Developing decision-making skills and tactical awareness in rugby union players through user-centred serious games

Abstract

Serious Games have been used as a training and learning tool in a variety of different educational fields with positive results in enhancing skills. However, within the domain of team sports, there is limited research to ascertain if Serious Games can have such an impact on athletes. Existing training methods within team sports remain conventional pitch training, with video analysis and classroom sessions using flip charts. Whilst these methods have proven success, there exists limitations such as availability, costs, content rigidity as well relevance to all experience levels of athletes. Serious games have the potential to overcome these issues with a highly available, low cost, interactive serious game with dynamic content, which could allow players to continue their training off the pitch, as well as being tailored to their own experience level and playing position. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the suitability and effectiveness of Serious Games as a training aid to develop decision-making skills and perceptual-cognitive abilities of Rugby Union players. The research followed 4 objectives: first a systematic literature review on the perceptual-cognitive abilities and decision-making skills in team sports, and specifically Rugby union, to establish the key factors and state-of-the-art approaches for decision-making training in team sports and serious games approaches, to develop a conceptual framework; next a user-centred approach was designed to refine the framework and design a serious game for training rugby union players in decision making, using a key participant group of rugby union experts to inform the design as well as refine the conceptual framework; third, a serious game was implemented based on this design as a proof-of-concept prototype for improving decision-making skills of Rugby Union players; finally, the hypothesis was validated and evaluated with a participant group, using the prototype game, the usability and effectiveness of decision-making training impact were both evaluated. The findings from this found that the serious game was usable and engaging by rugby players and coaches, as well as had a direct impact on the decision-making skills of the participant group, as assessed by proxy by their coaches. Contributions in this thesis include: the Headlights: Conceptual Framework, a Research Artefact & Shieldwall: Rugby (the proof-of-concept prototype), as well as a User-Centred Design Methodology. Findings showed that the user studies’ highlight the potential for serious games to be used as an impactful training aid for rugby union, and other team sports to compliment existing coaching methods which will overcome current issues with existing training methods, whilst providing accessible and adaptive training environments for athletes at all performance levels.