Design of a Serious Game for Safety in Manufacturing Industry Using Hybrid Simulation Modelling: Towards Eliciting Risk Preferences

Abstract

Conventional methods used to elicit risk-taking preferences have demonstrated significant disparities with real-world behaviours, compromising the validity of the data collected. Serious gaming (SG) provides a high potential to bridge this gap. This paper presents a serious game as a novel approach to elicit risk-preference in an industrial manufacturing context, focusing on the game-design and implementation using hybrid simulation modelling. The developed SG serves as a tool for conducting incentivized experiments aimed at assessing human behaviour towards risk, to inform policy recommendations. The game incorporates two influential factors in shaping risk-taking behaviour in a manufacturing environment, namely the social learning and production pressure and use a variety of game mechanics to promote the players' motivation and engagement. A usability study was conducted with 10 participants using the Usability Scale System (SUS) to identify problems in the usability of the game. Results have shown that our game has a good usability. INTRODUCTIONUnderstanding the risk-taking behaviour of workers in manufacturing sites can inform decision-making, help organizations to select the best strategies for improving the safety, and correct the deviant behaviour. This highlights the need for data on human decisions to engage in a risk-taking behaviour.Economists and psychologists have developed a variety of experimental methodologies to elicit individual's attitudes towards risk. The existing elicitation methods differs in their level of complexity. Simple elicitation methods such as Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) (Lejuez et al. 2002) has also been used in investigating risk attitudes across various domains (Fecteau et al. 2007;Hunt et al. 2005). Although, the applicability of risk preferences elicited through this method to other domains is uncertain. Questionnaires