Serious Games for Enhancing Law Enforcement Agencies: From Virtual Reality to Augmented Reality (Security Informatics and Law Enforcement)

This book provides a comprehensive and practically minded introduction into serious games for law enforcement agencies. Serious games offer wide ranging benefits for law enforcement with applications from professional trainings to command-level decision making to the preparation for crises events. This book explains the conceptual foundations of virtual and augmented reality, gamification and simulation. It further offers practical guidance on the process of serious games development from user requirements elicitation to evaluation. The chapters are intended to provide principles, as well as hands-on knowledge to plan, design, test and apply serious games successfully in a law enforcement environment. A diverse set of case studies showcases the enormous variety that is possible in serious game designs and application areas and offers insights into concrete design decisions, design processes, benefits and challenges. The book is meant for law enforcement professionals interested incommissioning their own serious games as well as game designers interested in collaborative pedagogy and serious games for the law enforcement and security sector.

Babak Akhgar is Professor of Informatics and Director of CENTRIC (Centre of Excellence in Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence and Organized Crime Research) at Sheffield Hallam University, UK and Fellow of the British Computer Society. He has more than 130 refereed publications in international journals and conferences on strategic information systems with specific focus on knowledge management (KM) and intelligence management. He is member of editorial boards of several international journals and has acted as Chair and Program Committee Member for numerous international conferences. He has extensive and hands-on experience in the development, management and execution of KM-projects and large international security initiatives (e.g., the application of social media in crisis management, intelligence-based combating of terrorism and organized crime, gun crime, cyber-crime and cyber terrorism and cross-cultural ideology polarization). In addition to this, he acts as technicallead in EU security projects (e.g., the EU H2020-project TENSOR on dark web). He has co-edited numerous books on Intelligence Management; for instance, “Emerging Trends in ICT Security”, “Application of Big Data for National Security”, “Open Source Intelligence Investigation” and “Combatting Cybercrime and Cyberterrorism”. Prof Akhgar is board member of the European Organisation for Security (EOS) and member of the academic advisory board of SAS UK.