Beyond simulations : serious games for training interpersonal skills in law enforcement

Serious games can be used to improve people's social awareness by letting them experience difficult social situations and learn from these experiences. However, we assert that, when moving beyond the strict realism that social simulations offer, techniques from role play may be used that offer more possibilities for feedback and reflection. We discuss the design of two such serious games for interpersonal skills training in the domain of law enforcement. These games feature intelligent virtual agents with which trainees have to interact across different scenarios to improve their social awareness. By interacting with the virtual agents, trainees experience how their behaviour influences the course of the intervention and its outcomes. We discuss how we intend to improve the learning experience in these serious games by including meta-techniques from role play. We close by describing the current and future implementations of our serious games

Meta-techniques for a social awareness learning game

In live action role play, so-called meta-techniques are used, in which meta-information (information outside of the enacted world setting, such as learning goals) is taken into account and used during play. We show how we intend to include two such meta-techniques in LOITER, a serious game about social interaction. In this game, players can interact with virtual characters with the ultimate goal of improving their own social awareness. We have constructed sets of learning goals around the interpersonal circumplex, a model for social interaction also used in the training curriculum of the police academy. The meta-techniques we are developing can assist players in attaining these learning goals by providing both feedback and insight into what is at play in characters' minds. The first meta-technique is that of act breaks: intermissions between acts of a live action role play during which players discuss the previous and following acts. In LOITER, consecutive acts have increasing levels of interaction complexity, corresponding to our sets of learning goals. In the act breaks, the trainee and the virtual character exchange information about their motivations for certain actions and what the effects of these actions were. This helps the trainees analyse the situation and their own actions. Secondly, feedback on the actions of trainees can be given in a less intrusive way during the acts themselves. We show, based on another meta-technique, how virtual characters can show 'thought bubbles' which give insight in their personal thoughts and thus help the trainees determine the reasons behind their behaviour

Challenging Reality using Techniques from Interactive Drama to Support Social Simulations in Virtual Worlds

Simulations of social situations have great potential to be applied to many of the social problems that we find in society and organisations. Social simulations can do more than provide experience and transfer current best practice; they may be used to transform current social realities. As many educationalists, organizations and researchers are finding, Virtual Worlds (VWs) provide an environment for conducting person to person social simulations. In this paper we consider a more challenging form of social simulation in VWs involving intelligent social interactions between humans and computer-based non-player characters in VWs, known as intelligent virtual agents (IVAs). However, using IVAs to simulate social behavior requires some reconsideration of the role that reality plays and challenges the definition of a simulation as a representation of reality. By bringing in the element of fiction (non-reality) often associated with drama, narrative and storytelling together with virtual worlds, we can relax some of the constraints associated with reality and go beyond reality. In beyond reality simulations, we actually use simulations to exaggerate aspects of the real world in order to emphasize a particular learning concept or even to break the rules, strategies, roles and operators which apply in the real world.10 page(s