then the first 50 entries on both Google Web Search and Google Scholar were reviewed. Scientific publications since 1996 have been investigated in detail. For a discussion of earlier games and simulations, see (Elgood 1997).

The identified products were categorized according to their self-description. The majority of them tends to be described as simulations. One possible reason for this might be a marketing perception bias against games. The investigation resulted in 2 games, 17 simulations, 2 interactive narratives, 3 virtual worlds, where entries that have commonalities (e.g. in cases when two games are variations of the same core) are considered as one. There were 14 more environments that for various reasons didn't meet the predefined conditions, e.g. they didn't have sufficient documentation (StevensTech Capstone Simulation, VOLT), didn't involve computer support; were older than 1996 and no current information was available; or were in some development phase (Adam Montgomery's game, Vivian Valiant).

I do not intend to publish the full list here, because hyperlinks tend to become dysfunctional fairly easy. In the third post on the topic I will comment on and refer to the systems that stood out or were representative.