Evaluation professionals need to be nimble and innovative in their approaches in order to be relevant and provide useful evidence to decision-makers, stakeholders, and society in the crowded public policy landscape. In this article, we offer serious games as a method that can be employed by evaluators to address three persisting challenges in current evaluation practice: inclusion of stakeholders, understanding of causal mechanisms, and utilization of evaluation findings. We provide a framework that distinguishes among games along two crucial aspects of evaluation inquiry - its function and the nature of the evaluand. We offer examples of successfully implemented games in each set of the four arenas we delineate: teaching knowables, testing retention, crash-testing mechanisms, and exploring systems. We explain how games can be employed to promote learning about and among stakeholders, and to collect valuable intelligence about the operations of programs and policies.

中文翻译：

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通过严肃游戏推进评估实践

评估专业人员在他们的方法中需要灵活和创新，以便在拥挤的公共政策环境中与决策者、利益相关者和社会相关并提供有用的证据。在本文中，我们提供严肃的游戏作为评估者可以用来解决当前评估实践中三个持续挑战的方法：利益相关者的参与、因果机制的理解以及评估结果的利用。我们提供了一个框架，可以根据评估查询的两个关键方面（其功能和被评估对象的性质）区分游戏。我们提供了在我们描绘的四个领域中的每一组中成功实施的游戏示例：教授知识、测试保留、碰撞测试机制和探索系统。