The Tacit Knowledge in Games: From Validation to Debriefing

Game sessions consist of three phases: briefing, gameplay, and debriefing, with the latter being considered the most important feature of games. Nevertheless, given that games are considered by many to be more of an artistic form rather than a scientific artifact, a question that rises is: Can game sessions in general and debriefing in particular be analyzed and performed in a rigorous scientific way? In other words, can they be consistently structured, given the different characteristics of games, and can clear criteria on what would constitute a successful game session and debriefing be defined? The answer to these questions is yes. Yet, it remains a challenge to extract the knowledge of experts, which resides to a large extent in the tacit knowledge spectrum. Hence, the aim of this paper is to shed some light in this tacit knowledge possessed by experts and to gain understanding on why certain practices are more prone to success than others as well as bring into the surface other practices that have remained well hidden. In order to accomplish this goal, three rounds of interviews were conducted.