……..honestly, how serious can gaming be?
And how do we proceed with the idea of resilience?
by Kees van der Blom, MSHE
Over the past few years, we developed suitable theoretical material for this purpose and also, great efforts have been made to bring resilience to the shop floor using the concept of a game.
Being an (ad hoc) working group we are committed to resilience (and everything that goes with it). That is why we would like to use the existing theory and build on the concept of a game; we have the ambition to make resilience easily accessible for management and the shop floor. This means that we want to work on a game concept that people want to play and where, in competition with others, they opt for resilient choices and at the same time learn by having fun.
In short, we think there is enough reason to set off (again) with resilience and there is enough demand. We believe that serious gaming can be an important tool to use for working with resilience theories on the shop floor. We are still in the development stage of our serious game and in the process we noticed that we were confronted with several interesting choices. We would like to share these experiences with you in a workshop specifically developed for the REA conference. The workshop serves a dual purpose: apart from discovering which problems we may encounter, this may also provide us input for the concept choices we must and intend to make with the game.
The starting points for setting up this experiment are:
- to learn how to build a good game based on a serious game framework;
- to experience how a serious gaming concept can help in developing operational resilience and team resilience on the shop floor;
- subsequently to experience how gaming can help to make a start in using resilience features on the shop floor; and
- finally, with the help of serious gaming, how to work out the resilience concept together.
And as said, it must definitely be fun and interactive too if you want to work with serious gaming in this way.
For us being an ad hoc working group, this is a serious effort to jointly develop a serious game in an interactive and fun way and which game we, working group, may use as basis to proceed on.
It would be good if in the end we could work together and build a serious game with which we can roll out the principles of team resilience and operational resilience on the shop floor and thus give safety a positive impetus.
The JJACK team
(John, Jurriaan, Anne, Christiaan, and Kees)