Jamie, a boy in Holly’s class, keeps calling Lucy “fat.” Lucy answers back and they end up getting into an argument (normally in the classroom). Eventually Mr Devenish, their class teacher, will tell them off, but they still keep on arguing, this time more sneakily – sitting down and giving each other hostile glances. They feel angry with each other, a bit resentful and Holly thinks that they didn’t manage to get their point across and conclusively finish the argument. This has been going on since Holly joined the school almost a year ago.

Now replace the names with Yannis, João?, Marie or Olaf and replace the reference to Lucy’s appearance with reference to cultural origin, social or religious background or athletic ability and you end up with a whole range of situations that are very likely to happen in any school across Europe.

In today’s multi-cultural and socially diverse Europe, confronting conflicts and coping with them is part of social life, especially since conflicts seem to arise in almost every context and developmental stage of human life, from scuffles in schoolyards, to bullying in the workplace and even to international warfare.

The Siren project (http://www.sirenproject.eu) aims to tackle problems, by creating a serious game that supports the role of teachers and helps them educate young people on how to understand and resolve conflicts.

World-class research groups from Greece, Denmark, Malta, Portugal, UK and the USA and an award-winning game design company from Denmark worked together to design and develop an interactive environment which benefits from recent advances in serious games, social networks, computational intelligence and emotional modelling to create uniquely motivating and educating games that can help shape how children think about and handle conflict.

The game developed by the project is able to automatically generate adaptive conflict scenarios that fit the teaching needs of particular groups of children with varying cultural background, maturity, technical expertise and the desired learning outcomes as specified by teachers, enabling the system to be used by school teachers all over Europe, without specific technical training.

Prof. Georgios N. Yannakakis at the Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta, describes the ground-breaking innovations of the Siren game as “advanced game technology that recognises the emotional reactions of its players and the conflict level of the game at any time. Driven by player models, the game’s AI generates automatically the next quest for each player so that conflict stays within appropriate levels. The player-driven procedural quest generation in Siren offers personalised learning experiences and player-specific exposure to conflict resolution which results in effective training of social skills.”

At the moment, Siren researchers are evaluating the social and learning impact of the game in real school environments, taking into account social and behavioural information before and after a month of game play sessions.

The Siren project is funded under the 7th Framework Programme, area: Technology-Enhanced Learning. The project started in September 2010 and will last 36 months, with a total budget of 2.93 M€ (EU funding is 2.25M€).

The Institute of Digital Games (http://game.edu.mt/), University of Malta (Malta) participates in the project via a core affiliation with the project consortium.

Permalink: The Siren Project – Social Games for Conflict Resolution