Why Games?

Games are used in xDelia for three main reasons. First, to develop a certain level of competence or expertise in the player. Second, as a tool for empirical data gathering and analysis. Third, as a way to provide immediate and meaningful feedback to the learner.

Strengthen the Process of Expertise Development and Expert Performance

Well-designed games are enjoyable and engage the player. Expertise development is commonly considered to be arduous and rather tiresome for the individual and games can contribute to overcome this problem, turning deliberate practice into a more enjoyable, engaging and motivating experience. Moreover, most people expect games to be repeatable and have much pleasure in improving their performance through frequent play. Expertise development will involve repetitive task execution if a lasting effect on the individual is expected, and games are of course well suited to induce repeated play. Also, games can be designed to incorporate situated task challenges and transport the player into situations that are shaped by highly specific, contextually authentic scenarios. Engagement with ecologically valid tasks and task environments are key in developing expert skills. Furthermore, games and simulations can provide a safe environment in which the consequences of errors are much reduced, significantly reducing the costs of learning. This allows ‘good’ and ‘bad’ decision-making to be explored, and the possibility to provide players with a much deeper understanding of decision processes and their potential consequences than that obtained in a real situation, where caution may constrain exploration since real potential losses are at stake. Finally, games have traditionally had a strong association with economic decision-making, formal game theory having a strong tradition of application for economic problems. Even entertainment computer games embody formal game elements and structure in their logic. Hence a financial decision training system is natural to implement as a game, with high potential for strong transfer effects.

Facilitate Empirical Research

Games are the medium par excellence within which researchers from behavioural finance and experimental economics investigate the practices and anomalies of human decision making. Also games provide an arbitrarily rich perceptual, interactive, and virtual world environment for situated learning, while being fully controllable as experimental stimuli. Hence empirical research using interactive games as stimuli can have high ecological validity. Moreover, interaction with games involves the sensor-motor and cognitive functions of players which can be recorded during game play using a wide array of devices that measure player behaviour, physiological parameters, and brain activity.

Enable Multimodal Feedback

Games serve as a cogent framework potentially provide one- or two-way (or n-way) task, behavioural, bio-, and neuro-feedback mechanisms for monitoring and performance assessment.