The recent need for social-distancing caused by COVID-19 resulted in working remotely, which can cause loneliness and disconnect from the organization. The pandemic stimulated people to look for novel ways to interact and, at the same time, socialize with each other. The change to home office increased the number of people using digital video calls; however, these impose restrictions on social bonding. In this commentary, we argue that the social bonding capacity of video calls can be increased by using games. Playing games can create a common object with shared goals, which can give players the feeling of being in the same environment, belonging to the same organization, working on joint objectives, and give an enjoyable experience. All work activities will unlikely return to the office after the pandemic is over, and preparing for remote working and socialization is needed. We recommend several avenues for research, including researching the concepts of online socialization and evaluating the effectiveness of gaming.@en

Game theoretical models can be used for social simulation of real-world systems. These models describe the interaction between actors who have to make a decision. Before application of those models, the game concept that describes the situation at hand needs to be selected. Selecting the right game concept is crucial when choosing a model to simulate the process, but not trivial. In this paper we present a taxonomy of game concepts to select a set of suitable models.

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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 games remain unaddressed. This includes the design of games, their validation, the actual game sessions, and applying the resulting knowledge from games in organisations. In this paper, solutions for issues identified in these four areas of gaming simulations are proposed. Solutions vary from purely analytical to purely social, stressing the interdisciplinary approach required to tackle the issues associated with them. The result consists of several theoretical and practical contributions as well as philosophical considerations regarding games for policy and decision making.@en

This study takes upon a group cognition perspective and investigates the cognition of railway traffic operations, in particular railway traffic and passenger traffic control. A table-top simulation environment is used to conduct the study, in which its design principles are elaborated upon. Network cognition is operationalized through communication content and flow and studied through social network analysis (SNA). SNA centrality metrics, such as degree, closeness and betweenness, are assessed in these networks. As part of the study, two cases are compared where operational procedures for disruption mitigation are varied. The dependent variables are the different types of communication network structures that are conceptualized for communication flow and semantic network structures for communication content. Although the quantitative comparisons between the two operational procedures regarding their communication flow and semantic networks showed no significant differences, this study provides a methodology to compare different conditions.

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In innovating and designing new concepts in the railway sector, the Dutch railway infrastructure manager ProRail uses different types of simulations to identify and tackle possible bottlenecks in future infrastructure design. Computer simulation tools are used in earlier stages of the design process, followed by the application of gaming simulations where the design is fine tuned together with railway traffic operators before it is put into operation. This study focuses on providing insights into the use of a human-in-the-loop simulator in which an organizational research question investigates the impact of multiple geographical workspace designs, while in parallel human factors research is conducted to investigate the concept of team situation awareness from an academic research interest. Finding a balance between the practical and academic implications in one research design and its findings does not rely on a trivial approach. The current article aims to contribute on several levels: (1)to illustrate the balance between research for practice and research for academia through the applications of gaming simulations; (2)to illustrate the use of gaming simulations for railway traffic operations and (3)to provide insights in team SA development in railway traffic operations using gaming simulations.

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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 abstraction of the real system, multiple design decisions need to be made and these may differ depending on the gaming simulation. Aim. This article proposes a framework for formalizing, and consequently standardizing, expediting and simplifying, the modelling of gaming simulations. Method. The proposed framework applies game concepts pertaining to game theory in the abstraction of the real system and the game design decisions. Results. Application of the framework in three case studies reveals several advantages of incorporating game theory into game design, such as formally defining the game design elements and identifying the worst-case scenarios in the real-systems, to name but two. Conclusions. Given the framework’s advantages in general, and the game design recommendations it offers in particular, it is safe to conclude that, for the cases presented in this article, the framework make positive contributions towards the development of gaming simulations.

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Decision-making on changes to large infrastructural systems is complex. It involves many actors, the system shows unpredictable behaviour and the environment in which decision-making takes place is dynamic. In a unique development case of the Dutch railway sector two decision-making processes regarding the same issue are performed in two consecutive years. Although, from a technical perspective, the elements of the processes are similar, the decisions in each year are different. In this paper, we use game concepts to explain the different outcomes. Other frequently adopted decision-based models that focus on the technical perspective do not distinguish between both processes. Game concepts are able to reveal the hidden actor and context dynamics of the process and provide action perspective. To identify the game concepts present in the decision-making process, we first consider whether these concepts are mentioned in interviews with decision-makers in our case. Thereafter, we interpret the processes using the identified game concepts. The fact that, in the second year, more external issues are discussed and pressure increased created room for another decision.

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Debriefing is considered, by many scholars, to be a fundamental part of learning through games and simulations. Despite its significance, there is a lack of research in the area of debriefing, which results in unaddressed factors that inhibit debriefing. Research in the field is complicated by many influencing factors varying from context to game, the purpose of the game, conditions and player specifics, facilitators etc. Insight in the role of these influencing factors can aid in understanding how debriefing can be optimized. In doing this research so far two viewpoints are relevant, the first is the design of debriefing and the second one is the actual execution of the debriefing. The aim of this study is to identify, on the basis of literature, the influence of factors and their interrelation, and subsequently, to categorize them based on expert opinions, so as to determine which pitfalls have the highest influence on inefficiency and ineffectiveness of debriefing. Based on 12 pitfalls identified in literature, and through the use of an online questionnaire, facilitation experts evaluated the extent to which these pitfalls occur due to the design or the execution of the debriefing, and the extent to which they are influenced by the rules of games and simulations. All 12 pitfalls seem to occur in practice, to some extent, due to both the design and the execution of the debriefing. Nevertheless, some pitfalls appear to be more influenced either by design or by execution. Moreover, the results on the extent to which the pitfalls are influenced by the rules of games and simulations are inconclusive, due to the contradiction between the answers on the pre-defined questions and the comments of the experts. A method for further extending the list of pitfalls and verifying the results, hence minimizing the threat to the internal validity of the study, is proposed, which includes a more extensive literature review, interviews, and case studies.@en

Developing open government by local government is cumbersome. Many local governments have no policies or are struggling to develop policies enabling to create value from open data. Policy-making is challenging due to the wicked nature of many policy problems, unclear objectives, and the involvement of diverse stakeholders. At the same time governments are opening their policy-making processes for participation by citizens and private companies. The goal of this paper is to present the structure of a game to increase the understanding of open-data policies by local governments. Open Data Policies are aimed at making public data available to be accessed and used by civil society. The game participants can experience the implications of various policies. This should help them to developed better policies.@en

The complexity of modern systems has made the use of simulations paramount, in order to test different scenarios in an affordable, ethical, and risk-free way. As such, simulations need to be validated, ensuring that the obtained results are meaningful. But validation apart from the computational difficulties, bears several other problems. The constant need for validation due to updates on the simulation software, the dependence on the validation experts to be always available for the new iterations and for presenting any new insights are just some of these problems. This paper proposes a framework, and applies it to two case studies, which is based on Web 3.0 technologies and the R statistical language as a mean to mitigate such problems.@en

Games for decision making have developed into a powerful tool for corporations. Irrespective of their size, corporations have been increasingly using these games in order to evaluate and ascertain impact-ful business decisions and strategies. Despite their proven added value to the decision making process, there is still lack of research on whether, and if so how, these games can be used by researchers and practitioners to build evidents on systems' behavior, as part of a larger scheme. To this effect, this paper proposes a framework to determine the different artifacts of games that should be logged and stored for future use.@en

Previous research on situation awareness (SA) predominantly focused on its explicit, reasoned, conscious features rather than on the implicit, intuitive, unconscious aspects that are often identified with expert operators. This research investigated implicit levels of SA of train traffic controllers (TTCs) in order to contribute to the body of knowledge on rail human factors research and SA. A novel approach was used to uncover levels of implicit SA through a set of three analyses: (1) fairly low SAGAT values with correlations between SAGAT scores and multiple performance indicators; (2) negative correlations between work experience and SAGAT scores; and (3) structurally lower level-1 SA (perception) scores in comparison to level-2 SA (comprehension) scores in accordance with Endsley's three-level model. Two studies were conducted: A pilot study – which focused on SA measurements with TTCs in a monitoring mode (N = 9) – and the main study, which involved TTCs from another control center (N = 20) and three different disrupted conditions. In the pilot study, SA was measured through the situation-awareness global assessment technique (SAGAT), perceived SA and observed SA, and performance was measured through punctuality and unplanned stops of trains before red signals. In the main study, SA was measured through SAGAT, and perceived SA and multiple performance indicators, such as arrival and departure punctuality and platform consistency, were assessed. In both studies, the set of three analyses showed consistent and persistent indications of the presence of implicit SA. Endsley's three-level model and related SAGAT method can be constrained by the presence of these intuitive, unconscious processes and inconsistent findings on correlations between SAGAT scores and performance. These findings provide insights into the SA of TTCs in the Netherlands and can support the development of training programs and/or the design of a new traffic management system.

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Agent-based modeling is used for simulating the actions and interactions of autonomous entities aiming to assessing their effects on the system as a whole. At an abstract level, an agent-based model (ABM) is a representation of the many simple agents and interactions among them. The decision making of the agents is based on the rules given to them. In an ABM, the model output is the result of internal decision-making and may differ with alteration in the decision path. On the contrary, with the set of rules embedded in agents, their behavior is modeled to take a ‘certain action’ in a ‘certain situation’. It suggests that the internal decision making behavior of agents is truly responsible for the model output and thus it cannot be ignored while validating ABMs. This research article focuses on the validating agents’ behavior by evaluating decision-making processes of agents. For this purpose, we propose a validation framework based on a participatory simulation game. Using this framework we engage a human player (i.e. a domain stakeholder) to allow us to collect information about choices and validate the behavior of an individual agent. A proof-of-concept game is developed for a city logistics ABM to test the framework.@en

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 drawn from gaming simulation use may result in decisions with large financial and social impact for ProRail and Dutch train passengers. Aim. In this article, we aim to investigate the validity of the gaming simulations for training traffic controllers for new situations in rail infrastructure. We also aim to contribute to the discussion on the minimum level of fidelity required to develop and conduct gaming simulations in a valid way. Method. We investigate the validity by using training sessions in conjunction with questionnaires. We based the approach and questionnaires on the earlier work of Raser. Results. Our results show that the validity of the gaming simulation ranges from medium to good. They also show that while the fidelity of the gaming simulation is not like the real-world operating conditions, this does not reduce validity to low levels. Conclusions. We conclude that the gaming simulation used in this study was of medium to good validity. We also conclude that maximum fidelity is not required in order to run a valid gaming simulation session.@en

Background. Debriefing is an intrinsic part of games for learning and proper
debriefing can also be beneficial to research games. However, the literature
on how to debrief research games is sparse and only provides the professional
with an abstract topic guide.
Aim. The purpose of this study was to design a framework for the debriefing of
research games that are used in ongoing innovation processes.
Method. We used the literature on debriefing and experimental research and our
experience as game designers to build a framework that tackles the context,
substance and method of debriefing research games.
Results. Our framework provides three contributions. First, it shows how
the context in which a research game is applied sometimes impacts the
functionality of the game in negative ways. This can be helped by designing both
the game and the debriefing together. Second, we operationalize validity to a
greater extent, as this is the core of a good research game. Third, we provide
a methodology for debriefing professionals that opens up the black box of the
gaming simulation session.
Conclusion. The debriefing framework provides a method to collectively assess
the validity, reliability and robustness of the causal claims associated with the
research conducted.@en