This year’s RICH Games Conference focuses on the educational potential of Serious Games as it is commonly being applied in healthcare training and assessment context to teach skills and test new competences. This is particularly important in a lifelong learning culture: to engage and train workforce; discover and develop leaders; and support sharing of knowledge and experience.

By exploiting the latest simulation and visualization technologies, using serious games, we are now able to contextualize the player’s experience in stimulating realistic environments. Furthermore, a large and growing population is increasingly familiar with playing games, which makes them particularly suited as a powerful instructional tool.

Serious games should lead to improved learning. We believe that providing evidence of such learning taking place is key to promote the adoption of serious games for education and training amongst healthcare practitioners. There is a growing need for information on in-situ game user assessment. Many are asking how to develop such games and how to apply such games. An effective application of Serious Games for training demands appropriate metrics, analytics, tools, and techniques for in-game user assessment. This can be achieved in particular by measuring elements such as learning outcomes and engagement, considering the twofold nature of Serious Games as compelling games that can also achieve precise learning outcomes.

We believe that this scientific approach is necessary in order to develop a new generation of Serious Games that are able to meet the above mentioned expectations and requirements as more effective training tools.

We are seeking original contributions that advance the state of the art in the technologies and knowledge available to support development and deployment of serious games (SG). Experimental studies are strongly encouraged.