Why use games for leadership learning?

Why use games for leadership learning?

Why use games for leadership learning?

By John N. Banter,John D. Egan, and Susan Burton

Abstract

“Background. To overcome the high failure rate of gameful interventions, we need tobetter understand their design and evaluation strategies to build an evidence-basefor best-practice approaches that bring about meaningful change. This systematic review asks: ‘What behavioral and technological design and evaluation theoriesand approaches are applied in games developed to bring about positive environmental outcomes?’. Method. We reviewed 52 papers published between 2015 and 2020 that used gameful interventions to improve behavior related to environmental outcomes. These papers were analyzed to review the behavioral and technical design, andthe assessment and evaluation approaches, employed by the intervention designers. Results. We found that these publications report on simple aspects of the behavioral and technical design behind the intervention but fail to justify their design choices in terms of theory and evidence. Furthermore, variability across their evaluation approaches and outcomes exists. Discussion. This review highlights several systemic flaws in the literature that limit our understanding of gameful interventions in the pro-environmental context. First, based on this review, we cannot be convinced that these interventions were designed according to best practice for intervention design or for technology development. Second, the justification for proposing a gameful intervention is not always clear. Finally, it is unclear whether these interventions are being evaluated based on best practice. Thus, it is not clear that we can draw confident conclusions about evidence-based outcomes of short-term engagement (in structural gamification interventions) or long-term behaviour change (incontent gamification and serious game interventions).”

Reference

Banter, J. N., Egan, J. D., & Burton, S. (2022). Why use games for leadership learning? New Directions for Student Leadership, 2022(174), 11-19. doi:10.1002/yd.20495 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/yd.20495

Keyword

Games, leadership, learning, interventions, designs, evaluation, strategies, research