Safety Hunting: a Serious Gaming Approach for Industrial Safety Training

Abstract

Current operational safety training methods for the chemical process industry typically focus 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 availability, session time and cost, knowledge transfer evaluation and participant immersion. In this light, this study proposed and developed ‘Safety Hunting’, a novel Serious Gaming approach for worksite safety training in the chemical processing industry. This article introduces the game, discusses its development and reports on the evaluation of its impact as an industrial safety training tool, thus offering a methodological framework to support the research, development and evaluation of similar Serious Games. The game is staged at an international agrochemical production facility in Italy. It was tested and evaluated with Norwegian University of Science and Technology affiliates. 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, offering realistic and engaging simulation scenarios. These positive outcomes open interesting opportunities for further research.