We started wondering: why not connect fun with work so we have a bit more fun than work in our lives… and if we want to justify it, here it goes. In humanitarian and development work, problems are never simple. People have to make decisions with limited information, limited resources and competing priorities. You need to work with people who do not always agree with you, adapt when the situation changes, and live with the results of your decisions. In other words, it can feel surprisingly close to playing a very complicated strategy game.
And that is where games become interesting.
A good serious game or simulation lets people experience complexity instead of just hearing about it. You make a decision, something changes, you get new information, and suddenly that decision looks very different. Research suggests that serious games can support problem-solving, teamwork, seeing things from someone else's side, and learning by doing, while broader research on gamification shows it can help motivation and learning too, when it is done well. That last part matters most: humanitarian and development training is usually NOT FUN!
So why don't we use more of them?
Partly because they are surprisingly hard to find. A 2024 review found 89 serious games related to humanitarian education and training, but many were no longer available, hard to access, dependent on a specialist to run them, or hard to adapt to a different context. That sounded familiar — while building this catalogue we kept getting stuck on the same puzzle: why build a game if it just ends up behind the paywall of an academic journal? And once you have spent half an hour searching, it is very tempting to just make another PowerPoint.
That is why we built the Humanitarian Games Catalogue.
The idea is not to rank the "best" games. It is simply to make it easier to see what exists: what a game is for, who it is for, how long it takes, whether it is online or in person, whether it needs a facilitator, and whether there is any evidence behind it.
We are also trying something we think could make the catalogue more useful: mapping games to the Core Humanitarian Standard (CHS).
The CHS gives the sector a shared language for quality and accountability, but a lot of its requirements are easier to understand by doing than by reading. Listening to people. Responding to feedback. Coordinating with others. Managing resources well. Deciding with incomplete information. Learning from mistakes. These are all things a game or simulation can let you practise.
The mapping does not mean that playing a game makes someone CHS-compliant. It is more practical than that: this game gives you a chance to explore or practise something connected to this particular requirement.
And that opens up a different kind of search. Instead of asking "what humanitarian games are out there?", a trainer can ask "I am running a session on accountability — is there a game for that?" Or "I need people to feel what coordination is actually like — what already exists?"
We don't think everything needs to become a game. Sometimes a good conversation is better. Sometimes it's a handbook, a workshop, or a genuinely well-made PowerPoint. But some things are simply more interesting when you play them instead of listening to someone explain them.
There are already a lot of clever, creative people (are there really…?) making games for our sector. We just want to make those games easier to find, easier to use, and hopefully a little harder to lose.
And, in the process, sneak a bit more fun into humanitarian learning.
Know a game we should have in the catalogue? Tell us!