Serious Games for Lone Working: Training People Who Work Alone

Two in the morning, a remote electrical substation, one technician on site. No colleague in sight, patchy phone coverage, the gate key in the wrong pocket. If something goes wrong, the decisive variable is not the severity of the event: it is the time that passes before anyone notices.

Lone working extends far beyond the industrial imagination: maintenance staff, drivers, out-of-hours cleaners, field technicians, home-visiting social and healthcare workers, security staff, farmers, anyone staffing a retail unit alone. Traditional training, built around a group answering together, serves them badly.

The problem: deciding without a second opinion

Someone working alone is in a different cognitive position. They must assess, decide and act without the natural corrective of a colleague saying "wait". Three operational consequences:

• No immediate rescue. A minor event can become serious purely because of delayed intervention.
• No cross-check. A misjudgement is intercepted by nobody.
• Psychological load. Prolonged vigilance, exposure to violence, a sense of organisational abandonment.

What the sources say

The UK guidance HSE INDG73 (Protecting lone workers: how to manage the risks of working alone, 2020 revision) states the central point: lone workers face the same hazards at work as anyone else, but there is a greater risk of these hazards causing harm, as they may not have anyone to help or support them if things go wrong. The revision added three significant elements: a section on protecting lone workers from work-related violence, expanded guidance on how managers should keep in touch with lone workers, and new advice on the impact lone working can have on stress, mental health and wellbeing. The guidance is explicit that employers should provide training, supervision, monitoring and support.

On the psychosocial side, EU-OSHA lists isolation among the main risk areas of working away from the team, and ISO 45003:2021 provides guidelines for managing psychosocial risk within an ISO 45001-based system, addressing hazards arising from work organisation, social factors, the work environment, equipment and hazardous tasks.

In Italy the framework is set by Legislative Decree 81/08: the risk assessment under Article 28 covers all risks, including work-related stress; Article 45 requires the employer to take the necessary first aid and emergency medical assistance measures, establishing arrangements with external services, including transport of injured workers. Some activities exclude solo work outright: for confined spaces or spaces suspected of contamination, Article 66 requires the worker entering to be assisted by another person positioned outside.

Why a serious game rather than a course

A course can transmit the alerting procedure. It cannot reproduce the experience of having to decide alone on partial information — which is precisely the competence that needs training.

Evidence on game formats is encouraging though still developing: a randomised controlled field trial published in Annali di Igiene, Medicina Preventiva e di Comunità (La Torre et al., 77 participants) found a positive effect of game-based training on occupational safety knowledge compared with traditional training; a 2025 systematic review with meta-analysis in the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning reports greater potential for serious games and gamification than traditional methods on acquisition, retention and engagement, thanks to the active participation they require.

Designing the serious game

Objectives

Three concrete competences, not generic ones:

1. Recognising the point of no return: the moment when the task must stop because nobody can intervene.
2. Raising the alarm correctly: who to call, in what order, what to say in thirty seconds.
3. Self-protecting in case of aggression or an oncoming health episode: withdraw, report, do not minimise.

Mechanics

• Incomplete-information scenario. The player receives only what they would actually see. No overview, no narrator.
• Implicit timer. Time passes and changes the scenario without an explicit countdown on screen: it reproduces real pressure without turning it into a race.
• Cost of choices. Every decision consumes a resource (battery, light, network coverage, physical energy). Learning comes from the constraint.
• The absent colleague. At intervals the game offers the option to "call" and returns realistic outcomes, including no answer. This dismantles the implicit belief that someone will turn up anyway.
• Replay. The same situation is faced twice under different conditions. Repetition with variation is what consolidates the decision pattern.

Virtual reality is a natural vehicle for these scenarios because it reproduces the restricted field of view and the sense of presence: the design guidance is the one described for VR and 360 video training. But a good tabletop serious game with scenario cards and resource constraints works without any technology.

Debriefing

The game is worth as much as the conversation that follows. Four questions do the work: at what point should you have stopped? What information were you missing and how could you have obtained it earlier? Who did you call and why that person? What in our organisation made the decision harder for you? The last question is the most productive, because it shifts the problem from the individual to the system. The method is that of structured serious game debriefing.

For first aid competences under solo conditions, the first aid and BLS escape room format can be adapted by shrinking the team to one or two people.

How to measure it

Four indicators you can collect without complex instrumentation:

• Simulated alert time: seconds between recognising the anomaly and making the correct call, measured at baseline and after three months.
• Appropriate stop rate: how often, in scenarios where it was required, the task was actually stopped.
• Quality of the emergency message: whether location, nature of the event and condition of the person are present.
• Reports coming from lone workers, monitored as with near miss reporting: if they stay at zero, the channel is not accessible.

Closing

Training people who work alone does not mean making them self-sufficient: it means helping them recognise, earlier, the limit they must not cross, and making the act of asking for help immediate. A serious game is the only format that lets them get that decision wrong without consequences. The rest — contact procedures, man-down alarm devices, return checks — is organisational responsibility, exactly as for the distributed teams described in safety in remote and hybrid work.