Make it work: Validation of applied games.
Traditional validation is thorough and slow, and does not comply with the fast and agile development of games. Successful games need to be both validated and profitable. This talk is about our quest for strategies that let us develop agile, but thorough on effectiveness and safety at the same time. Our games have been subject to validation studies for over a decade. This used to be done by researchers in universities with our finished products. Whatever the outcome would be, was uncertain and if it were to be negative we couldn’t do anything about it anyway.
In 2010 we delivered a game for training medical specialists to stabilize patients with the “abcde method”. This game was validated by the Erasmus university with traditional validation strategies. The results (positive) came out in 2015. In the mean time we were working on the 7th expansion of the game and it had been accredited to the highest level for several years.
First of all, in a typical lifetime of a game the time it takes to validate anything with traditional methods just takes too long. Second the traditional methods like RCT are primarily developed for drag validation and not very suitable for complex interventions like games.
We set out to look for new strategies with experts from different institutions and (medical) universities. After several attempts and iterations, we are now applying a strategy for validation in which every iteration of the game, from paper prototype to beta-version is subject to a test (as we have been doing in game development for years) that is designed not only for gameplay and usability purposes, but also complies to the academic rules for validation.
We have been doing this with a game for the prevention of PTSD with the Free University of Amsterdam with very promising results. We have just started a new project with Radboud University and Trimbos Institute about depression with High schoolers, and we will start with an awareness game for Dementia with the Geriatric Centre of the Academic Medical Centre in Groningen.
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