Serious Gaming in Construction Management Research and Education

More and more researchers recently discover the potential that serious games have for supporting construction management research and education. However, little theoretical guidelines exist of how to best use games for these two purposes. Many applications of serious games in the field lack a sound theoretical background, which often hinders broad generalization and formalization of results. This paper addresses this shortcoming, by providing theoretical insights into the effects of serious games on students and practitioners alike, drawing on organization science theories. In particular, the paper suggests that sensemaking theory is a suitable theory to support researchers that want to draw conclusions about organizational behavior of practitioners that are playing serious games. The paper also suggests, that activity theory is suitable to analyze how practitioners and students can learn from playing serious games. Both theories are demonstrated using game playing activities from a past research project at the University of Twente. The paper closes with a discussion of these two theories reflecting about how different abstraction levels of games support teaching as well as research activities.