Advancing Evaluation Practice With Serious Games

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 evaluato...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The American journal of evaluation 2020-09, Vol.41 (3), p.339-366
Main Authors: Olejniczak, Karol, Newcomer, Kathryn E., Meijer, Sebastiaan A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
causal mechanisms
Change
Competence
Computer Games
Computer Simulation
Evaluation Methods
evaluation use
Evaluation Utilization
Evaluators
Foreign Countries
Hospitals
inclusion of stakeholders
Participation
Public Policy
Rural Areas
serious games
Stakeholders
Teaching Methods
Technology Uses in Education
Testing
Transportation
Video Games
Workshops
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1098-2140
1557-0878
1557-0878
DOI:10.1177/1098214020905897