Advancing Evaluation Practice with Serious Games

Evaluation professionals need to be nimble and innovative in their approaches in order to be relevant and provide useful evidence to decision-makers, stakeholders, and society in the crowded public policy landscape. In this article, we offer serious games as a method that can be employed by evaluators to address three persisting challenges in current evaluation practice: inclusion of stakeholders, understanding of causal mechanisms, and utilization of evaluation findings. We provide a framework that distinguishes among games along two crucial aspects of evaluation inquiry - its function and the nature of the evaluand. We offer examples of successfully implemented games in each set of the four arenas we delineate: teaching knowables, testing retention, crash-testing mechanisms, and exploring systems. We explain how games can be employed to promote learning about and among stakeholders, and to collect valuable intelligence about the operations of programs and policies.