Understanding Systems Engineering Decision-Making Through Game-Based Simulation: Insights from Industry

Decision Pathways is a one-hour, team-based board game developed at the University of Twente to simulate architectural decision-making in Systems Engineering. Built on the Octalysis motivational framework, the game asks teams to make a people-versus-process knowledge pathway choice under a fixed budget of 20 coins and a 60-minute time limit, while navigating evolving constraint cards and presenting a final architecture canvas. Its design aims to make the tacit trade-offs of systems engineering practice visible and discussable, rather than leaving them implicit in day-to-day work.

The game was piloted with 10 PhD researchers and then run with 54 practicing high-tech systems engineers between December 2024 and March 2025. Across seven phases, including decision rounds, midgame constraint cards, and post-game reflection, the sessions generated data from facilitator observations, architecture canvases, sticky notes, and audio recordings. These were analysed thematically against four predefined themes: organisation-wide knowledge thinking, knowledge identification, knowledge use, and stakeholder alignment. Participants consistently described the game as realistic and engaging, and valued it as both a reflective exercise and a training tool for practitioners.

The study's principal contribution lies in showing that a physical simulation can surface how engineering teams identify, use, and align around knowledge when making architectural choices. The authors do, however, caution that transferability to other organisational contexts, sectors, and team compositions has not yet been established and requires further contextual validation before the findings can be generalised. The evidence is therefore best read as strong support for the game's value within high-tech systems engineering settings, with broader claims remaining provisional.

The reference base supports this positioning. The cited literature, dated 2021 to 2024, spans serious games in engineering education, systems thinking and teamwork, game-based organisational learning, and adaptive gamification, situating the work within recent peer-reviewed and conference research on game-based learning in systems engineering.