This project is sponsored by the Carl Zeiss Foundation as part of the program for the reinforcement of university research structures 2012.
The advancement of skills is an important goal, which can affect all stages of life. Despite the continuing relevance of traditional education through teachers, computer-based and computer-supported skill advancement is gaining significance. However, simple transference of the traditional methods onto the computer as the new medium, is not sufficient without also taking advantage of its additional capabilities. This step can only be performed by multidisciplinary teams, using approaches from technical disciplines complemented with foundations from the social and behavioural sciences. Thus, the establishment of the serious games research group creates novel synergies at the interface between psychology, computer science, and engineering.
Serious games trace back to Clark C. Abt in 1968, who began to connect games with the simulation of real situations to achieve skill acquisition. Today, serious games consist of computer-based games that offer game-like interaction with educational content. With today's computers' multimedia capabilities, the performance of smart phones, new peripheral devices such as the Wii or Kinect, and the pervasive availability of the internet, serious games research is undergoing a time of inflorescence. The areas of application are particularly diverse, and encompass all aspects of education in all stages of life, as well as the promotion of health, training of specific skills, and other assistive tasks.
Serious games are computer-based systems use game-like forms of interaction to teach users relevant content for future behaviour or experience. The focus is not on the game itself, but rather on skill advancement and acquisition, imparted through the realistic representation of a real-life situation. Skill acquisition is the most common goal, however, serious games can also be used for the conveyance of factual knowledge, or to attitudes. Unlike e-learning, serious games use game-like scenarios that intensify the authenticity of the experience.
Playing games can require and promote cognitive, emotional, perceptive, attentive and motor functions. Games can therefore be seen as a microcosmos of psychological processes. However, the technical implementation of serious games is also a challenge for a number of computer science disciplines. The research orientation of this project aims to investigate fundamental research questions on serious games from a predominantly psychological perspective. Serious games are a novel genre which convey their intrinsic goal of skill promotion, opinion-making, or knowledge acquisition with and through game elements. Thus, serious games exploit the interface between entertainment and computer technologies, and applications in the institutional and educational sector. Serious games are utilised in medicine and the health sector, by the military, in education and continuing education, in companies' employee training, as well as increasingly in the political and societal sphere (Michael & Chen 2006)1.
The Research Group
The following people and institutions are involved in the project:
Scientific Goals
Previous reseach primarily examined issues regarding the use and didactic design, or the realistic technical design and implementation of serious games systems. Generally, this led to a focus on either humanistic or purely technical research questions. The research group in Ulm, however, intends to optimise the mechanisms of adaptivity and interactivity regarding the adjustment of human and technical information processing.
The psychological perspective on research questions from the serious games field appears predominantly in the cognitive area of optimal information processing. For this purpose, processes of attention-shifting, perception, and memory will be analysed. The sponsored professorship specifies the processing steps regarding complex insight, decision-making and problem-solving processes, as well as questions towards the maintenance of activity (the so-called flow experience). The entirety of the processing is influenced by cognitive factors, but also by the momentary affective or motivational state, and the social situations within which the serious game occurs. Knowledge of neuro-modulatory systems and neuro-plastic processes should be exploited as part of the serious games research, as they form the foundation of any learning or memory process, and can thus aim for maximal efficacy of the programs towards the goal they intend to achieve (for example, an improvement in a child's language skills) - this constitutes the games' "seriousness".
Apart from the process-specific phenomena, the psychological perspective views the user attributes as of particular importance; cognitive features such as memory capacity and intelligence, as well as emotional-motivational factors such as fun become relevant from this standpoint. These input parameters, as well as variables relevant to the process realisation, need to be captured continually during the game situation, in order to provide optimal customisation of program components (game adaptivity). Thus, a decrease in the perception of flow could be detected, and balanced by increasing or reducing the challenges in terms of the user's existing capacities. Further, the system optimisation towards the user needs to be evaluated with standardised procedures. The evaluation of output variables should consider not merely the increase in skills, but also, once again, the emotional-motivational variables (experience of fun, perceived security, estimation of trustworthiness).
The psychological problem definitions hold a technical counterpart in computer science and engineering, and offer the foundation for model construction. Serious games are highly interactive sytems, which dynamically adapt their game logic to the users. The adaptation to the user is implemented on the basis of user models, which incorporate previously gained knowledge and expertise, age, gender, roles, cognitive load, emotionality, personality profiles and preferences, among others. This information allows systems to interact with users multimodally and adaptively in various input and output modalities (visual, auditory, haptic).
The visual output in particular places high demands on the degree of realism, which is necessary in order to strengthen the immersion of the user within the serious game. This addreses classic problems of computer graphics as part of media informatics. The game logic requires adaptive planning processes, created and dynamically altered via methods of artificial intelligence. System plans must in turn be communicated to the user, necessitating adaptive dialogue management. The degree of difficulty of the tasks posed by the serious game should also be adaptable. Considering sensor systems, the serious games should afford capacities such as an analysis of the gaze direction of the user, and the detection of gestures, poses, and facial expression. Furthermore, the model construction for the information processing of neuronal mechanisms underlying the psychological findings offers the possibility of targeted assessment of the empirical results, and the development of behavioural models (and thereupon, further research questions). The empirical technical research orientated towards fundamental questions and applications is thus consolidated through the theoretical foundational research on percetion and cognition aspects in serious games.
1. Michael, David; Chen, Sande (2006): Serious Games. Games that educate, train and inform. Boston, Thomson.