Research related to Serious Games

Peter Hastings
peterwh@cdm.depaul.edu
DePaul University
College of Computing and Digital Media
School of Computing
243 S. Wabash
Chicago IL 60604

1Research directions

• Learning Science principles [Bransford et al., 2000]
  • Connect to prior knowledge
  • Information delivery? Not!
  • Constructivism
  • Active learning
    • Learner is actively involved with the info to be learned
    • and thinking about thinking (metacognition)
  • Reflection
  • Assessment: To present new info at appropriate level, must know what student knows.
  • Zone of proximal development
  • Facts: an important base for higher-level knowledge
  • Experts vs novices
    • Qualitative differences in perception, knowledge retrieval, choice of action
    • Expert blindsight
  • Transfer
    • Abstraction: learn aspects of situation which allow new knowledge to apply at all and only appropriate situations.
    • Vertical, horizontal, near and far
  • Learning is hard work!
  • Motivation is critical!
• Cognitive architectures (e.g. (Act-R, Soar)
  • About decision making
  • Rules: IF conditions DO actions
  • Facts, rules have context-sensitive activation levels
  • Learning through:
    • adjusting activations on facts, rules
    • being told
    • production compilation
  • Learning must include not only what to do, but when to do it.
• Intelligent Tutoring Systems
  • Projects
    • Select-a-kibitzer [Wiemer-Hastings and Graesser, 2000] / StoryStation [Robertson and Wiemer-Hastings, 2002,Robertson et al., 2004]
    • Research Methods Tutor / AutoTutor [Wiemer-Hastings et al., 2003,Wiemer-Hastings et al., 2004,Wiemer-Hastings, 2004]
    • LispTutor Jr
  • Principles
    • Can be significant gender differences [Robertson and Wiemer-Hastings, 2002]
    • Learning even if tutor doesn't deeply assess student [Graesser et al., 1999,Graesser et al., 2003]
    • Model tracing possible for student modeling
• e-learning (Clark and Mayer) [Clark and Mayer, 2002]
  • Multimedia
  • Contiguity
  • Modality
  • Redundancy
  • Coherence
  • Personalization
• Gee's principles of learning from games [Gee, 2003]
  

  Active, critical learning	Design	Semiotic
  Semiotic domains	Metalevel thinking about semiotic domains	Psychosocial moratorium
  Committed learning	Identity	Self-knowledge
  Amplification of input	Achievement	Practice
  Ongoing learning	Regime of competence	Probing
  Multiple routes	Situated meaning	Text
  Intertextual	Multimodal	Material intelligence
  Intuitive knowledge Subset	Incremental	Concentrated sample
  Bottom-up basic skills	Explicit info on-demand and just-in-time	Discovery
  Transfer	Cultural models about the world	Cultural models about learning
  Cultural models about semiotic domains	Distributed	Dispersed
  Affinity group	Insider

• Hickey's principles for design of serious games
  • Support situative embodiment in academic knowledge
    • where personally meaningful activities and coherent narratives foster collective engagement
  • Offer multiple levels and forms of meaningful assessment
    • and opportunity to try, fail, try again
  • Provide useful feedback
    • used to enhance participation, learning, curricula
• Emotion theories
  • Appraisal theory ([Scherer et al., 2001])
    • 16 dimensional appraisal frame represents emotion (reaction to event)
    • Ditto for mood
    • Combine to get feeling
    • Current effort to include in Soar (Marinier)
    • Connection to motivation?
  • Ahn & Picard's Affective Cognitive Learning and Decision-making [Ahn and Picard, 2005,ACLD]
• Motivation theories
  • Flow ([Csikszentmihalyi, 1990])
    • Total absorption in activity
    • Balance of demands and capabilities
  • Self-determination [Deci and Ryan, 2000a,Deci and Ryan, 2000b]
    • Intrinsic motivation from inherent need to be active
    • Influenced by needs for competence, autonomy, relatedness (connection to others)
    • External motivation can be internalized
  • Terror-management theory (Greenberg et al)
• Persuasive technology (aka Captology) [Fogg, 2003]
  • Computers as:
    • Tools
    • Media (simulations)
    • Social actors
  • As Tools, persuasion by...
    • simplifying / reduction, e.g. one click shopping
    • guiding / tunneling: leading through a series of steps, like in tax program, program installation
    • customizing: recommendations
    • intervening / suggesting: especially at right time (kairos)
    • monitoring: Self-monitoring, like weight, skillometer?
    • surveilling: Subject must realize they're being surveilled, otherwise, it's not persuasion.
    • reinforcing: operant conditioning, "computer games are purest form of operant conditioning"
  • As Media, persuasion by ...
    • cause / effect simulation
    • virtual reality spaces
    • object simulations (crying baby, drunken driving)
  • As Social actors, persuasion by ...
    • physical cues
    • psychological cues
    • language cues
    • social dynamics
    • social roles
• Social business
  • Profit-Motivated Businesses (PMBs) are all about making profits, not benefiting people
  • Mohammed Yunus suggests establing businesses which are self-sustaining, but where success is defined in terms of their social benefits.
  • There is no obvious connection to games here, but I like it as a model of how academic projects might achieve larger impact.

2  Some Serious games

• Quest Atlantis
• ELECT Bilat
  • Training for negotiation in Iraq
  • Preparation phase: access various resources which inform your approach.
  • Negotiation phase: interact with animated agent, choosing your utterances and gestures from a menu. A coach makes hints about what you should do.
  • After action review: View the timeline of the negotiation, step through, and see how your actions affected trust level. A tutor gives feedback on what you did.

3  Game-creation environments

• GameMaker
• Torque
• Unity
• Cinema 4D
• Blender
• Second Life
• Unreal Tournament
• Source, used by Half Life

References

[Ahn and Picard, 2005]

Ahn, H. and Picard, R. (2005). Affective cognitive learning and decision making: A motivational reward framework for affective agents. In Affective computing and intelligent interaction, volume 3784. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg.

[Bransford et al., 2000]

Bransford, J., Brown, A., and Cocking, R., editors (2000). How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. National Academic Press, expanded edition.

[Clark and Mayer, 2002]

Clark, R. and Mayer, R. (2002). e-Learning and the Science of Instruction: Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning. Pfeiffer.

[Csikszentmihalyi, 1990]

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper and Row.

[Deci and Ryan, 2000a]

Deci, E. and Ryan, R. (2000a). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55:68-78.

[Deci and Ryan, 2000b]

Deci, E. and Ryan, R. (2000b). The "what" and "why" of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11:227-268.

[Fogg, 2003]

Fogg, B. J. (2003). Persuasive Technology. Morgan Kaufmann.

[Gee, 2003]

Gee, J. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. Palgrave Macmillan.

[Graesser et al., 2003]

Graesser, A., Jackson, G., Mathews, E., Mitchell, H., Olney, A., Ventura, M., Chipman, P., Franceschetti, D., Hu, X., Louwerse, M., Person, N., and TRG (2003). Why/autotutor: A test of learning gains from a physics tutor with natural language dialog. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Mahwah, NJ. Erlbaum.

[Graesser et al., 1999]

Graesser, A., Wiemer-Hastings, K., Wiemer-Hastings, P., Kreuz, R., and the TRG (1999). Autotutor: A simulation of a human tutor. Journal of Cognitive Systems Research, 1:35-51.

[Robertson et al., 2004]

Robertson, J., Cross, B., MacLeod, H., and Wiemer-Hastings, P. (2004). Children's interactions with animated agents in an intelligent tutoring system. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 14:335-357.

[Scherer et al., 2001]

Scherer, K., Schorr, A., and Johnstone, T., editors (2001). Appraisal Processes in Emotion: Theory, Methods, Research. Oxford University Press.

[Robertson and Wiemer-Hastings, 2002]

Robertson, J. and Wiemer-Hastings, P. (2002). Feedback on children's stories via multiple interface agents. In Cerri, S., Gouarderes, G., and Paraguacu, F., editors, Proceedings of the 6th Annual Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, pages 923-932. Springer.

[Wiemer-Hastings, 2004]

Wiemer-Hastings, P. (2004). The design and architecture of research methods tutor, a second generation dialog-based tutor. In Proceedings of the ITS2004 Workshop on Dialog-based Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Maciao, Brazil. Available at http://reed.cs.depaul.edu/peterwh/papers/its2004ws.pdf.

[Wiemer-Hastings et al., 2004]

Wiemer-Hastings, P., Allbritton, D., and Arnott, E. (2004). RMT: A dialog-based research methods tutor with or without a head. In Proceedings of the ITS2004 Seventh International Conference, Berlin. Springer. Available at http://reed.cs.depaul.edu/peterwh/papers/its2004.pdf.

[Wiemer-Hastings et al., 2003]

Wiemer-Hastings, P., Allbritton, D., Efron, J., and Arnott, E. (2003). Research methods tutoring in the classroom. In AIED2003 - Supplementary Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, pages 388 - 392, Sydney. University of Sydney. Available at http://reed.cs.depaul.edu/peterwh/papers/2003aiedwsrmt.pdf.

[Wiemer-Hastings and Graesser, 2000]

Wiemer-Hastings, P. and Graesser, A. (2000). Select-a-kibitzer: A computer tool that gives meaningful feedback on student compositions. Interactive Learning Environments, 8(2):149-169.