Using digital game-based learning to address life long learning.
The Rice University summer game initiative.
Under the supervision of Dr Stephen Wong and Dr Joseph Warren, Rice University students have developed two powerful digital game development systems. These systems address different needs; the first being a simulation engine and the second a board game compiler. Our aim is to assemble a cohesive group of students to create proof-of concept applications using these engines and to show their versatility and importance in life long learning applications.
Developing games and simulations for teaching and research requires a multi-pronged approach to developing the many technologies involved. These technologies can be separated in to several distinct areas: 1) The underlying simulation engine, 2) creating accurate simulations and stimulating pedagogical games, 3) the conversion of existing games, 4) the presentation layer, particularly, a web browser-based interface. The first two items will be addressed by Dr. Stephen Wong and his Sky.NET simulation framework development team. The Sky.NET system will be discussed in more detail below. There are two main sub-issues, one of which is the general aspects of creating a basic simulation and gaming application that can be used to deliver academic content and the other is to develop an application for creating complex and interactive social, economic, political and physical simulations for research and training. Both the sub-issues will be used to tune their common underlying Sky.NET simulation engine to insure that it has the proper features and performance for these sorts of applications. The third item will be addressed by Dr. Joe Warren and his team, who have been developing a Game Compiler system for automatically generating operational games from user-defined game specifications. Currently, significant progress has been made with a prototype compiler for card games and this summer’s research will be to extend that work to investigate the challenges of simple board games. The fourth item will be addressed via a web-based game that educates the players (general public and government officials) on the dynamics of the telecommunications industry, specifically addressing how "policy"changes and introduction of new disruptive technologies impact the industry and consumers.
The Sky.NET engine designed by Dr Wong and his students is a highly flexible and extensible simulation framework. This engine can be used to simulate any sort of system of interacting entities, such as human-human and human-geographic interactions. This enables the system to create interactive experiences such as role-playing scenarios and natural disaster situations. The Sky.NET engine manages abstract “entities” moving about a “terrain” or virtual World. The entities possess various “attributes” such as their maximum velocity or speed, their health or strength, their possessions, etc, as well as behaviors, such as moving, attacking, using fuel or energy, etc. These behaviors include the ability to interact with other entities, which include objects in the virtual world such as lakes, mountains and rivers, which are also technically other entities. The entities, their attributes and their behaviors are all dynamically configurable. The entities can include citizens, law officials, law enforcement officials, broadcast networks (that inform citizens), fuel suppliers and others. All these entities can have different behaviors that affect the behavior of the other entities. The simulation will allow to the users to test policies, to mimic scenarios and look for better solutions for future events. Sky.NET allows multiple “players” who can manipulate the entities they “own” in real time to perform their various behaviors. The simulator is designed to run continuously wherein players log on and off while retaining their roles, though their situations may change due to ongoing interactions with their entities.
Using Sky.NET we will create two applications, the first one will show the pedagogical power of the platform and the second one it’s flexibility.
The pedagogical game example will be loosely based on an existing game, the rare German board game, Jenseits von Theben (JvT), which involves multiple players exploring a “world” (in this case Europe and the middle east), collecting information (building applicable knowledge) and resources (assistants and tools/technology) to be used to improve their chances to uncover rare artifacts during archeological “digs” and progress first to “present” their findings at the concluding “conference”. This game takes the “book information” and puts into a discovery context where the students will be forced to examine each piece of data and relate it to the other data they may possess. The basic setup and configuration of this game is easily adaptable to many other areas of study and thus is widely applicable.
To demonstrate the flexibility of Sky.NET, we will create a new game/simulation to explore natural disaster preparedness and response in the Houston area. Our goal is to extend similar efforts in the field of hurricane landfall simulations such as the existing Disaster Dynamics game from the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. We want to explore not only the environmental impact of a hurricane, but also the human behavioral response in disaster situation as well. This would include, but not be limited to, traffic jams, water/food/fuel/shelter shortages and hospital overcrowding. In addition, the role of information management and dissemination, including the effect of incorrect and/or misleading information can be explored. Hurricane Rita last summer left two very different outcomes, one due to the hurricane, and the other, due to the pre-impact management and the evacuation procedures. After Rita the need for a better understanding of the natural disaster situation and the creation of better policies is urgent in the Houston area. We propose to use the Sky.NET to better understand the different scenarios. The use of Sky.NET will allow us to study different outcomes based on which decisions officials and citizens make, and how those decisions fit with the current events and the Houston area characteristics. Such a system would allow us to model the Houston region and construct “what-if” scenarios and games involving natural disasters to be used by our decision makers (city and state officials). We propose to demonstrate that the Sky.NET framework would be a suitable base upon which to build such a simulation environment.
Dr. Warren and his students have been working on the challenging problem of a generic game compiler system. His initial project has been to explore a prototype compiler for card games. The current system is able to handle essentially any traditional card game such as Hearts, Poker, etc, which has a fixed set of rules and multiple players on multiple computers. The event-driven system uses a specially designed game language that can be extended during game play to dynamically add or modify the rules and game play. Using this platform we will extend this work to our new digital library project in gaming history. Specifically, we would like to be able to offer the users of the digital library the ability to experience playing many of the antique game not just reading about them and viewing images. Our goal is to develop a more generic game compilerthat will be used to automatically generate a web-based computer replication of an existing board game after inputting the game’s parameters (description and components) and play mechanics (turn sequence/process).
The telecommunications game application will focus on the web presentation of games using Flash and other web browser technologies. This board game will highlight the interactions within the telecommunications industry such as between the companies, their customers, the physical infrastructure and the public policies affecting them. The back-end game engine, which is not the focus, will be an off-the-shelf solution which does not have the power and features of Sky.NET or the game compiler, but will be sufficient for this specific application.
By assembling a team of 5 to 8 students working in parallel on these diverse projects, we will be able to tackle the wide ranging scope of technologies and challenges while reducing inter-dependencies between developers. This research will establish milestone implementations that will enable us to pursue future funding of a fully integrated system for educational games for lifelong learning.