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and self-reported emotions were found to be direct indicators of conflict; negative
judgements about other players were correlated with conflict escalation. Likewise,
the angry affective state was also positively correlated with conflict escalation.
Surprisingly the happy affective state was also found to be positively correlated
with conflict escalation. This might have been linked to the student's role as a giver
or receiver of the detrimental action.
21.6
Discussion and Conclusions
In this paper, we present a multiplayer serious game
Village Voices
, which was
designed to support children between the ages of 9 and 12 in learning about conflict
resolution.
Village Voices
is informed by Bodine and Crawford (
1998
) conflict
resolution problem-solving process, and thus focuses on equipping young people
with skills to address conflicts proactively and without the need for mediators, and
to be reflective about conflict experiences. As our intention in
Village Voices
was to
create situations of conflict for each player even though players would potentially
have different perceptions of conflict from each other regarding the same game
event, we set out to model conflict intensity in players during play. As such, we
introduced a method for capturing conflict and conflict dynamics within a group of
players via the use of serious games.
We then used the game and its available conflict quests to collect data from 32
children in Portugal each playing a number of quests in a 4-player setup in a school
setting. The data consisted of demographic information, conflict resolution strategy
profile information, cultural tendency, in-game behavioural data, self-reports on
conflict and affect during the game. A number of features were extracted from
the data and analysed in this paper. We revealed effects between conflict manage-
ment style, gender, cultural tendency, and conflict intensity reports. In particular,
significant effects were found among different TKI conflict resolution styles, collec-
tivist/individualist orientation, and gender. The students in the accommodation and
compromise groups gave higher ratings than the students in the competition group.
Girls tend to report higher conflict ratings than boys. The students who are oriented
towards individualist also tend to give higher conflict ratings while the students
oriented towards collectivist tend to give lower ratings. Finally, strong correlations
were found between in-game actions and conflict ratings; in particular, the self-
reported emotions and social relationships indicated the degree of conflict that the
students felt.
The study presented in this article is constrained by a number of limitations.
First, the curved pattern of conflict experience reflects only the responses collected
from the male students. A subsequent study is required to test whether a similar
pattern can be clearly found from girls' reports. Second, a student's TKI style was
judged by his own responses to a TKI questionnaire and not by an expert's (e.g.
teacher's responses), thus, our findings on TKI style and conflict ratings might
be undermined by this limitation. Third, the duration of each game session was
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