atw - International Journal for Nuclear Power | 2.2024

Operation and New Build
35
(according to the category/time frame explained
earlier) so they were also not included in the analysis.
In the end, 96 papers were analyzed. Their content is
summarized in the charts below.
Figure 5 shows that there were a lot of papers focused
on Nuclear VR training without any game aspect to it.
Also, it shows how prevalent papers were regarding
Health and Safety and Academic training.
Fig. 7.
“Five immersive technology categories with the number of papers in each
category indicated in the pie chart and the percentage in the legend
(a total of 44 papers were included in SLR).” (Fracaro et al 2022) [25]
Fig. 5.
The breakdown of 96 papers comparing papers that were focused
on serious games, and those that were focused on VR training.
In Figure 6, we examined the specific combination of
Serious Games and VR. Here we see that the number of
papers focused on VR training with Serious Games is
much lower in total – 45 out of 96 but very noticeably
the Nuclear VR Training with Serious Games is much
lower – just 2 papers compared to 28 for VR alone.
5.3. Virtual Reality Literature Review
Given that a review of VR Literature was done by the
author and others in 2023 [27] , it seems not very helpful
to repeat a full review of VR Literature in general.
Rather, the detailed review will focus more specifically
on papers that involve both Serious Games and VR
research. This is more critical for this review and
topical to the goals of this paper.
However, it is useful to repeat the summary of takeaways
from the previous paper [27] . These are summarized
in Table 4.
5.4. Virtual Reality and Serious Games Literature
Review
When the existing literature was examined for both
Serious Games and VR research, only 31 papers were
found to have both characteristics. These were broadly
categorized into the following areas:
Academic (1)
Oil/Chemical Industry (1)
First Responder (6)
Health/Safety (21)
Nuclear (2)
Fig. 6.
The breakdown of the papers that were just about the
use of Serious Games in academics, and those that used
Serious Games in Academic and Industrial training.
Interestingly, one other literature review paper did a
similar analysis, also showing that the prevalence of
VR combined with Serious Games was very small in
comparison to other training methods as shown in
Figure 7. [25]
As recently as October 2023 a conference on Serious
Games [26] has no mention in the proceedings of any
nuclear focused VR Serious Games so even as recently
as this, there seems to be no focus on this particular
area.
These papers will be examined in more detail below.
5.4.1. Academic
While there are many papers covering VR or Serious
Games for Academic purposes, surprisingly only one
appeared that was involved in both. In “Game-like
Environments for Nuclear Engineering Education
Using GECK” the study interestingly “explores a new
game engine called Garden of Eden Creation Kit (GECK)
to enhance teaching and content retention of some
concepts in nuclear reactor engineering” [28] . While this
can’t fit into the real Nuclear VR/Serious Game category
because its “trainees” were high school students and
college-age students, it does show promise for being
able to identify that this age group has “enormous
Vol. 69 (2024)