On a Design Approach for Collaborative Decision Making Games: A Preliminary Validation Study

INTRODUCTION Complex decision making skills are essential in numerous domains (e.g., emergency response, military, business), where stakeholders often need to make strategic or tactical decisions on tasks that may be ambiguous, ill-defined, time constrained, and have high stakes. Often such tasks need to be solved by groups of people with complementary skills. The group works together, or collaborates, to make decisions and achieve a shared, common goal. Collaboration Engineering (CE) (Briggs et al, 2006) is an established discipline that explores how to improve collaborative decision making processes in groupware, simulations, design patterns (Zarate, 2013). The potential value of using games to support learning complex decision making skills is substantial (Hulst et al, 2014); however, little is available in the literature to support their systematic design. An approach in (Azadegan et al, 2015) specifically addresses the design of Collaborative Decision Making Games (CDMGs), where collaboration and consensus building happen during the gameplay process at the conscious cognitive level. The players, either colocated or distributed, work together to achieve a common goal. The approach is based on the principles of CE, aiming to provide guidance as well as building blocks for the design of CDMGs. Being developed based on the concept of patterns in CE, the design approach can be applied by users with different levels of expertise in CDMG design. The design approach is an iterative, five step process that integrates fundamental concepts from the game design, software design, and CE communities. The steps are: 1) Capturing Game Activities 2) Consideration of Collaboration Patterns 3) Creation of Game Elements 4) Allocation of Game Mechanics 5) Validation of Game Activities.