There?s no ?I? in ?Emergency Management Team:? designing and evaluating a serious game for training emergency managers in group decision making skills

Serious games are games that are designed to educate ratherthan entertain. The game outlined and evaluated here wascommissioned and designed as a tool to improve the groupdecision making skills of people who manage real-worldemergencies such as floods, fires, volcanoes and chemicalspills. The game design exploits research on decision makinggroups and applies pedagogically sound games designprinciples. An evaluation of the game design was carried outbased on a paper prototype. Eight participants were recruited and assigned to two groups of four participants each. These groups were video recorded while playing the game and the video was analysed in terms of game actions and member participation. Results indicate that the group who behaved in a more appropriate manner for a decision making group were rewarded with more positive feedback from the game state. These findings suggest that the game itself delivers appropriate feedback to players on their collaborative behaviour and is thus fit for the purposes intended in the current project.