Games can actually help people learn
There is a growing body of research suggesting that games can be useful learning tools. A 2013 meta-analysis by Wouters and colleagues, covering 77 studies of learning and 31 studies of motivation, found that serious games produced better learning and retention than conventional instruction. Interestingly, they did not find that serious games were automatically more motivating, which is a useful warning against assuming that putting people in a game magically makes learning fun.
A few years later, a 2018 review by Solinska-Nowak and colleagues looked at 45 serious games and simulations for disaster risk management and found potential for games to support areas such as risk awareness, problem-solving, collaboration and perspective-taking. Then, in 2020, Sailer and Homner looked specifically at gamification and found small but significant positive effects on cognitive, motivational and behavioural learning outcomes. More recently, Tay and colleagues (2022), looking specifically at adult learners and professional upskilling, found supportive evidence for digital game-based learning, while stressing that game design, pedagogy and the learning context need to work together. And Udeh and colleagues (2025), reviewing 49 empirical studies on gamification in employee training, found potential benefits for engagement, motivation, knowledge retention and performance, again with design and context making a difference.
So the argument isn't simply that games are fun. It is that good games can make people participate in learning rather than just consume information. You make a choice, get feedback, deal with consequences, try again and learn from the result. And perhaps we should admit the obvious: traditional training is a bit boring...
But what are we actually doing with games in our sector?
This made us curious about our own sector. If games can be useful for learning, what have humanitarian and development organisations actually been doing with them? Quite a lot, it turns out. The 2018 review by Solinska-Nowak and colleagues identified 45 serious games and simulations related to disaster risk management. More recently, Mukherjee and Guardiola (2024) looked at more than 120 games released between 1990 and 2023 and identified 89 serious games related to humanitarian issues, 31 of them aimed at professionals, policymakers and other stakeholders.
So there are games. The problem is that, compared with the wider world of games, the humanitarian ones are often pretty limited. Many focus on a very specific topic or project, depend heavily on a facilitator, are difficult to adapt, or simply aren't very engaging. Some feel more like interactive training exercises than games you would actually choose to play. And plenty seem to have been built to solve one particular training or project requirement and then quietly left behind.
That becomes an even bigger problem when you try to find them. In the 2024 study, of the 31 professional-oriented games identified, 11 were no longer available, 10 had restricted access and only 10 were publicly available. The authors also identified challenges around facilitation, adapting games to new settings, the lack of common design frameworks and limited long-term evaluation.
This is exactly the problem we kept running into. You hear about an interesting simulation at a conference, someone tells you, “There was a really good game for that,” and then you try to find it. You discover a reference to a project from 2017, a dead link, or perhaps an academic paper describing a game you cannot actually play. Why build a game if it just ends up behind restricted access of an academic journal? And once you have spent half an hour searching, it is very tempting to just make another PowerPoint.
So we built the Humanitarian Games Catalogue
The idea is deliberately simple: make games and simulations for humanitarian and development learning easier to find. What is it about? Who is it for? How long does it take? Is it digital or face-to-face? Does it need a facilitator? What does it actually help people learn? Is it still available? And, perhaps most importantly, is this actually a game you would want to play?
We are not trying to create a leaderboard of the “best” humanitarian games. We want to make the landscape easier to understand, be honest about what is available and what is not, and preserve things that might otherwise disappear. If the catalogue also saves someone from spending six months and a large budget building something that already exists, even better.
And then there is the CHS
This is where we think the catalogue could become more interesting. The Core Humanitarian Standard 2024 sets out nine commitments and accompanying requirements around quality and accountability. Many of them concern things that can be difficult to teach through a slide but potentially interesting to experience through a game: listening and responding to feedback, coordinating with others, managing resources, understanding risk, making decisions with incomplete information and learning from what happens.
So we have started mapping games against the CHS requirements. This is not about suggesting that playing a game makes anyone CHS-compliant. It is much more practical: this game gives you an opportunity to explore or practise something connected to this requirement. The hope is that eventually someone could search the catalogue from the learning need rather than from the game: I am running a session on accountability — is there a game I could use? Or: I want participants to experience the challenges of coordination and competing priorities — what is out there?
We don't think everything needs to become a game. Gamification can be badly designed, and the research is pretty clear that adding game elements does not automatically produce better learning. Sometimes you need a handbook, a workshop, a conversation or a very good PowerPoint.
But we do think there is something our sector could learn from games — including from the games being made outside our sector. The challenge is not just to make more humanitarian games. It is to make better ones: more engaging, more thoughtful, more reusable and more connected to the way people actually learn.
So the catalogue is partly a directory, partly an archive and, perhaps, partly a provocation.
There are games. Let's see what we can do with them.