Serious games for learning, used in the professional world, link both game and work practices. This issue concerns designers as well as training managers and human resources managers, all interested in transferring and evaluating professional skills. But serious games, simulating interpersonal relationships through notions of fiction, immersion, realism or referentiality, are also reactivating some problems encountered by documentary films. Thesis defended: This thesis suggests that the theory and practice of documentary cinema can serve the educational intent of the designer of serious game to facilitate the acquisition of new skills by the user. Objectives: On the cognitive level, the purpose is to explore the learning related to confrontation of viewpoints (sociocognitive conflict) through serious game on a single-player mode. The associated communicative purpose is to explain the construction of an interlocutor, a fictitious or a real one, who is able to oppose his point of view to the user. In order to meet these objectives, the sociocultural and historical processes of documentary filmmaking will advise different discursive and relational forms of the serious game. Method: 4 configurations of the same serious game EHPAD were tested in a quasi-experimental plan over a period of 5 months, with 250 users from 10 medical institutions. Our investigation is based on self-administered questionnaires and on an activity tracking system. To the statistical treatment arisen from the investigation, 5 focus groups, 3 individual interviews and observational reports are added. Main results: First, a series of theoretical transpositions supports the analogy between serious games and documentary filmmaking. On the empirical side, our investigation confirms this analogy by pointing out that the use of serious games in a professional context is favorable to engage a documentarizing reading. Second, the comparison between the 4 configurations of the game EHPAD demonstrates the significant influence of two narrative figures (mise en abyme and metalepsis) on the increase of "documentarity" and viewpoints confrontation. Finally, our research leads to a "narrato-cognitive grammar" allowing designers to move from a documented to a documentary writing: the targeted competency is no longer confined to fiction but extended by reflexivity to the real enunciators.
