World-class research groups from Greece, Denmark, Malta, Portugal, UK and the USA and an award-winning game design company from Denmark worked together in the Siren Project to design and develop an interactive environment to create uniquely motivating and educating games that can help shape how children think about and handle conflict.

A 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.

Prof. Georgios N. Yannakakis of the Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta, describes the ground-breaking innovations of the Siren game as “advanced game technology that recognises the emotional reactions of its players and the conflict level of the game at any time.

Driven by player models, the game's AI generates automatically the next quest for each player so that conflict stays within appropriate levels.

The player-driven procedural quest generation in Siren offers personalised learning experiences and player-specific exposure to conflict resolution which results in effective training of social skills.

At the moment, Siren researchers are evaluating the social and learning impact of the game in real school environments, taking into account social and behavioural information before and after a month of game play sessions.