Process Modelling as Serious Game: Design of a Role-Playing Game for a Corporate Training

This paper presents findings of a field study into the design and initial evaluation of a role-playing game based on a model of a complex tendering process at a German manufacturing company. Conceived as part of an inhouse training for 1,000 employees by the process management unit, the role-playing game aims to familiarize the participants with the intricacies of the manufacturer's tendering process - by instructing them to properly interpret a BPMN (Business Process Model & Notation) representation of the process presented to the participants in a modelling tool. Rather than presenting the participants with a syntactically correct and semantically adequate process model, the process model is reduced to a simplified representation of the control flow and to placeholders for activities, events, roles, documents and information systems. In the role-playing game, teams of four employees from different business functions perform the group task of understanding the meaning of predefined model elements in the context of the tendering process, and of assigning these elements to the correct placeholder under time pressure and in competition with other teams in the room. As an original game element, video interviews with experts on a particular aspect of the tendering process are attached to the respective model elements and are required by the participants to solve the group task. The game design is tested and developed in three pilot trainings. We report on the design of the role-playing game, its initial evaluation, and conclude with a discussion of our findings.