Serious Gaming for Resilience Screening

In the EDA project SEGARES (Serious Gaming for Resilience Screening), an international consortium is working on the development of a serious game to screen military and police personnel on critical competencies for dealing with challenging situations. This report describes the development of the demonstrator Space Evac, a serious game for the selection and assessment of high-risk professionals. It also describes the user experience research conducted across all organizations participating in the consortium.

The RMA is participating as in-kind partner.

The developed demonstrator Space Evac 1.0 is an online game that can be played in approximately 30-40 minutes. In the game, the player acts as the deputy commander of a space station, ensuring that the station’s processes run smoothly. Throughout the game, setbacks and unexpected events occur, requiring the player to respond. The game is designed to measure coping flexibility, adaptability, situational awareness, and cognitive flexibility through various methods and modules (behavioral measurements, situational judgment-like tests, gamified cognitive tests). By conducting the measurements under both normal and stressful conditions, the game can also provide insights into players’ stress resilience.
The user research results indicate that the developed game is in essence suitable for its intended purpose. Players find the game sufficiently user-friendly, feel immersed in the game, experience some stress while playing, and report behaving in the game as they would in real life. Players rate the suitability of the game as a selection tool as moderately high. Additionally, the research shows that the game is largely perceived similarly by players with different characteristics (such as gaming experience, technological readiness, age, or gender), suggesting minimal risk of the game unfairly favoring or disadvantaging certain groups.

This project is financed by the European Defence Agency.