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"Serious Communication for Serious Games" For decades, military and commercial aviation have been using flight simulators to help teach pilots to fly. Over the years, it has been shown that augmenting real-world training with virtual training results in cheaper, safer, and more effective training. These and other training devices have spread and evolved and now can be found throughout the military being used to train a wide variety of individual skills as well as complicated joint-operation teamwork skills such as convoy operations and Call for Fire. This talk will explore some of the technological challenges faced when building high-fidelity multiplayer training games for a global dynamic training network. Stringent military requirements include linking disparate training devices together such as serious games, full-fidelity flight simulators, and live-fire ranges so that soldiers may train in real-time with other units around the world in the same virtual world.
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SERIOUS COMMUNICATION
FOR SERIOUS GAMES (2.0)
Ross Kukulinski
Serious Play Conference 2013
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Photo by Derek Jensen
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Photo Courtesy of U.S. Military
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Serious Games are Powerful
Tools
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Serious Games …
Allow soldiers to experience situations that are impossible in the real world1
Provide improved hand-eye coordination, multi-tasking, and teamwork2
Are uniquely flexible to support varied training needs
1 Corti, 2006; Squire & Jenkins, 20032 Michael & Chen, 2006
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Fundamentals of Teamwork
The Big Five Core Components of Teamwork1
1. Team Leadership
2. Performance Monitoring
3. Backup Behavior
4. Adaptability
5. Team/Collective Orientation
Hypothesis: Communication key element?
1 Salas, Sims, & Burke, 2004
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Communication and Performance
America’s Army experimentsResearchers measured team communication
○ Communication network level○ Number of report-ins○ Number of normal communications
Teams with regular organized reports had:Higher performanceHigher estimated situational awareness
Schneider & Carley, 2005
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DARWARS Ambush!: Authoring Lessons Learned in a Training Game1
Communication skills are critical for success Communications capabilities differ widely
across varying military units Training system should be similar to real-
world communication system
1 Diller, Orberts, Blankenship, Nielsen, 2004
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‘Good’ Serious Games
Six Ingredients to a good game1
1. Mechanics
2. Rules
3. Immersive Graphics
4. Interactivity
5. Challenge
6. Risks
7. What about communication?
1 Derryberry, 2007
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Team Building Examples
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Compound® - H2 IT Solutions2013 Federal Virtual Challenge First Place Critical Thinking/Adaptability
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U.S. Army Grafenwoehr, Germany
Photo Courtesy of U.S. Military
First responder training with Live & Virtual Training
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Live-Virtual-Constructive
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Incident-Management Training
A Training Transfer Study of Serious Games
“Our work in this project demonstrated consistently through all five experiments that communications is fundamental to the training experience and one of the most important aspects of the exercise.”
Major Ben Brown
MOVES Institute
Naval Postgraduate School
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Brown, 2010
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On a personal note:
My biggest failures typically come down to one of two things:I didn’t communicateOr I didn’t communicate effectively
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So what?
If we’re building games to train or teachand teamwork is a determining element of
success or failures
Then our games need to accurately reflect real-world communication
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Real-world Communication
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What types of communication do you use in your workplace?
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My short list:
Email Instant Messaging Telephone / Cell Phone VoIP / Video Calling Face-to-face Twitter
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Acceptable Fidelity
• What is the training goal?• What is the real-world communication?• “One can debate the level of fidelity
needed for useful training, but fidelity must certainly be high when it relates to the specific task being trained”
1Brown, 2010
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Types of fidelity
Communication simulation Communication user interface
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Communication Simulation
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And now for a military example…
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Basic Intercom
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Intercom and Individual Radios
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Geolocated Individual Radios
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Geolocated Vehicle & Individual Radios
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Highest Fidelity
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Team building examples:
Compound & IMTS‘Intercom’ only for all players
Grafenwoehr First-RespondersSimulated radios & Earshot
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Communication User Interface
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“Quite simply, communications should be as seamless as all other aspects of [the serious game]. Communications should
be internal to [the game] with seams between vendor production transparent
to the user.”1
Major Benjamin Brown,
MOVES Institute,
Naval Postgraduate School1Brown, 2010
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Depends on fidelity
Players shout over their monitors In-game text-chat Simple press-to-talk key for voice Or communication ‘items’ are playable
objects Intelligent agents?
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User Interface
Heads up displaySimple and intuitiveFlashing icon over avatar headsAvatars’ mouths moveNot realistic – does it break flow?
In-game objectse.g. walk-up to a virtual computer and
interact with itHigher realism – but does it impede
training?
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Regardless of design decision Quality of the audio is paramount
Dropped or garbled audio is not acceptable Scalability can really be an issue Latency also matters
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Audio Latency
• End-to-end Latency– Time for audio to travel from one user to
another
• Effected by many factors– Network link– Packetization delay– Operating system delay– Hardware device delay
• Maximum 150ms one-way latency1
• Latency <100 ideal 1ITU-T G.114
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After Action Review
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After Action Review
• “Both simulation groups commented extensively on the AAR tool. Both groups believed the AAR tool was critical in providing a big picture view of what happened during the exercise.” 1
1Brown, 2010
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After Action Review
• Communication playback synced with visuals
• Seek, Pause, FF, RW, Bookmarks• Export audio/visual for later analysis and
study• BIG data?
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Final Thoughts
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A Common Myth
High fidelity means hard to use(and expensive?)
However: Does require insight into operational
environment
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Summary
Communication is critical for teamwork Serious games require high-fidelity and
high-quality communication for effective team-based training
Repetition is important, but so is analysis
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Resources Brown, B., (2010) A Training Transfer Study of Simulation Games Carpenter, R., White, C., (2005) Commercial Computer Games in the Australian
Department of Defense Corti, K. (2006) Games-based Learning; a serious business application. Derryberry, A. (2007) Serious Games: online games for learning Diller, D., Roberts, B., Blankenship, S., Nielsen, D. (2004) DARWARS Ambush!
Authoring Lessons Learned in a Training Game Hussain, T., etal (2010) Development of game-based training systems: Lessons
learned in an inter-disciplinary field in the making Hussain T. & Ferguson, W. (2005) Efficient Development of Large-Scale Military
Training Environments using a Multi-Player Game McGowan, C., Pecheux, B. (2007) Serious Games that Improve Performance Michael, D., & Chen, S. (2006) Serious games: Games that educate, train and
inform Sims E., Salas E., Burke S. (2004) Is There a ‘Big Five’ in Teamwork Snider, M., Carley K., Moon, I. (2005) Detailed Comparison of America’s Army and
Unit of Action Experiments Squire, K. & Jenkins, H. (2003) Harnessing the power of games in education
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Thank You!
Ross Kukulinski
@rosskukulinski
ross.kukulinski@asti-usa.com
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