Contrary to popular belief, digital games are not necessarily a waste of time and can be used for educational purposes. Matthew Agius finds out all about it from Georgios N. Yannakakis and Rilla Khaled.

There is a quiet revolution taking place. Happily, it is a peaceful revolution, aimed at teaching the skills required to resolve conflicts at grassroots level among children, using none other than (shock, horror) computer games. Aren’t computer games supposed to be time-leeching distractions, I hear you ask.

Enter the recently-completed, EU-funded, Siren project (short for Social games for conflict resolution based on natural interaction – www.sirenproject.eu) which aims to tackle “the problems that seem to arise in almost every context and developmental stage of human life: from scuffles in schoolyards to bullying in the workplace and even to international warfare, by creating a serious game which supports the role of teachers and helps them educate young people on how to understand and resolve conflicts”.

You would be forgiven for dismissing these lofty claims as simply marketing spiel, but you would be wrong.

The games are the result of three years of work by world-class research groups from Greece, Denmark, Portugal, the UK and the US, collaborating with an award-winning game design company from Denmark.

That, and the expertise of Georgios N. Yannakakis and Rilla Khaled from the University of Malta’s recently-inaugurated Institute of Digital Games. The results of this collaboration to date are two games, Village Voices and My Dream Theatre.

How did this project come about? According to Yannakakis, who spearheaded the technological development and adaptation aspect of the game, it was spurred by a call for game-based learning projects, issued by the European Commission. Up to that point, projects for classroom-oriented game based learning were, in his words, “disappointing”.

He wanted to improve both the design and technology aspects and so Siren was born. Discussions began with colleagues in Greece and the US, in the hope of combining interactive narrative and emotional modelling technologies to make a game for children that is fun and has an implicit educational objective. In this case, the objective was to teach players about conflict and how best to resolve it.

The game’s literature describes it as “taking advantage of social networks, computational intelligence and emotional modelling”, which must ring all manner of alarm bells to those reading it.

Yannakakis explains that the social network referred to is not online, but in the classroom itself – an organic social network. It is certainly heartening to know that future generations can still be socially competent in a face-to-face environment.

“The basic premise is that you are one of four characters in a medieval village. All the game characters are interdependent and this becomes more apparent as the game progresses,” explains Khaled, who led the game design aspect of the project.

“There are several quests to complete, which get more complex as you progress in the game and are interdependent on the other players’ actions.”

Yannakakis clarifies: “Computational intelligence automatically detects how high the level of conflict is through player actions and predicts how the player is feeling. Given this information, the game automatically generates new quests to keep the level of conflict within acceptable bounds.”

The other core piece of theory, as described by Khaled, is that conflicts tend to adopt a bell-shaped curve. Conflict builds and builds to a climax and then recedes. The way quests are chosen and presented to the player by the game, fits this curve.

A salient aspect of the game is that there are no laws or law enforcement at all. Players are free to steal from other players, trade, even to damage each other’s property. If this happens, players may choose to retaliate by posting notices about the culprit on the village notice-board or engage in tit-for-tat behaviour. The quests are designed in such a way as to funnel players into flashpoint situations, tailored to the age group, that give them the choice to either collaborate or retaliate.

The objective, in this case, was to teach players about conflict and how best to resolve it

To achieve this result, the team employed an ethnographer to study school children in the UK and observe the kinds of conflict that actually arise in this context.

“One would immediately think of bullying,” Khaled explains, “but in actual fact, the data shows that the most prevalent types of conflict (in the age group) are, in fact, friendship disputes, property disputes, disagreement on what games to play and so on.”

They then took the most prevalent causes of conflict and translated them into a medieval village setting, forming the quests in such a way as to funnel players into situations that would most likely trigger some form of conflict.

“While we would never say ‘you must steal Georgios’s apples’, we would say ‘to make this potion, you need apples’, ” explains Khaled.

She points out that there are no police in the game. This was a conscious choice by the developers, intended to elicit discussion and encourage collaborative actions. You have to work through the conflict to succeed.

Yannakakis adds that the intended teaching method includes a group discussion, led by the class teacher, after each 20-minute game session. This will make the subjects aware of how their actions affected and were interpreted by the other players. This aspect is highly relevant in a society increasingly dominated by social networking websites and lacking in face-to-face interaction.

The game was tested over several weeks with the same groups of children and the results were encouraging. Khaled recalls one episode in particular.

“At one time the conflict had reached a point where one child actually started crying,” she said. “We weren’t expecting the child to come back, but she did. This was a breakthrough; it showed that the game can be pretty powerful in eliciting conflict and then enabling meaningful conversations.”

This project may have ended, but its potential is not being ignored. The team is in discussion with the Ministry of Education regarding another game project, called IlearnRW, which assists children with learning difficulties such as dyslexia.

Education Minister Evarist Bartolo has already given his backing to the Siren project and the hope is to have it adopted for distribution with the ‘one tablet per child’ scheme. There are plans in the pipeline to develop more games.

www.game.edu.mt

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