Serious Games for Teaching Conflict Resolution: Modeling Conflict Dynamics - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 435

on an accurate player model that drives the adjustment and selection of quests for
each player. As such, it provides a personalized learning experience for its players,
providing them with quests appropriate to their conflict resolution abilities.
In developing this form of personalized experience, it is necessary to capture
how players react to conflict, identify detectors of conflict through the game and,
thereby, understand the dynamics of conflict. An innovation of Village Voices is the
data-driven approach for assessing children's perception about conflict through a
game. We therefore start this chapter by detailing the path towards designing the
game based on theories about conflict resolution and learning (which are discussed
in Sect. 21.2 ). We then present a game user survey held in Portugal involving 32
students playing Village Voices in a classroom setting. We log behavioural data of
the players and we ask them to report (a) the conflict intensity of the game every time
a conflict situation occurs (e.g., trading, message posting, stealing), (b) the current
affective state, and (c) relationship status of two players involved in the conflict
situation. In addition to the self-reported and behavioural data which are logged
during the game, we ask students and teachers to fill in questionnaires prior to the
game experience that provide information about their age, cultural background, and
conflict resolution style. The data is analysed for identifying detectors of conflict
intensity. It shows that gender, age, in-game behaviour, cultural tendency, and
conflict management style all have a direct impact on perceived conflict in our game.
In addition, the occurrences of detrimental actions in the game are associated with
conflict escalation and positive actions tend to result in conflict deescalation. Finally,
the children's social relationships with the other players and their emotional status
within the game are key indicators of their perception about conflict.

21.2 Related Work

This section covers the central aspects of the presented study and reviews related
work on serious games for conflict which involves framing conflict and learning
about conflict resolution. The section ends with an outline on computational models
of conflict.

21.2.1 Serious Games for Conflict

Serious games, games that feature non-entertainment objectives alongside entertain-
ment ones (Winn 2008 ), are increasingly being recognized as effective and powerful
tools for facilitating learning and encouraging behaviour change. In the case of
conflict resolution in particular, games are a promising vehicle for learning. At a
basic level, games provide us with the ability to create bounded worlds and realities
(Huizinga 1955 ). Conflict falls within the class of events that is not necessarily
safe or consequence-free if enacted in non-simulated environments, thus the partly