How Serious Are Serious Games?: Some Lessons From Infra-games

This paper examines whether serious games, particularly computer-based simulation games, can support advanced professional learning and decision-making in complex infrastructure domains such as utilities, ports, and wind farms. The authors argue that the growing complexity of infrastructure systems, combined with shifting technology, policy, and demand, makes these systems difficult for managers, policymakers, and young professionals to understand. They contend that simulation games offer a safe environment in which participants can experiment with decisions and negotiations and observe their consequences over time, provided they combine the realism of simulations with the engagement of games.

The authors identify several reasons for growing interest in digital simulation games. Participants who have grown up with video games and online communication expect engaging, dynamic experiences. Constructivist learning theory has shifted education toward active, experiential learning, and the authors note that simulation games provide dynamic feedback that traditional case studies and many linear e-learning courses lack. Planning complex infrastructure is characterized as a "wicked" problem with weak consensus on values and facts, pluricentric decision-making, and strategic stakeholder behavior, conditions the authors argue games can help participants experience and manage.

The paper's central illustration is SIM Maas, a multiplayer computer-based game built around the planning and land designation of the 2nd Maasvlakte in the Port of Rotterdam, a roughly 1000-hectare reclamation project spanning 2006 to 2036. Participating directors from commercial, operational, and financial departments make coordinated decisions about construction timing and client acceptance, with outcomes computed by a Java-based simulation. The authors present expected rather than measured results, since the game was still in its design phase, and they stress that simulation games are effective only when embedded in broader research, debriefing, and follow-up processes.