Rilla Khaled

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.

Towards Player Adaptivity in a Serious Game for Conflict Resolution

We present a technology demonstrator for an adaptive serious game for teaching conflict resolution and discuss the research questions associated with the project. The prototype is a single-player 3D mini-game which simulates a resource management conflict scenario. In order to teach the player how to resolve this type of conflict, the underlying system generates level content automatically which adapts to player experience and behaviour. Preliminary results demonstrate the efficiency of the procedural content generation mechanism in guiding the training of players towards targeted learning objectives.

Muse-based game design

Game design and user experience (UX) design both centre on the design of experiences. But whereas it is par for the course for end-user perspectives to be included during early design stages in UX, there is little methodological support or research into how to incorporate player perspectives into early stages of game design. In this paper, we introduce muse-based game design, an experimental empathic design approach foregrounding a dialogic artist -- muse relationship between a game designer and player. Following a user research stage focused on learning about the player, the designer forms idiosyncratic design constraints inspired by and relating to the player, which are then used to inspire ideation. To understand the consequences, advantages, and disadvantages of this approach, we discuss findings from two years of application of this style of game design in a Masters-level class of game design students at the IT University of Copenhagen.

Involving players earlier in the game design process using cultural probes

This paper reports on how the cultural probes method was used to generate games. The paper reviews cultural probes and how we applied the method. It also provides a detailed description of the probes designed for this project and how the output informed the design process. We have used a user-centered methodology with game related content at the stage of conceptualization for a digital game, with a mixed audience (parent-children) to gain insights into what game elements would interest them or motivate them to play. In the paper, researchers and designers of games or other interactive media can find inspiration for their own probes or decide whether or not to use cultural probes in their own projects. The cultural probes approach can be applied to evoke personal, situated responses from the participants, responses that may serve as concrete focus points for group brainstorming of game mechanics and themes. It is important to discuss these types of approaches in the games community. Game design as a practice is still relatively under-documented compared to other design discipline. Although similar methodological experiments have taken place, we have not encountered any in-depth reports involving cultural probes yet.

Modelling Global Pattern Formations for Collaborative Learning Environments

We present our research towards the design of a computational framework capable of modelling the formation and evolution of global patterns (i.e. group structures) in a population of social individuals. The framework is intended to be used in collaborative environments, e.g. social serious games and computer simulations of artificial societies. The theoretical basis of our research, together with current state of the art and future work, are briefly introduced.