Serious Games Adoption in Organizations – An Exploratory Analysis

This paper arises from work ongoing in the GALA (Games and Learning Alliance – Network of Excellence for Serious Games). An exploratory set of case studies were carried out to understand the benefits, barriers and enablers of adopting serious games in companies and non-educational organizations. Serious games are games that educate, train and inform. It could therefore be expected that serious games would play an important role within corporate training, but this seems not to be the case. Five exploratory case studies of SG adoption were collected. There was use of serious games for training (three cases) and for corporate change interventions (two cases). Most of the organizations commissioned the SG from an external party and only in one case did the organization itself develop the serious game. The key finding was that senior management support was critical for serious game adoption in every case. SG adoption was typically limited to a single department or branch/subsidiary of the company