Malta is participating in an international project partly funded by the European Union to develop a video game that supports the role of teachers and helps them educate young people on how to understand and resolve conflicts. The Siren Project, with funding to the tune of €2.93 million, is evidence of Malta’s efforts in the nascent local video game development industry.
“Malta is among the few countries in the world that did the obvious: It placed digital games as one of the priority sectors of financial development and growth,” explained to i-Tech Georgios N. Yannakakis from the Institute of Digital Games at the University of Malta, the Maltese partner in the project.
“Doing so has resulted in an increasing number of small-medium (and large) enterprises being established in the country today. Supported by proper educational programmes, such as our top-notch graduate MSc course in Digital Games, and word-class game research at the Institute of Digital Games, Malta has managed to invest intelligently in all three stakeholders required for a healthy growth of a financial sector: education; research; and development. It all projects to be a shining future for creative and game development industries in Malta, I believe.”
The project brings together world-class research groups from Greece, Denmark, Malta, Portugal, UK and the US, and an award-winning game design company from Denmark, which worked together to design and develop an interactive environment which benefits from recent advances in serious games, social networks, computational intelligence and emotional modelling to create uniquely motivating and educating games that can help shape how children think about and handle conflict.
The artificial intelligence of the game recognises emotional and behavioural patterns of the players and profiles them with respect to their abilities to deal with conflict. It then monitors how well they perform across conflict scenarios of varying difficulty and automatically picks the next game quest for each player, thereby personalising the conflict resolution training.
The team had a set of challenges to overcome to come up with a game that reaches the goals set by the project. “The main challenge for the Siren project consortium has been the design of a game that will be both playable and highly engaging for children but, at the same time, will foster their ability to resolve conflict. Serious games are often accused of under-delivering as most of them are games children don’t want to play. Unfortunately, the priority for designers and educators in those cases has been placed entirely on the learning objective(s) the game attempts to address. The Siren game, on the other hand, pushes children to try alternate ways of handling conflict and it is a fun game to play too!” reassured Prof Yannakakis.
The game developed by the project is able to automatically generate adaptive conflict scenarios that fit the teaching needs of particular groups of children with varying cultural background, maturity, technical expertise and the desired learning outcomes as specified by teachers, enabling the system to be used by school teachers all over Europe, without specific technical training.
Unfortunately some people still think that video games are a waste of time, especially for children, and Prof Yannakakis knows exactly who’s at fault. “There are various elements to blame for this but one of the primary ones has been the media. Bad stories about games sell pretty well. The use of games, if left completely uncontrolled, can indeed have a negative impact on a young person’s life.
“One of our primary roles as game educators and researchers is to inform the public about the social impact of games and this is a great opportunity for me to do so.
“Games have a positive impact on a large number of cognitive, sensorimotor and social skills of children as studies have already shown. Game experiences may have a powerful influence on the lives of young people as games can tell wonderful stories, provide complicated puzzles, challenge a player in new ways etc. Most importantly, some games are nowadays explicitly designed for supporting education, training, as well as psychical and mental health. It is exactly the ability of games to fully immerse the player that provides the ideal arena for obtaining new skills. It becomes a joyful activity full of challenges and rewards.”
The Institute of Digital Games at the University of Malta, a multi-disciplinary (and multi-cultural) group of researchers and educators, was established earlier this year to support Malta in strengthening its position with regard to games education and research, and thereby also support the local game development scene.
http://game.edu.mt