Advancing Evaluation Practice With Serious Games

Abstract

Evaluation professionals need to be nimble and innovative in their approaches in order to be relevant and provide useful evidence to decision-makers, stakeholders, and society in the crowded public policy landscape. In this article, we offer serious games as a method that can be employed by evaluators to address three persisting challenges in current evaluation practice: inclusion of stakeholders, understanding of causal mechanisms, and utilization of evaluation findings. We provide a framework that distinguishes among games along two crucial aspects of evaluation inquiry - its function and the nature of the evaluand. We offer examples of successfully implemented games in each set of the four arenas we delineate: teaching knowables, testing retention, crash-testing mechanisms, and exploring systems. We explain how games can be employed to promote learning about and among stakeholders, and to collect valuable intelligence about the operations of programs and policies.

Changing civil servants’ behaviour concerning the opening of governmental data: evaluating the effect of a game by comparing civil servants’ intentions before and after a game intervention

“…The gameplay sessions were divided into three moments: (1) a pretest was applied immediately before the game was played and the game rules were explained; (2) the game was played in five predefined rounds; and (3) a post-test was given containing the same 33 questions. This enabled comparison of the change in participants’ behaviours as a consequence of the game (Olejniczak et al., 2020). The pretest included 14 questions about the players’ characteristics, including age and gender.…”

Developing evaluation capacities in integrated care projects: Lessons from a scientific support mission implemented in Belgium

“…Due to these restrictions, only a proof of concept was eventually made available within the project's time frame. To overcome this absence, FAITH.be met with each of the 12 ICPs to realize exercises on population management in the form of a serious game ( 36 ), using the limited set of available data about reimbursed care provision and sociodemographic characteristics of the ICPs' populations. It is described in the Box 1 .…”

Teaching with experiments

“…The game provided a safe space for students to understand and experience the legacies of discrimination. Our cultural familiarity with games, their association with relaxed down time and the universal language they operate with make board games a useful and inclusive way to handle complex contexts or social issues (Olejniczak et al 2020).…”