‘Safety Hunting’: A Serious Gaming Approach for Industrial Safety Training

Operational accidents owing to human factors are not that uncommon in the chemical processing industry on a yearly basis, and these are often related to errors during the execution of safety procedures. Current safety training methods for the chemical process industry focus primarily on acquiring and evaluating knowledge and technical know-how about safety measures and procedures. Although these are valuable training tools, they present certain important drawbacks in terms of their availability, session time and cost, knowledge transfer evaluation, difficulty to simulate hazardous scenarios and replicate the psychological conditions involved during emergencies. Over the last years, Serious Gaming approaches (i.e., games developed for primarily educational purposes and not only entertainment) have attracted significant academic interest due to their potential to effectively convey complex concepts and support learning processes in areas such as engineering, healthcare, disaster risk management and governance. Aligning with this new pedagogical paradigm, we turn our attention to the field of industrial process safety to explore the use of serious gaming as a novel tool for worksite safety training in the chemical processing industry. This study proposed and developed ‘Safety Hunting’, a novel serious gaming approach for industrial safety training. We introduce the game, discuss its development and report on the evaluation of its impact as an industrial safety training tool. Moreover, we propose a methodological framework to support the research, development and evaluation of serious games. During development, game testing was conducted with Norwegian University of Science and Technology affiliates, while the finalised game was implemented and evaluated for its impact at an international agrochemical production facility in Italy. Our results showed that learning objectives could be achieved to a satisfactory degree within a short gameplay session. Apart from enhancing knowledge and understanding about related safety procedures, playing ‘Safety Hunting’ also evoked feelings of confidence among participants. The simulated scenarios were perceived as realistic and engaging settings, that helped create a connection between the virtual environment and the real world. Considering the game’s limitations, overall development costs are higher than traditional safety training, but significantly lower considering the extended period of use and adaptability of such educational resource. In any case, the positive outcomes open interesting opportunities for further research.