What Are Serious Games? How Do They Build Skills That Stick?

Completion is not competence. Serious games are built on that distinction - in this article we're going to explore what they are, and the evidence for why they change behaviour when standard training doesn't.

Most workplace learning is still judged on whether someone finished it. A course is opened, clicked through, and marked complete. A certificate is issued. Yet nothing about that sequence tells you whether the person could apply what they just saw under real pressure, with a real client, or with real risk on the line.

That gap – between what someone knows and what they can actually do – is where serious games sit. Not as a novelty format bolted onto existing content, but as a different answer to a different question: not "did they finish it?" but "could they handle it?"

What is a serious game?

A serious game is a digital learning experience that uses the mechanics of a game – choice, consequence, challenge, feedback. But within serious games, these mechanics are used for a purpose other than entertainment: to build a specific capability, test judgement, or rehearse behaviour before it's needed in practice. Learners are placed inside a realistic scenario, asked to make decisions, and shown the consequences of those decisions immediately. Nobody is told the "right" answer up front. They find out by doing. 

That's a meaningful difference from two things people often confuse serious games with:

• Gamification adds game elements - points, badges, leaderboards - to existing training. The content doesn't change; a scoring layer sits on top of it. It's a motivation tool, not a rehearsal tool.

• Standard e-learning transfers information: read this, watch this, answer these multiple-choice questions, get a completion certificate. It simply tells people what to do.

A serious game does neither. It doesn't decorate content with points, and it doesn't tell learners what to do - it puts them in a position where they have to decide, then lets them live with the outcome. That's rehearsal, not instruction.

Why serious games work

Strip away the game design language and what's left is a set of conditions that behavioural science has long associated with real learning. Serious games work because they consistently create all of these at once, which most training formats don't:

1. They make failure safe. In a live environment, mistakes are expensive, in a serious game, the same mistake costs nothing but a reset button. Learners can fail, see exactly why, and try a different approach immediately. That safe-failure loop is where judgement actually gets built, not from being told the correct answer in advance.
   

2. They demand a decision, not a definition. Traditional e-learning tests an ability to recall information. A serious game asks them to act on it – to weigh a situation, choose a course of action, and see it play out. That's a fundamentally different cognitive task, and it's the one that maps to what the job actually requires.
   

3. They give feedback that learners can't ignore. Because the consequence is tied directly to the decision, learners understand why something happened and can adjust their thinking accordingly.

4. They're paced to how people actually learn. Well-designed serious games introduce complexity in stages, so learners master one layer before the next is added. This mirrors the basic principle of scaffolding: new information sticks best when it's built on something already understood, not overwhelmingly delivered all at once.

5. They create ownership through choice. Making a decision – and living with it – builds a stronger sense of control than being handed an instruction. Learners who feel their choices matter, attribute both success and failure to their own judgement, which is what carries into real decisions later on.

6. They reward repetition. Unlike a course, a well-built serious game is designed to be replayed. Across Totem's own games, learners return to play an average of 4.3 times – each pass reinforcing sharpening decision-making, rather than simply repeating the same content that learners may not absorb. 

None of this requires learners to be "gamers." It requires the design to be built around a real decision, with real consequences, in a controlled space.

The evidence

The clearest independent evidence for this comes from a meta-analysis by Traci Sitzmann and Katherine Ely at the University of Colorado Denver Business School, which compared post-training outcomes for over 6,000 participants – students, employees, and military personnel - taught with computer-based simulation games against a comparison group taught by conventional methods. The results: declarative knowledge was 11% higher, procedural knowledge 14% higher, retention 9% higher, and self-efficacy 20% higher for those trained with simulation games.

Totem's own project data tells the same story with sharper numbers. In a game built to teach greener IT practices, 92% of learners sought out more information after finishing, 96% went on to take or consider further training, and 89% said they had recommended, or would recommend, the game to colleagues – evidence that engagement translated into action, not just a good completion score.

In a project with Mars, Totem replaced a standard course with a gamified simulation designed to strengthen financial judgement across regional leaders. Rather than testing what participants already knew, the simulation was built to develop how they thought through ambiguous, high-stakes decisions. The result: 100% of participants reported increased clarity in communicating and measuring value creation across the organisation – and, more importantly, the exercise created a shared language for judgement before anyone was accountable for it in a live setting.

A separate trial with the University of Liverpool tested a project management simulation against a class of MSc students studying Programming with Management. The pass rate rose to 100% as a direct result of using the game instead of conventional instruction.

Taken together, this is a consistent pattern rather than an isolated result: when learners are asked to decide rather than recall, both the depth of understanding and the confidence to apply it measurably improve. Enough evidence to correlate serious games to serious success.

The business case

For organisations, the argument isn't really about engagement – it's about risk and performance readiness.

Employees can often describe the right process; what they haven't done is practise applying it under pressure, with incomplete information. Traditionally, that practice happens on the job the first time it matters, with a real client or a real budget attached. Serious games move that practice into a space where the consequences of getting it wrong are contained.

That shift has knock-on effects that matter commercially:

• Reduced risk. Surfacing decision-making patterns before they're tested live means organisations catch weak judgement while it's still cheap to correct.

• Consistency at scale. A serious game delivers the same standard of practice to a leadership team of ten or a dispersed workforce of ten thousand, without depending on the availability of a specific trainer or facility.

• Data instead of guesswork. Because every decision a learner makes can be tracked, organisations get visibility into decision patterns and behavioural trends they would never see from a completion report – visibility that can inform where further support is actually needed.

• Cost measured the right way. A serious game usually costs more to build upfront than a standard course. Measured against the cost of the mistakes, rework, and slow time-to-competence that come from undertrained staff, the comparison looks very different.

None of this makes serious games a replacement for every kind of learning. They're not the right tool for pure information transfer. But where they earn their place is in exactly the situations where knowing the theory and being able to act on it are two different things: leadership, safety, compliance, negotiation, financial judgement, and any role where the first real mistake is also the most expensive one.

Knowledge isn't enough

The organisations getting the most from serious games have stopped asking whether their training was completed and started asking whether their people are ready. Only the latter predicts what happens when the pressure is real. If your current learning is being finished but not applied, that's the gap worth closing. 

Book your readiness audit to see where rehearsal – not another course – would make the biggest difference to your teams.