Victoria Uren & Panagiotis Petridis

This Beer is Off!

building a dialogue game for servitization

Introduction

Business Games have been used for education & executive development since Management Decision Simulator (Meier et al 1969)

Potential to engage learners in very positive ways

Few examples relevant to servitzation e.g. (Nemoto et al 2014)

Barriers to adoption include high game development costs

Platforms such as Unity (http://unity3d.com/ ) aim to reduce these costs

Implementation of iServe

Game mechanics including learning points & scenario developed in two workshops with servitization & serious games experts

Implemented in Unity as a dialogue game

Stage Person hours(h)

Game Mechanics 44Scenario Development 44

Dialogue Scripting 132Implementation 50

iServe: the ‘Beer is Off’ Game

Aim: to solve the problem of bad beer in a bar

Learning point: Basic, Intermediate and Advanced services

Mechanics: Dialogue based, players must make service design decisions based on information provided by non-player characters

Points: players gain higher points if they choose actions that would lead to Advanced services

Evaluation

Game test at SSC 2014

45 players

Typical participant

older than 35,

low gaming experience

high servitization expertise,

Focus on usability

User reactions

Ease of use

older

not a gamer

expert

Overall reaction

Question mean(s)Overall reactions

terrible-wonderful 5.2(1.8)frustrating-satisfying 5.2(2.0)

dull-stimulating 5.4(2.1)difficult-easy 6.2(1.8)rigid-flexible 4.6(2.0)

Learning to play the game learning to operate the interface 5.8(2.4)time to learn to use the interface 6.4(2.3)

Effects of Age and Gaming Experience

No statistically significant difference (t-tests 5%) on any of the key usability questions for younger or more experienced players

Age /

re

act

ion

Experi

ence

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ease

of

pla

y

Does the game teach about servitization

Question mean(s) Experts

(score 3-5)Novices(score 1-2)

Did you learn about servitization from the game?

2.3(1.1) 2.8(1.1)

do you think a novice would learn about servitization from the game?

2.6(1.1) 3.4(0.9)

Significant difference (t-tests 5%) for the second question.

Novices are more confident of the potential of the game to teach about servitization.

Outcomes

Playable game environments can be generated using game engine technology in realistic time-frames.

Virtual environments are usable by the target audience of older, non-gamers.

Current game is rather basic (benchmarked against Business game taxonomy of (Greco et al 2013)) - lacks challenge.

Next steps include wrapping the virtual environment around a simulation to increase challenge.

References

Meier, R. C., Newell, W. T., & Pazer, H. L. (1969). Simulation in Business and Economics. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Nemoto, Y., Uei, K., Fujiwara, T., Mizoguchi, S., & Shimomura, Y. (2014). Strategic Thinking in EDIPS: Edutainment for Designing Integrated Product - Service System. Procedia CIRP, 16, 92–97.

Greco, M., Baldissin, N., & Nonino, F. (2013). An exploratory taxonomy of business games. Simulation and Gaming, 44(5), 645–682.