Serious games and virtual environments are increasingly used for emergency management training and research. The development of these technologies seems to contribute to a solution to some problems in the existing literature on emergency management which is mainly based on case study research. However, using virtual technology for research also introduces new difficulties. This paper describes the advantages and drawbacks of using serious games for research and reviews eight recently published

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... tudies that make use of virtual environments. The review focuses on the external validity of serious games as this is a challenging issues for research that involves virtual environments. The paper concludes with some recommendations to increase the external validity of future research with serious games.