Serious Games for Teaching Conflict Resolution: Modeling Conflict Dynamics - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 440

Ware et al. ( 2013 ) present an AI-plan based computational model of narrative
that operationalizes conflict. In their Conflict Partial order Causal Link (CPOCL)
model, a conflict can be understood as a series of steps that threaten or obstruct part
of another plan, i.e. negate causal links that have been established for another plan.
CPOCL is based on the perspective that “conflict occurs when a character forms a
plan that is thwarted by another event in the story, or would have been thwarted if
the event had succeeded”. Ware et al. ( 2013 ) further define seven dimensions that
characterize conflict: participants, reason, duration, balance, directness, stakes , and
resolution . The first three dimensions (i.e. participants, reason, and duration) are
used to detect if conflict exists, while the remaining dimensions are used to generate
stories that embed different kinds of conflicts. Their experimental studies validated
the notion that the participants, reason , and duration metrics could detect conflict as
well as the average human subject. The balance, directness , and resolution metrics
were also found to be in agreement with what human subjects judged. On the
other hand, there was disagreement between CPOCL and subjects on evaluating the
degree of stake . The nature of conflict in Ware et al. ( 2013 ) differs from our work
in that their understanding of conflict concerns a narrative phenomenon which can
potentially involve multiple participants and a structured story, while the conflict
dealt with in this particular study refers to emotion experienced by an individual
participant.
While the aforementioned studies take a theoretical stance on conflict modeling
or approach conflict indirectly, in this paper we introduce a data-driven approach
to conflict model construction which allows subjects to experience conflict and
report it. For that purpose we collected data from children playing the Village Voices
game, asking them to fill-in demographics and conflict style questionnaires and
recording their behavioural patterns in the game. We further asked them to report the
conflict intensity of each game quest during play. We then used linear mappings to
approximate the underlying function between in-game behaviour, user profile (e.g.
conflict style) and conflict intensity.

21.3 Game Design

Village Voices is a four-player open world game that takes place in a fictional village
set in pre-industrialization times. It is designed to be played in a classroom setting
by players who know one another, under teacher supervision. On the surface, the
game is about survival and prosperity in the village. On closer inspection, however,
the game is about friendship and reputation management in the village, and mastery
of conflict resolution.
Each game world contains four player-controlled character roles: the blacksmith,
the innkeeper, the alchemist, and the carpenter (see Fig. 21.1 ). When the game
begins, each player is assigned a particular character to play. This character role
is retained for the entire duration of the player's experience with Village Voices .
As part of daily life in the village, players are required to undertake various actions