Anja van der Hulst

Name: Anja van der Hulst

Position at UvA:  Lecturer

"I am a coordinator and consultant for the serious gaming research at the Dutch research organisation TNO. Within TNO, about forty people are involved in research and development within the field of serious gaming, with a focus on safety and security, education, healthcare, urban development and mobility.  I did my PhD on discovery learning in simulation and worked at the Defense Laboratory of TNO. During that period, I coordinated the development of a range of games for the military and first responders."

"At the moment, my focus is on the use of serious gaming for complex decision making, either for strategy and policy development or for training. It’s about ‘story living’…  I’ve been working for quite a while in the field of military and first responder training and for us, the use of games is the most exiting and promising development in that field. Our trainees do not handle class based instruction very well, they readily ‘tune out’. They need hands-on experience to learn and, with simulations and games, we  provide them with environments where they can safely experiment and experience. Certainly, when we design games properly, there is no tuning out here. We see frustration, flow and excitement when learning, they actually do live the story."

"Until now, we have educated new TNO employees ourselves in the domain of serious gaming, and the same goes for many of the serious gaming companies in the Netherlands. But we are stretching our limits here, as the market is growing and our international involvement increases.  Hence, with the track Game Studies I hope that the field gets a serious quality boost when more people enter the organisations involved with a solid background in serious gaming design and research. We expect students to be able to design serious games, to create innovative serious gaming concepts and architectures, and to validate such concepts."