Towards a Comprehensive Methodology for the Research and Evaluation of Serious Games

The author presents the methodological backgrounds and underlying research design of an on-going scientific research project concerned with the scientific evaluation of serious games and/or computer-based simulation-games (SG) for advanced learning. The main questions of this research project are: 1. what are the requirements and design principles for a comprehensive social-scientific methodology for the evaluation of SG? 2. To what extend does SG contribute to advanced learning? 3. What factors contribute to, or determine this learning? 4. To what extend and under what conditions can SG- based learning be transferred to the real world (RW)? Between 2004 and 2012, several hundreds of SG-sessions in the Netherlands with twelve different SG were evaluated systematically, uniformly and quantitatively to give a data-set of 2100 respondents in higher education and in work-organizations. The author presents the research model, the quasi-experimental design and evaluation instruments. This focus in this article is on methodology and data-set to establish a proper foundation for forthcoming publications on empirical results.