Serious Games and Participatory Risk Assessment: Letting the People Who Know the Job Speak

Risk assessment: paperwork or process?

In many companies risk assessment happens behind a closed door. The prevention and protection officer collects floor plans, safety data sheets and old minutes, fills in the document and takes it to be signed. The result is formally correct and substantially mute: it describes work as someone imagines it is done, not as it is actually done.

Italy's Legislative Decree 81/2008 assigns risk assessment to the employer as a non-delegable duty (art. 17) and provides for the risk assessment document in art. 28. But "non-delegable" does not mean "solitary": the workers' safety representative must be consulted in advance on the risk assessment (art. 50). The law opens a space for participation that in practice often remains formal.

If you need a refresher on the structural elements of the document, start with how a company risk assessment document is built.

Why participation is not an add-on

The Guidance on risk assessment at work published in 1996 by the European Commission (DG Employment) is clear on this point: according to the EU-OSHA fact sheet that summarises it, hazard identification and the adoption of control measures must be based on the participation and consultation of all those who work in the workplace, in particular workers and their representatives. EU-OSHA has confirmed that these provisions remain relevant.

The reason is practical before it is legal. The person doing the job knows:

• the shortcuts taken when the line is running late;
• the tools that "never work" and the improvised fixes that replace them;
• the points where PPE comes off because it gets in the way;
• the near misses nobody ever wrote down.

This information does not emerge in a face-to-face interview. It emerges when people have a safe setting, a concrete task and a reason to speak. That is exactly what a well-designed playful format provides.

How a participatory assessment workshop works

A workshop of this kind usually lasts half a day and involves 8–12 people per department, with the prevention officer and the workers' safety representative present as facilitators, not examiners. The typical structure has four phases.

Phase 1 — Hazard mapping

The department floor plan is laid out on the table. Each participant receives markers and places them wherever they perceive a hazard, with no initial discussion. The resulting map is already data: clusters of markers show where risk perception is shared, isolated markers show knowledge held by a single person.

Phase 2 — Scenario cards

Cards are handed out describing short, plausible situations: a breakdown, an urgent delivery, a new colleague, missing PPE. Groups must say what would really happen in their department. The cards move the conversation from self-justification to technical narrative.

Phase 3 — Voting on priorities

Each participant has a limited number of votes to assign to the hazards identified. The constraint forces a hierarchy and makes visible the disagreements between shifts, roles and levels. Those disagreements are working material for the prevention officer, not a nuisance.

Phase 4 — Simulating the measures

For the top three or four hazards voted, groups propose measures and then "play" them: what happens to the work cycle, to timing, to quality? This is where you discard measures that look obvious on paper and would be worked around on day one.

The value of the workshop is consolidated in the closing discussion. On running that phase it is worth reading debriefing after a safety serious game.

Digital tools: the OiRA lesson

Not everything has to be analogue. EU-OSHA's OiRA platform (Online interactive Risk Assessment) offers free sector-specific tools for micro and small enterprises, derived from the Dutch RI&E tool, with the stated aim of "demystifying" risk assessment. According to EU-OSHA's Consolidated Annual Activity Report 2025, in 2025 OiRA passed 334,000 users and more than 568,000 risk assessments carried out.

The interesting point for workshop designers is not the software itself but its premise: risk assessment becomes accessible when it is broken down into questions that the people doing the work can understand. That is the same principle as the scenario cards.

What the scientific evidence says — and does not say

Methodological honesty is required. The scoping review by Rivière and colleagues, published in JMIR Serious Games in 2025 (13:e66913) and devoted to serious games for preventing musculoskeletal disorders in occupational settings, identified about 2,700 records and included 15 studies.

Two conclusions are useful for our topic:

1. Serious games designed through collaborative and iterative processes involving end users and domain experts turn out to be pedagogically more solid. Co-design with workers is not a participatory flourish: it is a quality factor of the tool itself.
2. The authors report a substantial gap in empirical evidence on effectiveness and widespread methodological limitations in the available studies.

In operational terms: we can state that involvement improves design, but we cannot promise quantified reductions in accidents. The correct way to present a playful workshop to management is as a tool for collecting information that is otherwise inaccessible, with internal indicators to be measured over time.

Mistakes to avoid

• Turning the game into an exam. If participants suspect their answers will end up in an individual appraisal, they will stay silent.
• Letting the department head run the workshop. Direct hierarchical presence suppresses exactly the information you are looking for.
• Giving nothing back. If after three months nobody knows what happened to the proposals, the second workshop will not work.
• Confusing participation with delegation. Responsibility stays with the employer: the workshop feeds the decision, it does not replace it.
• Stopping at the event. An isolated annual workshop produces less than a continuous flow of reports, as experience with gamified near miss reporting shows.

From the game table to the document

The output must be translated into usable form: a list of hazards with department and role, voted priorities, proposed measures with the outcome of the simulation, disagreements left open. This material enters the assessment process as a documented source, is discussed with the workers' safety representative during prior consultation, and feeds the update of the document.

The success criterion is simple: if a department operator rereading the document recognises their own job, the workshop worked.