Serious Games in ESG Training: Serious Business

Understanding where an organisation stands on a complex topic is never straightforward. Interviews, surveys, and questionnaires all have their place, but in a world already saturated with requests for feedback, they are not always the most revealing or engaging tools. The same challenge applies to training: traditional classroom settings often struggle to spark interaction, uncover gaps in understanding, or meaningfully connect people across teams. This is where serious games potentially offer a better, faster, more efficient alternative.

A Different Way to Learn, Share, and Engage

Serious games create a gamified environment in which training, education, and information exchange can take place in a structured yet engaging way. While the objectives are very “serious”, involving learning, and the gaining of awareness and insights, the route to achieving them is deliberately more interactive and, importantly, more human and, hopefully, more fun. These games can take many forms. Digital games are well-suited to individual learning and awareness-building. Face-to-face tabletop exercises, often involving role play and guided scenarios, go a step further. They encourage dialogue, reveal latent assumptions, and help reduce siloing by bringing people together around shared challenges.

Why Serious Games Work for ESG

ESG topics are inherently complex. They involve regulation, culture, values, and trade-offs. Furthermore, they potentially bring together groups within the same organisation (e.g., different departments) who may rarely sit at the same table. Serious games would therefore allow organisations to explore ESG issues in a more relaxed and inclusive setting, without diluting their importance. Cultural context also matters. For example, in more hierarchical environments, open discussion may not come naturally. Hence, well-designed serious games can help create a respectful space where ideas can be tested, perspectives shared, and difficult questions raised constructively. When run face-to-face, they can even encourage an element of theatre to be introduced, making the experience memorable as well as meaningful.

The Game is only the Beginning

As ISG Chief Research Officer Dr Kevin Fleming, who has experience in developing and executing serious games within the disaster risk reduction domain, explains: “The game opens the door, but it is the follow-up discussions that carry the work forward and create lasting clarity. The only downside? You may find the game surprisingly hard to leave behind…” The value of serious gaming lies not just in the exercise itself, but in what comes next. The game builds awareness, alignment, and shared understanding. The follow-up is where those insights are translated into concrete plans, actions, and implementation. Designing for that continuation is a fundamental part of effective serious game practice.

From Play to Practice

ISG is exploring how serious games can be effectively integrated into ESG training and advisory offerings, where these activities can help organisations understand where they stand in terms of ESG compliance, to identify capability gaps, and to move forward in ways where with their own culture and operating realities align with their ESG responsibilities. For organisations navigating ESG’s complexity, serious games and the follow-up discussions can become a practical starting point, and for any advisory activities, a faster, more efficient way to identify and execute strategies while working with and empowering the in-house teams.