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Good gamers, good managers? A proof-of-concept study with Sid Meier’s Civilization | Review of Managerial Science | Springer Nature Link

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Human resource professionals increasingly enhance their assessment tools with game elements—a process typically referred to as “gamification”—to make them more interesting and engaging for candidates, and they design and use “serious games” that can support skill assessment and development. However, commercial, off-the-shelf video games are not or are only rarely used to screen or test candidates, even though there is increasing evidence that they are indicative of various skills that are professionally valuable. Using the strategy game Civilization, this proof-of-concept study explores if strategy video games are indicative of managerial skills and, if so, of what managerial skills. Under controlled laboratory conditions, we asked forty business students to play the Civilization game and to participate in a series of assessment exercises. We find that students who had high scores in the game had better skills related to problem-solving and organizing and planning than the students who had low scores. In addition, a preliminary analysis of in-game data, including players’ interactions and chat messages, suggests that strategy games such as Civilization may be used for more precise and holistic “stealth assessments,” including personality assessments.

1 Introduction “I’ve been playing Civilization since middle school. It’s my favorite strategy game and one of the reasons I got into engineering.” Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook, 21 October 2016 Information technology (IT) has changed human resource (HR) management, particularly its assessment procedures. HR professionals are increasingly using IT-enhanced versions of traditional selection methods such as digital interviews, social-media analytics, and reviews of user profiles on professional social-networking sites instead of traditional selection interviews, personality tests, and…

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