Ross Kukulinski--ASTi

1. Ross Kukulinski Serious Play Conference 2013 1

2. Photo by Derek Jensen 2

3. Photo Courtesy of U.S. Military 3

4. Serious Games are Powerful Tools 4

5. 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, 2003 2 Michael & Chen, 2006 5

6. 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 6

7. Communication and Performance  America‟s Army experiments  Researchers measured team communication ○ Communication network level ○ Number of report-ins ○ Number of normal communications  Teams with regular organized reports had:  Higher performance  Higher estimated situational awareness Schneider & Carley, 2005 7

8. 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 8

9. „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 9

10. Team Building Examples 10

12. U.S. Army Grafenwoehr, Germany First responder training with Live & Virtual Training Photo Courtesy of U.S. Military 12

13. Live-Virtual-Constructive 13

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15. Incident-Management Training 15

16. 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 Brown, 2010 16

17. On a personal note:  My biggest failures typically come down to one of two things:  I didn‟t communicate  Or I didn‟t communicate effectively 17

18. So what?  If we‟re building games to train or teach  and teamwork is a determining element of success or failures  Then our games need to accurately reflect real-world communication 18

19. Real-world Communication 19

20. What types of communication do you use in your workplace? 20

21. My short list:  Email  Instant Messaging  Telephone / Cell Phone  VoIP / Video Calling  Face-to-face  Twitter 21

22. 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 22

23. Types of fidelity  Communication simulation  Communication user interface 23

24. Communication Simulation 24

25. And now for a military example… 25

26. Basic Intercom 26

27. Intercom and Individual Radios 27

28. Geolocated Individual Radios 28

29. Geolocated Vehicle & Individual Radios 29

30. Highest Fidelity 30

31. Team building examples:  Compound & IMTS  „Intercom‟ only for all players  Grafenwoehr First-Responders  Simulated radios & Earshot 31

32. Communication User Interface 32

33. “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 School 1Brown, 2010 33

34. 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? 34

35. User Interface  Heads up display  Simple and intuitive  Flashing icon over avatar heads  Avatars‟ mouths move  Not realistic – does it break flow?  In-game objects  e.g. walk-up to a virtual computer and interact with it  Higher realism – but does it impede training? 35

36. 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 36

37. 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 37

38. After Action Review 38

39. 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 39

40. After Action Review • Communication playback synced with visuals • Seek, Pause, FF, RW, Bookmarks • Export audio/visual for later analysis and study • BIG data? 40

41. Final Thoughts 41

42. A Common Myth  High fidelity means hard to use  (and expensive?) However:  Does require insight into operational environment 42

43. 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 43

44. 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             44

45. Thank You! Ross Kukulinski @rosskukulinski ross.kukulinski@asti-usa.com 45