Gaming simulation design for individual and team situation awareness

Abstract

Situation awareness is a key concept in understanding operator behaviour. Shortly, it can be described as knowing what is going on. For the past decades, human-in-the-loop simulators have been the traditional type of gaming simulations for studying or training situation awareness. The overall characteristic of gaming simulations is that they are a simulation of a system using gaming methods in which humans take part. Depending on a range of design choices, these gaming simulations take upon different visualizations and approaches to simulate aspects of the real world. Thus, a fundamental question is: what are the minimal requirements of a game to ensure natural levels of (team) situation awareness? This paper aims to capture and define the boundaries and limitations of gaming simulation design, in which the situation awareness of individuals and teams can be simulated and measured. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.