Serious games have come quite some way. In their introduction to the first International Workshop on Intelligent Digital Games for Empowerment and Inclusion on May 14, 2013, Schuller, Palettam, and Sabouret summarize:
Digital Games for Empowerment and Inclusion possess the
potential to change our society in a most positive way by
preparing selected groups in a playful and fun way for their
everyday life’s social and special situations. The current
generation of such games thereby increasingly demands for
computational intelligence algorithms to help analyze players’ behavior and monitor their motivation and interest to adapt game progress. Intelligent Digital Games for Empowerment and Inclusion (IDGEI) focus in particular on such games in connection with machine intelligence and its inclusion in digital serious games.
My colleagues and I from the eCUTE project are very thrilled to participate in the workshop, where we will describe Traveller, an intercultural training tool for young adults.
Traveller is based on an original theoretical
framework which focuses on key concepts of intercultural
training. By progressing through a creative story, users are able to engage via a novel interaction paradigm with intelligent virtual characters that incorporate different simulated cultures which can lead to misunderstandings and sometimes conflicts. Through the use of an innovative evaluation approach, users will gain a greater understanding of the behavioural differences between these
characters, and thereby learn to become more effective at dealing with misunderstandings due to differences in culture.
The contributions of the workshop will be published in open access proceedings with the Society for the Advancement of the Science of Digital Games (SASDG), (see below – I will post a link when this becomes available). In the meanwhile you can learn more about TRAVELLER and see some video material on the eCUTE web page. We have spent almost 3 years developing TRAVELLER and a second application, MIXER in the pursuit of technology enhanced training in cultural understanding. A demonstration of TRAVELLER was also given this week at AAMAS 2013 (12th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA, May 6 – 10, 2013).
References
Degens, N., Hofstede, G. J., Mascarenhas, S., Silva, A., Paiva, A., Kistler, F., André, E. Swiderska, A., Krumhuber, E., Kappas, A., Hume, C., Hall, L., & Aylett, R. (2013). Traveller – Intercultural training with intelligent agents for young adults. Presented at the First International Workshop on Intelligent Digital Games for Empowerment and Inclusion (IDGEI 2013) held in conjunction with the 8th Foundations of Digital Games 2013 (FDG), Chania, Greece, May 2013.
Schuller, B.,Paletta, L. & Sabouret, N. (Eds.)(2013) Proceedings 1st International Workshop on Intelligent Digital Games for Empowerment and Inclusion (IDGEI 2013) held in conjunction with the 8th Foundations of Digital Games 2013 (FDG), Chania, Greece, May 2013. SASDG.
Affective Computing Science 