Gordon P. D. Ingram

Tales from the front lines of a large-scale serious game project

Serious games have received much positive attention; correspondingly, many researchers have taken up the challenge of establishing how to best design them. However, the current literature often focuses on best practice design strategies and frameworks. Fine-grained details, contextual descriptions, and organisational factors that are invaluable in helping us to learn from and reflect on project experiences are often overlooked. In this paper, we present five distinct and sometimes competing perspectives that are critical in understanding factors that influence serious game projects: project organisation, technology, domain knowledge, user research, and game design. We explain these perspectives by providing insights from the design and development process of an EU-funded serious game about conflict resolution developed by an interdisciplinary consortium of researchers and industry-based developers. We also point out a set of underlying forces that become evident from viewing the process from different perspectives, to underscore that problems exist in serious game projects and that we should open the conversation about them.

A computational approach towards conflict resolution for serious games

Conflict is an unavoidable feature of life, but the development of conflict resolution management skills can facilitate the parties involved in resolving their conflicts in a positive manner. The goal of our research is to develop a serious game in which children may experiment with conflict resolution strategies and learn how to work towards positive conflict outcomes. While serious games related to conflict exist at present, our work represents the first attempt to teach conflict resolution skills through a game in a manner informed by sociological and psychological theories of conflict and current best practice for conflict resolution. In this paper, we present a computational approach to conflict generation and resolution. We describe the five phases involved in our conflict modeling process: conflict situation creation, conflict detection, player modeling and conflict strategy prediction, conflict management, and conflict resolution, and discuss the three major elements of our player model: assertiveness, cooperativeness, and relationship. Finally, we overview a simple resource management game we have developed in which we have begun experimenting with our conflict model concepts.

From Hitting to Tattling to Gossip: An Evolutionary Rationale for the Development of Indirect Aggression:

Adult humans are characterized by low rates of intra-group physical aggression. Since children tend to be more physically aggressive, an evolutionary developmental account shows promise for explaining how physical aggression is suppressed in adults. I argue that this is achieved partly through extended dominance hierarchies, based on indirect reciprocity and linguistic transmission of reputational information, mediated by indirectly aggressive competition. Reviewing the literature on indirect and related forms of aggression provides three pieces of evidence for the claim that evolutionarily old impulses towards physical aggression are socialized into indirect aggression in humans: (i) physical aggression falls in early childhood over the same age range at which indirect aggression increases; (ii) the same individuals engage in both direct and indirect aggression; and (iii) socially dominant individuals practice indirect aggression more frequently. Consideration of the developmental course of indirect aggression is complemented by analysis of similar developments in verbal behaviors that are not always thought of as aggressive, namely tattling and gossip. An important puzzle concerns why indirect aggression becomes more covert, and tattling more derogated, in preadolescence and adolescence. This may be due to the development of new strategies aimed at renegotiating social identity and friendship alliances in the peer group.

Applying Evolutionary Psychology to a Serious Game about Children's Interpersonal Conflict

This article describes the use of evolutionary psychology to inform the design of a serious computer game aimed at improving 9–12-year-old childrens conflict resolution skills. The design of the game will include dynamic narrative generation and emotional tagging, and there is a strong evolutionary rationale for the effect of both of these on conflict resolution. Gender differences will also be taken into consideration in designing the game. In interview research in schools in three countries (Greece, Portugal, and the UK) aimed at formalizing the game requirements, we found that gender differences varied in the extent to which they applied cross-culturally. Across the three countries, girls were less likely to talk about responding to conflict with physical aggression, talked more about feeling sad about conflict and about conflicts over friendship alliances, and talked less about conflicts in the context of sports or games. Predicted gender differences in anger and reconciliation were not found. Results are interpreted in terms of differing underlying models of friendship that are motivated by parental investment theory. This research will inform the design of the themes that we use in game scenarios for both girls and boys.

Evolutionary Cyberpsychology 2.0: Revisiting Some Old Predictions and Posting Some New Ones in the Age of Facebook

Human interactions are changing in far-reaching ways due to recent developments in Internet and mobile communication technologies, including widespread uptake of Facebook and other online social networks. Cyberpsychology, the study of computer-mediated communication and Internet behavior, is a rapidly developing field that has largely gone unnoticed by evolutionary psychologists. Piazza and Bering (Comput Hum Behav 25:1258–1269, 2009) published a primer aimed at applying evolutionary perspectives to cyberpsychology. We review relevant research published in the interim that bears on these predictions to see how they have fared and determine what still needs to be done to address them. We give particular attention to research on social networking software—an area of cyberpsychology that has exploded in recent years—and offer some new hypotheses that reflect this trend. The chapter is organized around six broad themes from evolutionary psychology: mating, intrasexual competition, parenting and kinship, friendship, personal information management, and trust and social exchange. We discuss the nature of each topic as it applies to Internet behavior, review relevant hypotheses and research, and offer directions for future studies.

Evolutionary developmental explanations of gender differences in interpersonal conflict: A response to Trnka (2013)

In focusing on gender differences in anger expression, Trnka (2013) provides a useful complement to the article by Ingram et al., (2012) analyzing gender differences in childrens narratives about peer conflict. I agree that gender differences in anger are more likely to be the result of differential socialization processes regarding the expression of anger than by innate differences in the experience of anger. Gender differences in intersexual anger and aggression are likely to be affected by the social context, and especially whether a female is interacting with a romantic partner or an unknown male. The implication of socialization in anger expression raises the possibility that culture plays a causal role in encouraging cooperative breeding by inhibiting inter-female aggressive displays. Another of Trnkas proposals, that the expression of anger contributes to reconciliation and inhibits long-term relationship damage, is intuitively plausible and supported by the research literature, but not by data from the current study.