Serious Games for Teaching Conflict Resolution: Modeling Conflict Dynamics - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 444

Escalation Phase

De-escalation Phase

Conflict
intensity
level

War

Peace enforcement

Crisis

Crisis management

Peace keeping

Open
Conflict

Conflict management

Conflict management

Unstable
Peace

Direct prevention

Peace building

Stable
peace

Structural prevention

Peace consolidation

Duration
of conflict

Early stage Mid-stage Late-stage

Fig. 21.3 A conflict cycle proposed by Swanstrom and Weissmann [reproduced from Swanstrom
and Weissmann ( 2005 )]

As Village Voices is premised around creating conflict situations, it is therefore
centrally important that individual players indeed perceive game situations as actual
conflicts, as without this they would lack meaningful grounds to draw on during the
debrief phase. But perception of conflict can vary radically from one individual to
another. Part of the design challenge therefore became to ensure that each player
experienced conflict, in spite of their different conflict perception thresholds. The
literature on conflict proposes that it typically takes the form illustrated in Fig. 21.3 .
Village Voices attempts to create this experience curve for each individual player,
by selecting quests that appropriately escalate or de-escalate the conflict they are
currently experiencing. An example of quests that are given sequentially to the
character innkeeper is shown in Table 21.1 . The quests were designed so that a
player's perception of conflict rises as the quests advance. We hypothesized that the
degree of intensity of conflict that players feel escalates as the number of trading
partners increases, and the number of resources required grows. As such, in Quest
1 , the simplest quest, the player is asked to collect her own resources only. In Quest
2 , the player is required to obtain items from one other player, while in Quest 4