David Panzoli

Game engines selection framework for high-fidelity serious applications

Serious games represent the state-of-the-art in the convergence of electronic gaming technologies with instructional design principles and pedagogies. Despite the value of high-fidelity content in engaging learners and providing realistic training environments, building games which deliver high levels of visual and functional realism is a complex, time consuming and expensive process. Therefore, commercial game engines, which provide a development environment and resources to more rapidly create high-fidelity virtual worlds, are increasingly used for serious as well as for entertainment applications. Towards this intention, the authors propose a new framework for the selection of game engines for serious applications and sets out five elements for analysis of engines in order to create a benchmarking approach to the validation of game engine selection. Selection criteria for game engines and the choice of platform for Serious Games are substantially different from entertainment games, as Serious Games have very different objectives, emphases and technical requirements. In particular, the convergence of training simulators with serious games, made possible by increasing hardware rendering capacity is enabling the creation of high-fidelity serious games, which challenge existing instructional approaches. This paper overviews several game engines that are suitable for high-fidelity serious games, using the proposed framework.

Communication system and team situation awareness in a multiplayer real-time learning environment: application to a virtual operating room

Digital multi-player learning games are believed to represent an important step forward in risk management training, especially related to human factors, where they are trusted to improve the performance of a team of learners in reducing serious adverse events, near-misses and crashes in complex socio-technical systems. Team situation awareness is one of the critical factors that can lead the team to consider the situation with an erroneous mental representation. Then, inadequate decisions are likely to be made regarding the actual situation. This paper describes an innovative communication system designed to be used in digital learning games. The system aims at enabling the learners to share information and build a common representation of the situation to help them take appropriate actions, anticipate failures, identify, reduce or correct errors. This innovative system is neither based on voice-chat nor branching dialogues, but on the idea that pieces of information can be manipulated as tangible objects in a virtual environment. To that end, it provides a handful of graphic interactions allowing users to collect, memorize, exchange, listen and broadcast information, ask and answer questions, debate and vote. The communication system was experimented on a healthcare training context with students and their teacher. The training scenario is set in a virtual operating room and features latent critical events (wrong-patient or wrong-side surgery). Teams have to manage such a critical situation, detect anomalies hidden in the environment and share them to make the most suitable decision. Analyzing the results demonstrated the efficacy of the communication system as per the ability for the players to actually exchange information, build a common representation of the situation and make collaborative decisions accordingly. The communication system was considered user-friendly by the users and successfully exposed lifelike behaviors such as debate, conflict or irritation. More importantly, every matter or implicit disagreement was raised while playing the game and led to an argued discussion, although eventually the right decision was not always taken by the team. So, improving the gameplay should help theplayers to manage a conflict and to make them agree on the most suitable decision.

3D Real-Time Collaborative Environment to Learn Teamwork and Non-technical Skills in the Operating Room

Risk-management training in the operating room (OR) can be achieved by involving learners in a simulated risky situation. The task is particularly complex because most of the time, the causes of an accident or an adverse event imply a large variety of contributing factors that are (i) difficult to combine artificially and (ii) even harder to detect and evaluate in a dynamic training context. This paper describes a model for specifying pedagogical objectives that has been integrated and used in a 3D virtual operating room project designed to train medical staff on risk management, particularly risks linked to communication default. Training sessions organized with trainers, student-anesthetist-nurses, student-operating-nurse and student-anesthetists show how teamwork efficiency in critical situations may be evaluated in a collaborative environment.

Serious Games Scenario Modeling for Non-experts

The use of serious games and gamified softwares is a new and growing trend for training professionals in a wide variety of disciplines where procedures and decision-making are key (automotive diagnostic, surgery, etc). Serious Games are safer, less expensive and advocated to be more efficient. Unfortunately, there is a lack of methodology and tools adapted for non-computing experts to develop their own gamified learning scenarios. In this paper, we propose an approach allowing trainers to model professional activities in the form of serious games scenarios. Trainers are enabled to express their expertise using a domain specific graphical representation which will be implemented eventually in an easy-to-use authoring tool. The produced scenarios describe both the actions necessary for completing the professional procedure and the associated pedagogy to provide the learner with relevant educational feedback. The proposed approach specifies a model matching those requirements, and is illustrated by an application example in the automotive context. We intend to demonstrate that an appropriate model is likely to make scenario editing accessible to trainers who are not necessarily familiar with computer modeling in the first place.

Learning mechanical engineering in a virtual workshop: A preliminary study on utilisability, utility and acceptability

With the recent development of virtual reality (VR) technology, a variety of new tools can be imagined. This article presents a preliminary study on the use of VR for immersive learning games in the field of mechanical engineering. We present the design of such a game and the results of the experiments that followed the implementation of the game. This study was conducted with teachers and students from an undergraduate school of Mechanical Engineering and focuses on utility, usability and acceptability.

Making Decisions in a Virtual Operating Room

Immersive Serious Games are collaborative virtual environments where learners are enabled to follow scripted educational activities by interacting in the virtual environment. The joint activity of several users requires the ability to make collective decisions, ideally preceded by an argumentation. During a decision process, opinions are given, arguments are used to back up the opinions, and a decision is made accordingly (or not). One critical feature of a serious game concerns the evaluation of the learners during, or most currently after, the game session. From an educational point of view, this evaluation considers that the argumentation preceding the decision is more important than the decision itself. Yet, the argumentation usually escapes the understanding of the game since the users argue verbally. Channeling the decision making within the boundaries of what a game or a computer system is able to comprehend is an important challenge in immersive learning games. In order to do so, we present the decision feature that we have developed and introduced in a learning game called 3D Virtual Operating Room. Users are enabled to collect information pertaining to the virtual environment. By means of a dedicated activity, users are enabled to make collaborative decisions with as much expressiveness as in real life, that is: expressing their opinion and advancing arguments supporting their opinions; or, should they be convinced by others, changing their mind and withdrawing their arguments. The decision system has been experimented by multiple teams of players and its usefulness has been highlighted by qualitative results. Future work aims to provide further evidence that the collaborative decision system is apt for assessment in a pedagogical context.

Constrained control of non-playing characters using Monte Carlo Tree Search

In this paper, we apply the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) method for controlling at once several virtual characters in a 3D multi-player learning game. The MCTS is used as a search algorithm to explore a search space where every potential solution reflects a specific state of the game environment. Functions representing the interaction abilities of each character are provided to the algorithm to leap from one state to another. We show that the MCTS algorithm successfully manages to plan the actions for several virtual characters in a synchronized fashion, from the initial state to one or more desirable end states. Besides, we demonstrate the ability of this algorithm to fulfill a specific requirement of a learning game AI : guiding the non player characters to follow a predefined and constrained learning scenario and, if necessary, to adapt their decision to unexpected events in the simulation.

Virtual customers in a multiagent training application

Format-Store is a serious game application designed for training salesmen and managers in the context of a retail store or a larger supermarket. In this paper, we argue that a relevant way to train a salesperson to their daily activities (e.g. customer relationship management, store management and stock control) consists in immersing them in a 3d environment populated with realistic virtual customers. The first part of this paper presents the multiagent approach we apply to the design of the intelligent customers. Specifically, we analyse the contribution of the interaction-oriented methodology Ioda in facilitating the conception of a game for non computer-scientists by means of a user-friendly design tool and the automated implementation of the conceptual model. The second part describes the organisation of the game around scenarios modelled with respect to the pedagogical requirements. We discuss how the multiagent simulation is wrapped by several modules for the purpose of controlling the learning experience of the player.

Beyond Reactive Systems: An Associative Memory for Sensory-Driven Intelligent Behavior

Searching to reproduce intelligence by the mean of modelling cognitive abilities has been a trend of artificial intelligence research for over fifty years. With respect to this, the relatively limited advances of this last decade suggest that new areas of consideration need to be investigated. In particular, nouvelle AI, which originates from a more ecological approach, claims a critical part for solving issues around embodiment. In this paper, we hypothesise that intelligent behaviour can be obtained without the need for cognitive modelling. Towards exploring this, we propose a model for a connectionist controller where an associative memory is used to enhance the adaptation of an autonomous agent operating in a complex environment. Initial experiments yield promising results, and we have found that simple agents show intelligent behaviour.

A Method to Design a Multi-player Scenario to Experiment Risk Management in a Digital Collaborative Learning Game: A Case of Study in Healthcare

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest for collaborative training in risk management. One of the critical point is to create educational and entirely controlled training environments that support industrial companies (in aviation, healthcare, nuclear...) or hospitals to train (future or not) professionals. The aim is to improve their teamwork performance making them understand the importance applying or adjusting safety recommendations. In this article, we present a method to design multi-player educational scenario for risk management in a socio-technical and dynamic context. The socio-technical situations focused in this article involve non-technical skills such as teamwork, communication, leadership, decision-making and situation awareness. The method presented here has been used to design as well regular situations as well as critical situations in which deficiencies already exist or mistakes can be freely made and fixed by the team in a controlled digital environment.