Building classes of entertaining games for health education

			Abstract
	
Games are typically built using a game engine or other software that
marries the game scenario with game rules to produce an instance of the
game type. Although this is a widely used approach for game generation for
the commercial market, educational games offer an opportunity to design
architectures that separate the educational content from the game rules
and enable the creation of instances of games on demand. This model has
been used previously for simple answer-style games such as tic-tac-toe,
where the questions are selected at run time from a database of topic
related questions.

In this paper, we present an architecture for creating classes of
scenario-based educational games that are derivatives of entertainment
games, i.e., are based on existing games, such as airplane shooters or
quest-like games. The individual games are generated at run time using the
game scenario and the game rules in conjunction with health focus content
and the user’s profile. This means that the play of the game is the same
across the community of users but that the health content may be different
for different users, e.g., IBD, asthma, or diabetes. This design includes
a module for content experts to insert their own educational content. The
lowest level of the architecture consists of game engine, content
database, user profile, and user data.

In this paper we will describe, by way of example, the use of a widely
available flash game which we have altered by inserting an object that
attaches itself to a class of attack ships. One of the properties of the
inserted object is to attach a short text string to the ship. At run time,
text from the database is displayed on one or more of these objects and
the player decides which ship to shoot based on the text strings. The
results of the user actions are stored in the database and the user
profile updated as well. The play of the game is not altered from its
original form but the insertion of health related content allows the play
of the game to support a health agenda. Furthermore, the game plays the
same whether the content is for asthma or diabetes.

This architecture provides support for multiple communities, including:
patients (game players), coaches, and health researchers. The underlying
hypothesis is that patients will be more engaged in the learning and
reinforcing of the health concepts using the game than they would be in
other educational contexts. User profile information is stored for each
player, so that the game content and play style can be tailored to
individual players. Coaches and clinicians can make use of the data
collected throughout the game, including logs the game play such as,
choices made, and time and duration of play. This data can be used
indirectly to monitor the progress of the patient and directly to
intervene as needed for support or additional feedback. Health researchers
can use the data for clinical trials evaluating the efficacy of treatments
with and without game components.

Producing reusable classes of educational games can have a significant
impact on the time and cost of game development and may support the
building of communities of users. Furthermore, this compartmentalized
architecture provides a platform that supports continual monitoring as
well as follow-up analysis, i.e., both longitudinal studies and clinical
trials.

This work is a project of the SAGE, Simulation and Advanced Games for
Education, network exploring the role of games in health education.


Presented by Carolyn Watters, representing Dalhousie SAGE group at Digra 
Conference, 2005.