Challenges of Serious Games for Improving Students’ Management Skills on Decision Making

Serious Games have been used in civil education since the 1950s. The first serious games were business games aiming to improve the skills required for decision making processes. In 1964, the INTOP simulation game was the first game representing a complete enterprise operating in different markets (Rohn, 1995). Management games as a subgroup of serious games are still widely in use, especially within vocational training of managers. Since that time, a variety of games have been developed and proved successful for the mediation of skills in complex systems (Windhoff, 2001). Serious games are also widely used in primary and secondary education nowadays. Children learn excellently by playing them. In contrast, learning by gaming is often seen as not serious enough within higher education and vocational training. Consequently, gaming as a teaching method is still often excluded in many curricula. Hence, students lack the experience of active knowledge acquirement during lessons and thus encounter a barrier for successful participation in serious games later.