Sustainability considerations are traditionally difficult to trade-off with technical and business requirements in an early design phase. Hence, design teams need support to reflect early on in the process, on how sustainability may affect profitability and customer value fulfilment in the long term. The commoditisation of modelling and simulation techniques points to gamification and serious gaming as emerging approaches to raise awareness among the design team – as well as users and stakeholders – of the expected behaviour of a solution along its life cycle. The objective of this paper is to explore how serious games can be used to inform decision-makers about the value versus cost implications of being (or not being) ‘sustainability compliant’ when designing products and systems. The paper initially presents the findings from a descriptive study focused on the definition of ‘design support’ intended to raise sustainability awareness through serious gaming. It further describes the development, application and testing of one of such games for material selection in the aerospace industry.

Innovation Concept: Mass Casualty Incidents (MCI) are complex events that most paramedics encounter only a few times in their careers. Triaging and managing multiple patients during an incident requires different skills than typically practiced by prehospital providers. Simulation and drills can provide an opportunity to practice those skills, but are costly and resource intensive while only allowing a few providers to be in a triage or leadership role. It is important to find engaging and less expensive methods for teaching MCI triage and initial scene management. Methods: The authors have developed and are testing a card game based on the previously published GridlockED board game. The game was developed utilizing an iterative process previously described. This game was tested with paramedics as well as other emergency medicine learners to determine usability, engagement, fidelity, as well as usefulness in teaching MCI triage and patient-flow concepts. Curriculum, Tool or Material: The card game provides a focused learning experience to allow providers to practice initial triage of multiple injured patients as well as manage patient flow from the scene to area hospitals when faced with limited prehospital resources and capabilities. Players work together in various simulated scenarios to correctly triage injured patients and send them to the correct healthcare facility. Conclusion: Serious gaming has gained momentum in medical education. Developing novel curriculae around low frequency, high stakes situations using a game like TriagED may hold the key to ensure prehospital care providers are trained for these incidents. In the future, games which integrate an element of Incident Command or receiving hosptials (e.g. full integration with GridlockED game) may help to further explore the relationship between scene management and patient flow within receiving hospitals.

Serious gaming is the use of games for purposes beyond entertainment. In this paper, we investigate the use of serious gaming as a tool for research into decision-making in engineering systems design. Serious gaming provides a fully controllable environment in which to study the decision-making behavior of engineers in simulated design scenarios. However, given the nature of games and their inherent association with entertainment, it is possible that gaming environments themselves induce unexpected, or unrepresentative behavior. We present two experiments in which we investigate serious gaming as a research tool. Both experiments deal with design decisions in the presence of sunk costs and compare two approaches for communicating the decision-making scenario: (1) an interactive game and (2) a written narrative. The written narrative approach for communicating decision-making scenarios is a widely used and accepted technique for decision-making research. We find that behavior observed in the game variants did not significantly differ from behavior observed in their written narrative equivalents. This result builds confidence for the use of game-based research approaches. However, the results in this paper suggest that response distributions collected from a game have more noise than those from an equivalent written narrative.