Serious Games for Teaching Conflict Resolution: Modeling Conflict Dynamics - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 458

limited to 15 min, which can sometimes be too short for meaningful conflicts to
occur, or for conflicts to occur between players with particular conflict management
styles. We therefore plan longer game sessions as an immediate future study to
examine the impact of gameplay time in reported conflict. Finally, while self-
reports in rating format offer a potentially useful psychometrics tool for children
of our age group, the study presented here treats ratings as values for a regression
problem. We argue that doing so only provides an initial (and limited) perspective
on the conflict phenomenon as ratings should be naturally treated as ordinal values.
Several studies have already showed the clear benefits of rank-based questionnaires
over rating-based questionnaires (Yannakakis and Hallam 2011 ; Metallinou and
Narayanan 2013 ) which suggest the transformation of ratings into ordinal scales
and the further processing of them via rank-based statistics or non-linear preference
learning models.
Obtained results show that the game can successfully elicit conflict situations
and that reported conflict ratings appear to follow a conflict escalation and conflict
deescalation phase. While this is already an indication for the game's capacity
in teaching conflict resolution, extensive studies across different countries within
school settings will be required to further validate the ability of the game to transfer
these skills to the real (non-digital) world. Such studies are currently running
and preliminary results already suggest that both the game and its personalization
mechanisms (user modeling and scenario adaptation) (Grappiolo et al. 2011 ;
Cheong et al. 2013 ) offer an alternative, yet very powerful, approach to social skill
learning.
Acknowledgements This research was partially supported by the FP7 ICT project SIREN (project
no: 258453). The authors would like to thank Joanna Campos and Carlos Martinho at INESC-ID
for organizing the user study in Portugal. We also thank all the students who participated in this
study.
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