Introducing Gamification in Professional Training

The incorporation of game elements in non-game contexts is a subject of interest in various sectors, such as business, marketing, engineering, medicine, and military. Gamification and serious games have been involved in the rapid adaptation of professional training. The main goal of game thinking is to motivate and engage learners by using game-like techniques. This paper introduces gamification as an innovative approach for police officers to develop the required competencies for upholding the ethics, principles, and values that the Ecuadorian institution and society demand of them. The aim of gamification is to improve the quality and efficiency of the transfer from theory to real-life practice in police training. The paper focuses on the use of technology in a gamified virtual learning environment that simulates scenarios based upon common incidents reported to Ecuadorian police. The evaluation was conducted with 50 police officers. Our initial evaluation demonstrates that gamification has the potential to be scaled to force-wide proportions. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.