Veerkracht 2.0 - Embodied Interactions in a Servant-Leadership Game

VEERKRACHT is a game for servant-leadership development. Although already the first version of the game provided a rather authentic environment for professional training, some players reported that it did not sufficiently provide the rich and meaningful interaction required to practice leadership skills. To revise the game we took inspiration from the literature on embodied cognition and added embodied interactions with non-player characters. An evaluation of the revised game, VEERKRACHT 2.0, yielded significant increases in some of the learning effects when compared to the original game. Further analysis showed that the increased learning was to a large extent due to the revised (embodied) interactions in the game. We concluded that, although some questions remain unanswered, embodied cognition seems a promising area of research for improving game designs and game design theories.