Serious Game Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

This paper presents the results obtained with the implementation of a series of learning activities based on Mobile Serious Games (MSGs) for the development of problem solving and collaborative skills in Chilean 8th grade students. Three MSGs were developed and played by teams of four students in order to solve problems collaboratively. A quasi-experimental design was used. The data shows that the experimental group achieved a higher perception of their own collaboration skills and a higher score in the plan execution dimension of the problem solving cycle than did the non-equivalent control group, revealing that MSG-based learning activities may contribute to such learning improvements. This challenges future research to identify under which conditions learning activities based on mobile serious games can promote the development of higher order skills.

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- Experimental Design, Higher Order Thinking, Problem Solving, Computers in Education
- by eric sanchez
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- Engineering, Higher Education, Game Design, Digital Culture

A major challenge in todays fast pace world is the acquisition of competence in a timely and efficient manner, whilst keeping the individual highly motivated. This paper presents a novel based on the use of serious games driven by Case Based Reasoning (CBR) tailored by Threshold Concepts (TC) to present the learner with the most efficient choice of game scenarios to address their present competence gap. This allows the learner to maximise their time in competence development. This is current work-in-progress.

- by W. Seager and +2
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- Serious Game, Use Case, Competence Development

Serious games are emerging as an important outgrowth of the video gaming in-dustry. Entertaining games, such as Flight Simulator and SimCity, are already in use in schools and universities across the country, and the number of serious... more

- by Atsusi Hirumi
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- Computer Science, Instructional Design, Game Design, Game Based Learning

History subject plays a vital role in instilling the spirits of patriotism among the students; to nourish and instill love and loyalty to one's country and to be a true citizen.The lack of creativity in history teaching caused students to become bored and lose interest in the subject.Digital games, an interactive technology can foster learning process effectively and interestingly especially among young learners. Digital Game Based Learning (DGBL) approach utilizes the game as a medium for conveying learning contents. There are many models for educational games development which combined the Instructional Design (ID) and game development process. However, there is still a conflict on how to merge ID and game development effectively. Therefore, we looked into the pedagogy and game design aspects. We then propose a DGBL model for History educational games design and a developmentmethodology which combined the ID and game development process, named DGBL-ID model. The DGBL-ID model consists of five phases: analysis, design, development, quality assurance as well as implementation and evaluation.

- by Nor Azan Mat Zin
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- Computer Science, Instructional Design, Game Design, Video Game

Interactive navigable 3D visualisations of built and natural environments have become commonplace in design and planning of urban environments and landscapes, and are regarded as potent prototyping and communication tools. In training applications, for instance for fire fighters, virtual environments displayed on desktop monitors or on projection screens are used to represent situations and scenarios that cannot be created in

- by J. Houtkamp
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- Mental Representation, Virtual Environment, Text, Urban Environment

Citizens are not aware of water quality issues and their impact on the environment. It was this finding that motivated a project that aimed to design a game to educate users on water quality issues. Design Science Research (DSR) methodology was adopted for the development of the water quality awareness game, which focuses on ocean plastic pollution. This paper reports the usability of the game and the increase in knowledge and awareness of ocean plastic pollution of users. The main findings revealed that whilst initial knowledge of ocean plastic pollution was low among the participants, their knowledge increased after playing the game. The participants found the game to be "enjoyable", "informative" and "eye opening", but that they would have preferred more variability in difficulty levels. This study provides valuable lessons learnt and demonstrates that gamification can be used to educate citizens of water quality.

- by Brenda Scholtz
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- Water quality, Evaluation, Awareness, Serious Game

In a world of ever-increasing and newly discovered complexities, and rapidly expanding data sets describing man-made and natural phenomena, information visualization offers a means of structuring and enabling interpretation of these data in the context of that complexity. Advances in graphics hardware, art asset pipelines and parallelized computational platforms offer unprecedented potential. However, harnessing this potential to good effect is challenging and requires the integration of skills from the arts and social sciences to support scientific endeavor in the physical and life sciences. Here, we consider those skills and describe four case studies that highlight interoperation among disciplines at this arts-science-social science interface.

- by Mark Shovman and +3
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- Information Visualization, Visual Analytics, Complex Systems, Life Sciences

The creation process in digital art relies often on collaborations between an artist (or group of artists) and a multidisciplinary team. This collaboration implies a multidisciplinary work involving art, science, technology, design,... more

Game-based approaches to learning are increasingly recognized for their potential to stimulate intrinsic motivation amongst learners. While a range of examples of effective serious games exist, creating high-fidelity content with which to populate games is resource-intensive task. To reduce this resource requirement, research is increasingly exploring means to reuse and repurpose existing games. Education has proven a popular application area for Adaptive Hypermedia (AH), as adaptation can offer enriched learning experiences. Whilst content has mainly been in the form of rich text, various efforts have been made to integrate serious games into AH. However, there is little in the way of effective integrated authoring and user modeling support. This paper explores avenues for effectively integrating serious games into AH. In particular, we consider authoring and user modeling aspects in addition to integration into run-time adaptation engines, thereby enabling authors to create AH tha...

- by Sylvester Arnab
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- Adaptive Hypermedia, Serious Game, Learning Experience

Borrowing from film and filmmaking styles, techniques and devices that manipulate spectators ’ attention and experience, this paper proposes an approach to inform design of games and gameplay to manipulate player’s focus of attention and encourage contemplation – in design features, characters, story elements, etc. or even break the player’s engaged attention in the game/virtual world altogether – to provide meaning, experience and opportunities for learning. Focusing on film styles alternative to the continuity style of Hollywood filmmaking, we discuss examples of design for contemplative gameplay in game-based learning environments/serious games, machinima and augmented and mixed reality games in previous, current and future projects. We propose that one goal of game design is to establish a rhythm between contemplation and engagement, and the appropriate rhythm is determined largely by a game’s genre, platform and/or narrative.

- by Peichi Chung
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- Film Theory, Serious Games, Game Design, Machinima
- by Joske Houtkamp
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- Mental Representation, Virtual Environment, Text, Urban Environment

In this paper we propose a mixed reality system (MRS) and an adaptation module for rehabilitation of the upper limb after stroke through serious games. Aim of the system is to increase intensity and number of training session using the fun factor as driver. Although our system is targeting post stroke patient it is necessary to validate and test our approach with valid users at the first stage to provide patients with stable system to use. These studies and their results are described in this paper.

- by Abdelkader Gouaich
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- Stroke rehabilitation, Mixed Reality, Virtual Reality, Adaptive modulation

The majority of nursing curriculums continue to relate experiences and examples of nursing to the more familiar role of "nurse clinician". Specifically, the use of simulation and technology has been used in the undergraduate nursing program to assist learners in developing nursing skills and knowledge for treating individual patients with acute and chronic conditions. Nursing students are now able to apply learned concepts of nurse clinician when treating virtual patients and while engaging in simulation-based education. The use of such simulation in undergraduate nursing education allows learners to readily apply skills and knowledge within a safe learning environment; however, the use of such technology has not been widely adopted to address the learning needs of today's community health nursing students. In fact, despite its importance, the role and process of community health nursing is often unknown to many undergraduate nursing students. This paper presents a strategy-based, interactive community simulation environment that addresses the learning needs of millennial students within a community health nursing curriculum.

- by Bill Kapralos
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- Game Based Learning, Community Health, Learning Environment, Nursing Education

In vivo exposure has proved its efficacy in the treatment of specific phobias; however, not all patients benefit from it. Communication and information technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) have improved exposure treatment adherence and acceptance. Serious games (SG) could also be used in order to facilitate exposure treatment. A line of research on SG is emerging which focuses on health issues. We have developed a SG for the treatment of cockroach phobia that uses a mobile phone as the application device. This work examines results of an N = 1 study about whether the use of this mobile game can facilitate treatment of this specific phobia preparing her for the AR exposure. A 25-year-old woman with cockroach phobia participated in the study. Results showed that the use of the mobile game reduced her level of fear and avoidance before a ''one-session" AR exposure treatment was applied, following the guidelines by Öst. The participant found very helpful the use of the SG before the AR exposure session and she was willing to use it after the AR exposure session as a homework assignment. Although the results of this study are preliminary, SG appears to be a line of research of high interest in clinical psychology for the treatment of specific phobias.

- by Cristina Botella
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- Information Systems, Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Cognitive Science

Context: To meet the growing need for education in Software Project Management, educational games have been introduced as a beneficial instructional strategy. However, there are no low-cost board games openly available to teach Earned Value Management (EVM) in computing programs. Objective: This paper presents an educational board game to reinforce and teach the application of EVM concepts in the context of undergraduate computing programs complementing expository lessons on EVM basics. Method: The game has been developed based on project management fundamentals and teaching experience in this area. So far, it has been applied in two project management courses in undergraduate computing programs at the Federal University of Santa Catarina. We evaluated motivation, user experience and the game's contribution to learning through case studies on Kirkpatrick's level one based on the perception of the students. Results: First results of the evaluation of the game indicate a perceived potential of the game to contribute to the learning of EVM concepts and their application. The results also point out a very positive effect of the game on social interaction, engagement, immersion, attention and relevance to the course objectives. Conclusion: We conclude that the game DELIVER! can contribute to the learning of the EVM on the cognitive levels of remembering, understanding and application. The illustration of the application of EVM through the game can motivate its usefulness. The game has proven to be an engaging instructional strategy, keeping students on the task and attentive. In this respect, the game offers a possibility to complement traditional instructional strategies for teaching EVM. In order to further generalize and to strengthen the validity of the results, it is important to obtain further evaluations.

The increasing popularity of computer games has turned children and teenagers into regular users. Serious Games expect to give them more than just entertainment. Although the development of Serious Games is increasing, there still are few companies, studies and research groups dedicated to this area. Also, most projects in this field target sophisticated and costly-to-develop computer games aimed to cover a wide range of academic content. Therefore, these games lose concreteness and complicate the evaluation of their real educational value, making it difficult for students to focus on important concepts. Moreover, these games are not reusable and it is extremely difficult for students to follow more than one of them in an effective way. This paper evaluates and proposes serious mini-games as a solution. In particular, it presents and develops what we have called “conceptual mini-games”. A conceptual mini-game is completely focused on a concrete concept to be taught, in order to tran...

- by Francisco Gallego
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- Computer Science, Education, Active Learning, Teaching

During Major Incident Medical Management and Support Courses, 91 learners were randomly distributed into one of two training groups: 44 participants practiced triage sieve protocol using a card-sort exercise, whilst the remaining 47... more

- by Steve Jarvis
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- Education, Video Games, Video Game, Virtual Worlds

Given the interactive media characteristics and intrinsically motivating appeal, computer games are often praised for their potential and value in education. However, comprehensive research testing these assumptions is still missing. Preliminary comparative studies on the learning effects of games versus traditional media have shown some promise. In this paper, we describe a comparative study that thoroughly investigates the effects of interactivity and media richness on science learning among college students. We also discuss important results and implications yielded from comparisons among four conditions in our experiment (game, replay, hypertext and text).

- by Ute Ritterfeld
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- Digital Media, Video Game, Interactive Media, Comparative Study

This paper reports on a case study of using rapid prototyping to develop a serious game about crime prevention. Five small-scale formative evaluations (with a total of 17 participants) were used to guide the collect user requirements and formative feedback. Early formative results are positive and provided early signals on what needs to be changed in the game design and

- by Angela Sasse
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- Engineering, Game Design, Crime Prevention, Rapid Prototyping

We are witnessing a mad rush to pour educational content into games in an ad hoc manner in hopes that player/learners are motivated simply because the content is housed inside a game. A failure to base educational game design on well-established learning and instructional theories increases the risk of the game failing to meet its intended educational goals, and yielding students who are entertained but who have not acquired any academic skills or knowledge. Our review of standalone educational games has shown that they are not always based on sound educational principles and theories. We contend that, if academic learning is to take place, a new design paradigm must be developed. This article discusses the RETAIN design and evaluation model for educational games that was developed to aide in the evaluation of how well academic content is endogenously immersed and embedded within the game's fantasy and story context, promoters transfer of knowledge, and encourages repetitive usage to that content becomes available for use in an automatic way.

- by Glenda Gunter
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- Design, Instructional Design, Educational Technology, Game Design

During the past two decades, digital games have become an increasingly popular source of study for academics, educational researchers and instructional designers. Much has been written about the potential of games for teaching and learning, both in the design of educational/serious games and the implementation of off-the-shelf games for learning. Yet relatively little research has been conducted about how game culture and the enmeshed practice of play may impact classroom dynamics. The purpose of this study is to present a case study about how the use of World of Warcraft (WoW) as a teaching tool and medium of play impacted class dynamics in an undergraduate university-level course for game design. Specifically, this study will address how WoW's game culture and the practice of play impacted (a) student-to-student dynamics and (b) class dynamics. The goal of this study is to explore some of the dynamics of play as a component of learning.

A considerable number of serious games have been developed over the last ten years, with varying degrees of success. Due to a lack of clear standards and guidelines for game developers, it is difficult to justify claims that a specific game meets the learner's requirements and/or expectations. This paper defines a conceptual model for serious games that will contribute to their design and the measurement of achievement in meeting their learning outcomes.

- by Amri Yusoff
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- Psychology, Game Theory, Design, Taxonomy

As emphasis on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) initiatives increase, students are at a fragile point in their education. It is imperative that students learn core skills like computer programming and procedural logic necessary to living in today's increasingly digital society. Our new game Shapemaker solves these problems in game-based learning that incorporates an engaging augmented reality interface. ShapeMaker utilizes a table-based tactile interface that bridges physical actions with digital results, allowing players to learn basic concepts in programming by playing a card game. Shapemaker aims to transform the process of introducing new students to the world of programming and create a new, wider demographic of computer programmers. This article is a preliminary study of Shapemaker, documenting its concept, current design, and directions for development.

The number of law students in Thailand has seen a continual and sharp increase. Despite this significant increase in the number of law students in Thailand, the quality and achievement of legal education is sometimes questionable. Law graduates who are well prepared to be competent novice lawyers are the best indicator of the quality of law curriculum and lawyering skills are essential to become a successful lawyer. However, questions exist regarding the proficiency of recently graduated lawyers in Thailand which suggests that law graduates lack confidence and capability in fundamental lawyering skills. This paper aims to investigate what these fundamental lawyering skills are via research at the law faculty of Chiang Mai University (CMU), one of the top five law schools in Thailand. The methodology is comprised of two sections. Section 1 interviews qualified legal experts from major law career paths to identify the fundamental lawyering skills for law students of Chiang Mai University. Section 2 investigates what type of fundamental lawyering skills law students of CMU need to improve and become satisfied and competent in their lawyering practice. In the research, senior law students and law graduates of the law faculty, CMU were encouraged to complete a selfconfidence evaluation towards fundamental lawyering skills. The study found that there are eight significant fundamental lawyering skills for law students of CMU. Moreover, after raw data analysis from two target groups, the results revealed that there are four significant lawyering skills which have a high rate of dissatisfaction which are as follows: negotiation, litigation procedures and alternative dispute resolutions, counselling clients and ,lastly, factual investigation. These particular four lawyering skills are not provided for all law students because fundamental skills were provided mostly via elective courses rather than compulsory ones. Moreover, internship programs did not maximize potential of law students in relation to learning lawyering skills. To conclude, there are significant reasons within this paper which support changing the law curriculum to enhance teaching and learning of lawyering skills learning.

- by Chainarong Luengvilai and +1
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- Legal Education, Knowledge Management, Tacit Knowledge, Higher Education

- by Joske Houtkamp
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- Mental Representation, Virtual Environment, Text, Urban Environment

In contrast to traditional teaching-and-learning environments whereby the teacher controls the learning (e.g., teacher-centered), video games present a learner-centered approach to learning whereby the student controls their learning experience through interactivity. Despite the many benefits of a learner-centered approach, the use of video game technology in business-related curriculums and accounting in particular, has been sparse. By and large accounting education has remained based on "paper and pen learning". This paper describes an ongoing project that will see the development and evaluation of a strategy-based, learner-centered, interactive accounting simulation environment for undergraduate accounting curriculums. The interactive simulation is meant to place accounting education in a "game" environment.

- by Bill Kapralos
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- Teaching and Learning, Accounting, Health Care, Active Learning

Serious games are about to enter the medical sector to give people with behavioural or addictive disorders the ability to use them as part of health promotion and disease prevention. The PlayMancer framework will support physical rehabilitations and psycho-education programs thru a modular multiplayer networked 3D game based on the Universally Accessible Games (UA games) guidelines.

- by Costas Davarakis
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- Educational Technology, Game Development, Work in Progress, Mental Disorder

The paper focuses on a part of a new project Serious Games on a Global Market which focuses on language learning and teaching. Serious Games are digital games and equipment with an agenda of educational design. The paper makes a theoretical argument for a Serious Games product based on theories of educational design and learning in relation to games. Furthermore technology based perspectives on language teaching and learning are described and in addition to this, the paper draws on data from two recent research projects that have studied the role of game based activity in children's digitally based practices in off school contexts. This theoretical construction will be employed in the developing of the prototype of the digitally based educational platform "Mingoville".

- by Abir Taha
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- Digital Games, Language Teaching, Language Learning, Educational design

Effective stroke rehabilitation must be early, intensive and repetitive, which can lead to problems with patient motivation and engagement. The design of video games, often associated with good user engagement, may offer insights into how more effective systems for stroke rehabilitation can be developed. In this paper we identify game design principles for upper limb stroke rehabilitation and present several games developed using these principles. The games use low-cost video-capture technology which may make them suitable for deployment at home. Results from evaluating the games with both healthy subjects and people with stroke in their home are encouraging.

- by Suzanne McDonough and +1
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- Cognitive Science, Game Design, Video Game, Stroke rehabilitation

It has been stated repeatedly that actively participating in rehabilitation programs increases the benefits and the effectiveness of the therapy. In developing robotic devices for stroke rehabilitation, the existing use of boring task interfaces produces a significant reduction in elderly patient motivation. To combine robotaided therapy with appealing games, then, is not only a matter of creating entertainment, but a real necessity for motor recovery. Besides emphasizing a lack of attention to elderly patients in conceiving games for poststroke rehabilitation, this paper suggests a tool that consolidates the gaming scenario criteria for both rehabilitation and elderly entertainment. Conclusions are then formed from the adaptability of existing games to identify the direction of future game development.

- by Eletha Flores
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- Assistive Technology, Stroke rehabilitation, Game Development, Serious Game

A framework for the development, design and deployment of customisable mobile and hand held device based serious games.

Nowadays formal education systems are under increasing pressure to respond and adapt to rapid technological innovation and associated changes in the way we work and live. As well as accommodation of technology in its ever-diversifying forms, there is a fundamental need to enhance learning processes through evolution in pedagogical approaches, so as to make learning in formal education more engaging and, it is hoped, more effective. One opportunity attracting particularly close attention is Serious Games (SG), which offer considerable potential for facilitating both informal and formal learning. SG appear to offer the chance to "hook" today's (largely) digital-native generation of young learners, who are at risk of falling into an ever-widening gap between "networked" lifestyles and the relative stagnant environment they experience in school and university. However, there are a number of inhibitors preventing wider SG take-up in mainstream education. This paper investigates SG in formal education, initially by concentrating on pedagogical issues from two different but complementary perspectives, game design and game deployment. It then goes on to examine game based practice in formal settings and focuses on the pivotal role of the educator within the emerging panorama. This is followed by a brief look at some specific implementation strategies, collaboration and game building, which are opening up new possibilities. Finally some points for further consideration are offered.

- by Maria Magdalena Popescu
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- Instructional Design, Teaching Methods, Serious Game

We are witnessing a mad rush to pour educational content into games in an ad hoc manner in hopes that players are motivated to learn simply because the content is housed inside a game. A failure to base serious game design on well-established learning theories as proposed by well- respected educators like Robert Gagne and James Keller, increases the risk

- by Glenda Gunter
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- Instructional Design, Game Design, Video Game, Puppetry as an Educational Tool

The development of science simulations and games has outpaced their grounding in theory and research on learning and assessment. Both genres draw upon the affordances of technology to provide students with opportunities to engage in active exploration and experimentation in virtual science environments that are impractical or impossible to access otherwise. Science simulations typically fall into three categories—simulations of science

- by Edys Quellmalz
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- Formative Assessment, Virtual Laboratory, Virtual Environment, Science Learning

Computer games is a form of real-time interactive software wrapped in creatively crafted media that offers game-players engaging, goal-directed play. Designing computer games requires adequate experience and great attention to detail to describe the rules, play and aesthetics that compose the interactive experience. For inexperienced game designers, formalised methods such as game design languages and game meta-models can provide a guide and language to produce a game design specification correct by design. This paper introduces a new game content model that can aid game designers document specification of game design.

- by Stephen Tang
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- Game Design, Game Based Learning, Model Driven Development, Computer Model

One of the core courses in the undergraduate mechanical engineering curriculum has been completely redesigned. In the new numerical methods course, all assignments and learning experiences are built around a video/computer game. Students are given the task of writing computer programs to race a simulated car around a track. In doing so, students learn and implement numerical methods content. The paper describes a preliminary study to measure student engagement. Results show that students`playing' the video game in their homework are significantly more engaged than when working on homework in other engineering courses.

- by David Shernoff
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- Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Education, Engineering Education

This paper arises from work ongoing in the GALA (Games and Learning Alliance -Network of Excellence for Serious Games). As part of GALA, a comprehensive state of the art analysis of existing serious games for the business and industry domain (loosely defined) was undertaken. A categorisation of the identified serious games was developed in order to analyse the characteristics of the serious games -the aspects they covered and those they do not cover. Of primary importance were the simulation level, topic and skills mediated by the identified serious games. The "simulation level" means the level or amount of the world that is simulated in the simulation or serious game. This is a hierarchy starting with the World/ God/ Universe -in which level whole worlds are simulated, for example, in games such as Civilization. The hierarchy then proceeds downwards from nation, industry, interorganisational, business/ organisation, intra-organisational/ processes, group/ team, discipline, techniques to games addressing the individual. Second the skills to be transferred by the serious game were also analysed. From this an analysis of the gaps in coverage of serious games was carried out, leading to identifying opportunities for, and recommendations of, serious games to be developed for the business and industry domain.

- by Jannicke Baalsrud Hauge and +1
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- Serious Game

means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without written permission from the publisher. Product or company names used in this set are for identification purposes only. Inclusion of the names of the products or companies... more

- by Igor Mayer
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- Research Design, Professional Ethics, Game Based Learning, Standardisation

Abstract:-History subject plays a vital role in instilling the spirits of patriotism among the students; to nourish and instill love and loyalty to one's country and to be a true citizen. The lack of creativity in history teaching caused students to become bored and lose interest in the subject. Digital games, an interactive technology can foster learning process effectively and interestingly especially among young learners. Digital Game Based Learning (DGBL) approach utilizes the game as a medium for conveying learning contents. There are many ...

- by Azizah Jaafar
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- Instructional Design, Game Design, Video Game, Digital Games

We discuss the design of the Intermediary Agent's brain, the control module of an embodied conversational virtual peer in a simulation game aimed at providing learning experiences regarding the dynamics of collaboration at the inter-personal (IP) level. We derive the overall aims of the game from theoretical foundations in collaboration theory and pedagogical theory and related requirements for the virtual peer; present the overall modular design of the system; and then detail the design perspectives and the interplay of the related operationalised concepts leading to the control architecture of the Intermediary Agent, that is realised as a simple cognitive appraisal process driven by direct and indirect effects of the missionoriented and social interactions of players and agent on the agent's level of trust in its human peers. We conclude with coverage of related work and insights from first deployment experiences.

- by Juan Martínez-Miranda and +1
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- Game Theory, Perception, Social Interaction, Experimental Design

Papers hav e b een do uble-blind peer r eviewed bef ore f inal s ubmission t o t he c onference. I nitially, pa per abstracts w ere r ead an d s elected b y t he c onference pane l f or s ubmission a s pos sible p apers f or t he... more

- by Ioana Stanescu and +4
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- Serious Game
- by Shelby Gull Laird
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- Video Game, Serious Game

This paper presents an experimental feedback on a serious game dedicated to strengthening programming skills. This serious game called Prog&Play is built on an open source realtime strategy game. Its goal is to be compatible with different students, teachers and institutions. We propose an iterative evaluation in order to improve it while experiments are running. Through this evaluation, we define a framework that will be tested by third parties in different contexts and we analyse negative points and mistakes in order to improve the project. In every instance, evaluation is beneficial and allows establishing a communication about the implemented practices.

- by Mathieu Muratet and +1
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- Serious Game
- by jean-marc Labat
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- Knowledge Management, Cognitive Modeling, Serious Games, Game Design

Modern computer games show potential not just for engaging and entertaining users, but also in promoting learning. Game designers employ a range of techniques to promote long-term user engagement and motivation. These techniques are increasingly being employed in so-called serious games, games that have nonentertainment purposes such as education or training. Although such games share the goal of AIED of promoting deep learner engagement with subject matter, the techniques employed are very different. Can AIED technologies complement and enhance serious game design techniques, or does good serious game design render AIED techniques superfluous? This paper explores these questions in the context of the Tactical Language Training System (TLTS), a program that supports rapid acquisition of foreign language and cultural skills. The TLTS combines game design principles and game development tools with learner modelling, pedagogical agents, and pedagogical dramas. Learners carry out missions in a simulated game world, interacting with non-player characters. A virtual aide assists the learners if they run into difficulties, and gives performance feedback in the context of preparatory exercises. Artificial intelligence plays a key role in controlling the behaviour of the non-player characters in the game; intelligent tutoring provides supplementary scaffolding.

- by Stacy Marsella
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- Game Design, Language Learning, Game Development, Foreign Language