Abstract:

The popularity of serious games has raised the need for high-level authoring environments in order to:
(1) allow people without professional game design skills to create (or being actively involved in the creation) or modify serious games, and
(2) enhance serious game development, as development costs are one of the major drawbacks.

In order to come to well-grounded and effective serious games, different parties should be involved in the development of serious games, game developers as well as so-called domain experts, such as pedagogical experts or psychologists and subject-matter experts, but this may result in communication barriers that can seriously hinder the development.

To solve this issue, this paper presents a model-driven authoring framework and toolset that enables to produce serious games easily and quickly, at lower cost and with the active involvement of (non-IT schooled) domain experts, and therefore lowers the barriers that hinder the production of serious games. Furthermore, the toolset allows for the creation of games with an adaptive narrative that can be played several times without becoming predictable by adapting the gameplay based on the real-time input of the player or post-game feedback. Choices made by the player have an influence on the overarching narrative of the game, which in turn will be used to select appropriate narrative events for the new context. Each narrative event can focus on a different subset of the learning objectives.

The authoring framework is used within the Friendly ATTAC project, a project that helps youngsters dealing with cyberbullying issues through an innovative serious game. The game itself was designed to tackle cyberbullying among young adolescents (7th-8th graders), and aimed to increase positive bystander behavior and reduce negative bystander behavior. The adjusted overall game objective consisted of scenarios of potential cyberbullying, where the player needs to select the appropriate response as a bystander. The game is a 2,5 D puzzle-adventure game in which the player has to remove cyberbullying webpage by correctly applying positive bystander strategies in a classroom context. The player’s response affects the victim’s mood, the classroom climate and the bully’s level of bullying. Mechanics involve a discussion system in which the player needs to assess the situation, character development where characters can evolve to several participant roles in cyberbullying, and a reputation system where the classroom climate is set as a final game objective.

By using the toolset developed, it was possible for the non-technical people (subject-matter experts) to be actively involved in the development of the serious game, to make the development process much more iterative, and at the same time to shorten the overall development time. The toolbox was successfully used to design levels that are afterwards used to fully automatically create playable adaptive game scenarios.

Keywords:

Serious game, cyberbullying, toolset, dynamic tailoring.