Game-based, gamified, and gamefully designed assessments for employee selection: Definitions, distinctions, design, and validation

Reflecting practitioner efforts to improve existing psychometric assessments, a new games-related class of assessments and assessment design approaches has emerged, and research is beginning to examine it as well. Understanding this class of assessments requires understanding of three major terms. First, game-based assessment refers to an assessment method in which job candidates are players participating in a core gameplay loop while trait information is inferred. Second, gameful design refers to practices by assessment professionals using game mechanics or other game concepts to guide their decision-making in assessment design. Third, gamification refers to practices by assessment professionals changing existing assessments by adding game mechanics and applying game concepts to them. Whereas game-based assessment is itself an assessment method, the other two are (re)design strategies. In this review, we explore these distinctions in finer terms, describe the game design and development processes necessary to create a functional game-based assessment, describe theoretical and practical concerns related to the use or addition of game mechanics in traditional assessment methods, and present evaluation guidelines for the entire assessment class. Overall, we conclude that the future of games-related assessment is promising, but further progress will require a focus on interdisciplinary understanding and much greater integration of design and development into assessment theory.