Developing Serious Games with Integrated Debriefing

Serious games (SG) are recognized in several domains as a promising instructional approach. When it comes to the field of Information Systems, however, they are not yet broadly investigated. Especially in business intelligence and analytics, a literature review indicates the absence of SG for proper report design. Such games, however, seem beneficial since many business reports suffer from poor business information visualization (BIV). To address this issue, the scope of the study is twofold: first, the paper presents a SG that aims to foster learning about BIV. Second, it evaluates this SG in a laboratory experiment, comparing it to a more conventional instructional approach (i.e., presentation) and testing two different versions of the game: One version integrates debriefing into the game itself, whereas the other version uses classical post hoc debriefing. Results indicate that it is favorable to integrate debriefing into the game in terms of motivation and learning outcomes. In the vein of design science research, the authors thus intend to contribute a useful artifact as well as a novel design principle for this instructional approach: Integrating debriefing into SG.