Warning: Contains Spoilers

Color and lighting are two devices often used in the media to convey certain messages or highlight important aspects of the story. Video games did not fully utilize these devices outside of providing relative realism to an otherwise monochromatic game. Perhaps, that is due to the lack of processing power in compiling how the game looks visually. Nowadays, they can be deployed to draw a theme in the game mechanics, and used as integral parts of the plot. Enter Splinter Cell: Conviction. This AAA stealthy action-adventure from Ubisoft is the sixth installment of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell series. This game is just one example of how these devices are used to present compelling gameplay and a rich story.

Show Me The Way – Players move from one objective to the next from directions lit on the backdrops.

As with the previous series, protagonist Sam Fisher still needs to sneak around the map from one objective to the next. But this time, he’s doing it alone as he recovers from the recent loss of his daughter, Sarah. Immediately, the player can notice the change in how lighting is employed differently from the other games. When Fisher is hiding from his enemies’ view, the colorful screen changes to a simple black-and-white composition. When he is detected while sneaking, players are still able to move around. Now, however, a bright silhouette figure stands as contrast where the player has left. This signifies as the marker of the player’s last known location according to the enemies. Directions and tips for the game are shown on the wall from an unknown light source, sometimes with a loop of Fisher’s memories playing in the background in black and white. This bridge the device between the game mechanics and how the story is told.

How I Once Was – Detected players leave a white, transparent silhouette, which the enemy AI will focus towards. Note the chandelier remains in full color to allow players to interact with this object.

To compliment the action, color and lighting were also used during critical plot points. For example, at the beginning of the game, a cut scene featured a flashback of a conversation between Fisher and Sarah. The scene served as a tutorial, as well as demonstrating the theme of the story – darkness can be used as a positive tool to shield and protect you. This is a stark contrast to other games, where players depend on the consistency of brightness to maneuver through the game. This dichotomy also helps the player reach the next objective, where the player comes out of the darkness to the next part of the story.

Bedtime Story – Fisher’s flashback with his daughter Sarah. The use of lighting serves as a motif to the game mechanic and sets the mood for the whole game.

(Spoiler alert!) My favorite part of the game was the scene in which Fisher discovered that Sarah was in fact very much alive the whole time. Sarah, concurrently, was also told that her father had been killed. These actions were sanctioned by Fisher’s old boss and best friend, Lambert. However, both characters needed to be “kept in the dark” for their own safety, hammering in the overall theme of the entire game! Fisher was then overwhelmed and dazed with emotion to discover his daughter’s status, as well as his best friend’s betrayal. This is where the game really amped up the lighting trick. The player proceeds to finish out the level in sepia – not quite black-and-white, not quite fully colored; just dancing between the spectrum to reflect the balance of rage and sanity felt by Fisher at that moment. At that part of the game, Fisher has already infiltrated Third Echelon, the organization and building where he used to work for before his daughter’s supposed death. The player would then have to repel and eliminate various security forces and splinter cell agents, who are also kept in the dark and has labeled Fisher as their enemy and target. (On a side note, this plot twist added extra excitement to the game, since players controlled Fisher as a splinter cell agent in the previous games of the series – a practically untouchable warrior of the dark. Now, ironically, they are used as tools of evil that Fisher needed to defeat.)

Combined with other techniques to draw darkness as an aid rather than a hindrance (resupply crates hidden in the alleyways, Sonar Goggles to highlight units in the dark, etc.), Splinter Cell: Conviction is the perfect example of how color and lighting can weave through multiple aspects of a video game to deliver a significant impact to the overall experience.

Image Credits: Giant Bomb | Big Download

Almost exactly one year since we began, this past Tuesday we wrapped development on the Digital ECALC project. Developed by the UCF Substance Use Research Group (SURG), ECALC stands for “Expectancy Challenge Alcohol Literacy Curriculum.” It is an instructor-led, group-based intervention to educate students about expectancies associated with alcohol in an attempt to reduce heavy drinking.

When students think about the way drinking alcohol makes them feel, they often report that they are outgoing, happy, and carefree. These effects, however, run contrary to the actual physical effects of alcohol consumption, which include dizziness, slowed reactions, and nausea. These positive effects are expectancy effects, which are effects we’ve come to associate with alcohol through experience, such as repeatedly seeing alcohol consumption in party situations. This occurs because we have been conditioned to feel happy, silly, outgoing, etc., while drinking alcohol. Researchers have even found that people can even exhibit these positive expectancy effects associated with drinking while consuming beer that they believe to be real, but is actually non-alcoholic.¹

ECALC was constructed to educate students about the powerful effect of expectancies. When students drink heavily, they are often striving to experience these expectancy effects. This presentation reveals the truth about alcohol and that these effects are independent of actual consumption. This encourages students to rethink the decision to drink heavily.

RETRO was tasked with taking the content from the original ECALC presentation, which was based in PowerPoint, and turning it into a more engaging, interactive experience. We incorporated interactive minigames and demonstrations, narrated animations, pictures, sound clips, and video clips. Our former programmer, Dan Brown, even lent us his voice for the presentation’s guide, Scientist Dan. Our enhanced version of the presentation is scheduled to go live in front of UCF students all next week.

So, I’d like to take a moment to thank my wonderful development team for all of their hard work: Greg Pardo (programmer), Danielle Chelles (artist), Jenny Vogel (voice talent coordinator), and Dan Brown (the voice of Scientist Dan). Also, a huge thanks goes to our sponsors/SMEs from SURG — Dr. Dunn, Tom Hall, Amy Schreiner, Abigail Fried, and Alyssa Boucher.

You can read more about the project and see some screen caps on the Digital ECALC project page.

Are you interested in seeing how a research lab works? Would you like to experience science first-hand? The RETRO lab needs you! Beginning in Summer 2012, we will be running a series of 12 studies and we need a large number of both male and female undergraduate volunteers to serve as research assistants to help with data collection. Training needs to begin immediately.

We are currently seeking motivated undergraduate students
interested in gaining research experience!

As an undergraduate research assistant, you will volunteer 10 hours every week to collect data for these 12 studies. You will receive training on research ethics and how to conduct the experiment. You will interact with participants and collect data. You will also have the opportunity to participate in lab discussions about gaming and science. This is a great opportunity to experience research at a large university first-hand.

No previous experience is required!

Think of this as a training opportunity. We will teach you what you need to know. The skills you will acquire in the lab paired with the experience in data collection will look great on both job and graduate school applications.

What you’ll be doing:

• Interacting with participants
• Collecting data
• Using physiological instruments
• Participating in lab discussions

What you’ll learn

• Research ethics
• How to conduct an experiment
• How to use an Arrington eye tracker, a BIOPAC, and an Affectiva Q Sensor

Commitment: Volunteer 10 Hours / Week

Interested? Have questions? Please feel free to email me at kprocci at knights.ucf.edu!

Flyer Template Credit

Here at RETRO Lab we like to get things done right the first time. This post is for any programmers out there who struggle with flash containers.

First let me begin by saying that as a developer, you don’t always know how the client will be using what you’ve made. Many times we have to make decisions about whether to take a quick-and-dirty approach or build a more dynamic application that can be altered easily in the future. In these situations it’s important to probe the client for as much information as possible. However, in this case, the client was developing at the same time so it was pretty hard to make final decisions early on without knowing how our games would be implemented by our client. As it turns out, they wanted to integrate them into a interactive program they had been building in Flash Builder.

Some of the issues we encountered along with the solutions we came up with:

1. A resolution change: We developed five or so games at a resolution that ultimately ended up changing. Since many of the games we coded for a static resolution, parts of the games needed to be reprogrammed. Any variable or constant that had importance relative to the dimensions of the product needed to be updated. Another issue is scaling without pixel distortion. When you shrink a stage of a non-vector based game in a SWF, you’re going to have some ugly issues and frame-rate changes. In our case our client was willing to accept this and I found a way to enable bitmap smoothing on every bitmap in a flash file which also helped.

2. Masking: When you’re running a SWF game alone or in an html container, it’s going to perform differently than if it was in another flash container. I personally always apply a mask to the stage that is the size of my clip. That way, nothing outside the area I want gets displayed. Seems simple enough but when you have a Flash Builder or SWF parent of your game, the stage is much bigger your game is added to the stage they have versus creating a new stage. The end result is masking the parent’s content and a whole bunch of other issues I won’t get into. So how did we solve this. It was kind of a pain but instead of adding everything to the stage, you should create a MovieClip the size you want, add that to the stage, and then add all your game assets onto that. That way you can create a mask specifically for this clip and avoid any direct stage manipulation. Which brings me to the third issue.

3. Stage Properties: Manipulating the stage is fine if you are running your app/game from an html or projector like I mentioned above. When you start messing with the stages settings in a parent flash-based container, you will overwrite that containers stage settings. This will obviously lead to the container application no longer performing how it once did. So avoid setting any of the stage properties and try to keep it all local.

So overall this project was an experience and it’s a testament to how nasty flash can get when you start embedding SWF files within each other. Hopefully the problems we solved will put more pressure on our team to take these issues into consideration before we go and take a traditional approach to AS3 programming. Good luck!

It’s been an extremely productive winter break. We finished up some of our development projects, finished a paper reporting on a study from our Game-Based Training research effort, edited a few other potential publications, and wrote a few grants. We’ve also been updating the website with information. Now we’re gearing up to start a whole bunch of new studies and projects.

We have officially finished game development for our resilience minigames! In about a year and a half, we were able to design and develop seven (award-winning) minigames. The simulation that the minigames are for is almost done as well, so we will begin validation studies in Army ROTC cadets this semester.

I am very excited to announce our newest research project: We will be working with Raytheon BBN Technologies to conduct a series of 12 studies on a game that is currently under development. Funded by IARPA, this game is designed to improve the decision-making abilities of intelligence analysts by addressing cognitive biases. Aside from effectiveness, we are also interested in the role of engagement in serious game effectiveness. We’ll be updating our Projects page with more information soon, but for now if you would like to know more check out the following links:

• Press Release from BBN
• An awesome article in Wired!

In the next few months, we will also finish development for the Digital ECALC project, finish two meta-analyses, hopefully get a few papers published, and wrap data collection on a gaming preferences and effectiveness study… It’s going to be a busy semester, so stay tuned!

Like many others, I remember, years ago, watching the opening cinematic for Final Fantasy VII for the very first time and knowing that we had entered a brand new age. Since then, video games have been using more and more elaborate opening cinematics to entice people to play the game and to quickly establish a narrative. The only problem is that these things are expensive as all get out to make. If you are making a triple “A” game, then the expense can be justified as marketing. I’m not ashamed to say that I have bought games just because the trailer was pretty. But, serious games tend to have a captive audience. You don’t have to convince students to play a learning game if their schools mandate it! So, in the interest of saving money and getting the most out of every game feature, we here at RETRO explored just how an opening cinematic can help users get the most out of the game.

One of the major purposes of an opening cinematic is to establish a context. One study found that establishing a supplementary, stressful context before playing a game actually improved players’ performance on performance tasks in that game¹. After examining the learning and motivation literature, we decided that there are three cognitive factors that can yield this improvement: context², stress³, and motivation⁴. Essentially, people learn better in a relevant context, do better when in a stressful situation when they are accustomed to performing in stressful situations, and do better when they want to master a task rather than just look good doing it.

So, that’s what we tested. We had students play the Damage Control Trainer, a 3D first-person game designed to teach recruits to navigate the inside of a battleship, and we changed the opening cinematic to stress either wanting to learn the material or wanting to score well. Unfortunately, players reported similar levels of motivation, regardless of opening cinematic seen. So, we expanded the study. Players either watched an opening cinematic or they didn’t, and we checked if they differed in terms of motivation, levels of stress, or perceived contextual relevance.

They didn’t.

So, to be sure, we went further. The previously mentioned study used movie clips to stress out players, rather than a cinematic, so we decided to do that too. Players watched one of four short movie clips that was either relevant or irrelevant and either stressful, or stress-free. Regardless of movie clip watched, players performed similarly and learned roughly the same amount. Furthermore, the players’ perception of the game’s relevance, a subcomponent of context, increased after playing the game, regardless of the clip they watched. So, we conclude that it isn’t the opening cinematic which affected players’ sense of context, and subsequently their performance, but rather the game itself.

While the use of situated cognition, arousal, and goal orientation have all been used successfully in training, incorporating these factors into an opening cinematic does improve learning in a serious game. So, if you’re making a serious game, don’t break the bank making an opening cinematic. Those resources can be better used to improve game usability and in-game features that provide contextually-relevant stress. Or, you can buy your dev team lunch. Either way, you’re getting a better game in the end!

1. This finding is reported in the following study: Morris, Hancock, & Shirkey’s (2004) “Motivational effects of adding context relevant stress in PC-based game training.”

2. Context, used in this instance, refers to situated cognition; this principle states that one learns moreeffectively when in a context that is relevant to the material being learned. If a game tries to teach a behavior by setting the game in an environment where that behavior occurs (learning about physics on a space station, for example), then that game is using an endogenous framework. Read more about situated cognition in Van Eck’s (2006) “Digital game based learning: It’s not just the digital natives who are restless” and Susi, Johannesson, and Backlund’s (2007) “Serious Games: An Overview”. Read more about the benefits of using endogenous frameworks in learning games in Rieber’s (1996) “Seriously considering play: Designing interactive learning environments on the blending of microworlds, simulations, and games,” and Kenny & Gunter’s (2007) “Endogenous fantasy-based serious games: Intrinsic motivation and learning.”

3. We focus on a key component of stress, arousal. Intensity of arousal has been shown to be a factor in motivation for learning behavior. Read more about this relationship in Garris, Ahlers, & Driskell’s (2002) “Games, motivation, and learning: A research and practice model.”

4. Motivation can be described in a number of ways. We use the Goal Orientation paradigm. Here, motivation is comprised of two components: Orientation and Valence. Orientation describes motivation in terms of mastery of the material and performance of learning activity. Valence is described as the desire to approach the positive or avoid the negative. More information on Goal orientation is available in Elliot & McGregor’s (2001) “A 2×2 achievement goal framework.”

Images and video provided by Julian Orrego.

It has been a busy, busy week. RETRO has been at I/ITSEC to show-off two of our minigames, Garden Defense and Devil’s Advocate, both of which were finalists in the 2011 Serious Games Showcase & Challenge. It is certainly an honor to have not one, but two games as finalists in this prestigious competition. I am extremely pleased (and proud) to announce that Garden Defense, our tower defense assessment minigame, won Best Student Game!

A little bit about Garden Defense: Like Devil’s Advocate, this minigame was developed for the Novonics Corporation for their Walk in my Shoes serious game. Walk in my Shoes follows a solider through his deployment, including the stages both before and after. This serious game teaches players conflict management strategies, provides information on the challenges of reintegration, and even gives more background on everything that needs to be done before deployment (e.g., assign power of attorney, renew car registration).

In Walk in my Shoes, we needed some sort of assessment method to serve as the capstone experience. This would determine what content areas the player needed to review. Traditionally, this would have been a simple quiz-based assessment. Our game designer, Lucas Blair, saw this as a challenge. How do you gamify an assessment? Games as a medium are uniquely suited for this type of task as they require input from the player to drive play. The decisions a player makes can affect his or her progress within the game world. When coming up with the design for this assessment game, Lucas knew that somehow the performance on the quiz had to have a real-time effect on gameplay.

I think what Lucas did was ingenious – he decided to design a tower defense game. For those who are unfamiliar with the genre, this type of game involves lines of enemies marching on your home base. You must protect your base by strategically placing defensive towers, which automatically fire upon enemies when they come near. In order to build those towers, you need to spend money/resources. Different enemy types will require different types of defensive towers to defeat them and points and time are often limited, so this quickly becomes a resource management and strategy game.

In Garden Defense, players are tasked with protecting tomato and pepper plants from an extremely persistent bug army. The towers (bug spray, fly swatters, and bug zappers) aren’t free and players need to spend points in order to defend their garden. To do this, and here’s the smart part, players are required to answer questions. If they answer correctly, they are awarded points to spend. Essentially, the reward for correct answers is in-game currency, which is needed to play and beat the game.

These questions come from all of the different content areas presented in Walk in my Shoes. Player performance in the assessment directly affects their ability to successfully play the game, and based on his or her performance, at the end of the game it tells the player the content they need to review. By requiring the player to use the content they have learned in order play, Lucas successfully turned what would otherwise be a boring quiz into a fun, tower defense serious game.

This game is a shining example as to how games themselves can be used as an assessment tool. It is also another example of the creativity a game-loving research scientist can bring to the table when designing effective serious games.

I would like to thank the dev team for their incredible work:

• Programmer: Skyler Goodell
• Artist: Danielle Chelles
• Designer: Lucas Blair
• Production Managers: Danielle Chelles, Lucas Blair, Katelyn Procci
• Instructional Systems Architect: Dr. Anya Andrews
• Subject Matter Expert: Dr. Michael Kofler
• Additional Writers: Katelyn Procci

Garden Defense was developed by the UCF RETRO Lab for the Novonics Corporation, which was funded by the Defense Centers of Excellence.

You should always be proud of your work, no matter what you do. Serious games research labs, such as my own, provide a unique opportunity with respect to this. Aside from being able to create a piece of art (yes, I’m one of those games-as-art types) that people enjoy playing, you also have the added benefit of truly helping people.

Sometimes you lose sight of this when you are bogged down with development. Graduate school is hard enough, but graduate school with a production schedule, man, talk about a challenge. You might be grumpy because you’ve been stuck in the office all day and you keep finding bugs in something you need to deliver in an hour and you’re stressed and you’re hungry and the coffee machine won’t work and you don’t remember what the sun or your apartment looks like — but at the end of the day, you are producing something that just might make a difference to someone.

That’s why I love training games. One of my most favorite games that we studied was developed by our partners, BBN Raytheon Technologies. Their game, the VESSEL Damage Control Trainer, teaches US Navy recruits all sorts of damage control skills – from first-aid and communications protocols to shipboard navigation.

We conducted several validation studies and found that, by and large, the players of the game performed better than those who did not play the game in a series of transfer tasks. This is excellent from a scientific standpoint – we were able to see that players of the game performed better in realistically simulated situations, one of which included a flooding scenario. Great, we found p-less-than-point-oh-five, let’s publish!

But you really need to take a step back and think about what you’ve just found. What it really boils down to is, because someone played this game, they were just a touch faster at fixing a leaking pipe, or they were able to understand communications just a little bit better. In an emergency situation, in which these skills will be used, this can be the difference between life and death.

Potentially, this game just saved a life.

And being a part of that is a great feeling.

Games like these are great because, with a little creativity and appropriate implementation, they can be used for almost anything. My most favorite current project are the set of minigames we are developing. Supported by a grant from the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health & Traumatic Brain Injury, we were subcontracted by the Novonics Corporation to create little practice environments for the content taught in a larger simulation to help soldiers deal with the psychological challenges of deployment. Our minigames touch on all sorts of areas, like how to correct cognitive distortions or how to best deal with uncomfortable questions and situations that deployed soldiers may face upon returning stateside. They’re all neat and unique games (go ahead, try to find another stealth-based serious game, I dare you) and their instructional and therapeutic value is potentially immense (stay tuned for the results of our upcoming validation studies).

If one soldier is helped because they played our game, that makes it all worth it.

As an aside, if you are going to I/ITSEC 2011 later this year, you should come by our booth and play some of our games! Two of those minigames, Devil’s Advocate and Garden Defense, are both finalists in the 2011 Serious Games Showcase & Challenge.

In competition against international and large corporate software developers, UCF RETRO Lab landed a Bronze Medal for their student entry in the Government/Military category at the 2011 Serious Play Conference held earlier this month in Redmond, WA at the DigiPen Institute of Technology for their work on Devil’s Advocate. We are very proud, especially of our programmer Skyler’s excellent work. We would also like to recognize the entire Devil’s Advocate design and development team for their exceptional work on this game:

• Programmer: Skyler Goodell
• Artist: Danielle Chelles
• Designer: Lucas Blair
• Production Managers: Danielle Chelles, Lucas Blair
• Instructional Systems Architect: Dr. Anya Andrews
• Subject Matter Expert: Dr. Michael Kofler

Devil’s Advocate is a lightweight Flash-based minigame embedded within a larger, interactive learning simulation designed for teaching psychological health skills to military service members at various stages of the deployment cycle.  It is one minigame in a suite of seven developed for this project. Devil’s Advocate deals with anxiety and depression and provides players an opportunity to practice the cognitive restructuring of negative thoughts–a skill taught previously in the larger simulation–by moving undetected around a military base in order to identify soliders’ automatic negative thoughts. In this stealth game, players are able to review the different types of negative automatic thoughts (e.g., over-generalization, personalization and blame) and then actually label example automatic thoughts. Once they apply the correct label to the automatic thought, a new, positive automatic thought replaces it.

Devil’s Advocate was developed by the UCF RETRO Lab for the Novonics Corporation, which was funded by the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health to develop an interactive simulation to prepare military personnel for the myriad of psychological challenges they will face during the stages of deployment.

See the other award winning serious game titles here: http://www.seriousplayconference.com/2011/08/

As part of RETRO’s Game-Based Training research effort for the Office of Naval Research via Raytheon BBN Technologies, Fallout 3 a popular commercial off-the-shelf video game, was modified into a virtual environment used to test shipboard navigation skills. One of the in-game cities, Rivet City, is a large US Navy ship modeled in-part after a World War II aircraft carrier, the USS Oriskany. Rivet City was modified to look like an actual US Navy ship, complete with an accurate compartment labeling system. Every compartment on a ship has its own unique identifier listed on plaques (sometimes referred to as bullseyes). The numbers follow a very specific system. Training recruits to understand and use this system is difficult and attempts have been made to improve their shipboard navigation abilities using virtual environments, such as with BBN’s VESSEL Damage Control Trainer.

Initially we developed this mod as a virtual testbed and used the in-game quest editor to generate an experience that tested players’ shipboard navigation abilities. During this quest, players were tasked with seeking out various ship compartments using the bullseye plaques placed above compartment doors. The most difficult part of this effort was re-skinning the ship and placing all of the correct bullseyes over the doors. Now that this has been completed, additional quests can be generated that focus on instructional content as well. This will allow players to further explore the virtual ship environment to better understand how to use the navigation system.

Be sure to check out the video at the top of the post to see the mod!

That is the beauty of modding commercial games–once the virtual environment has been created, any number of creative quests can be created to provide instruction and practice. For example, NPCs can be used to teach players about the bullseye system, quests can be structured to take players step-by-step through the process, and the mod can even be used to test a player’s ability to apply knowledge. And this is done inexpensively, thanks in large part to Bethesda for developing and including a level and quest editor with their games. Instead of spending a monumental amount of money into developing a new game engine, we can work off of one that already exists. It is no surprise that modding has become popular in the serious games community.

The Fallout 3 mod was used in a pilot study conducted during summer 2011. The purpose of the study was to examine how well shipboard navigation skills transferred from one virtual learning environment to another. Participants first played either BBN’s VESSEL Damage Control Trainer, a first-person serious game designed to teach Navy shipboard navigation and damage control procedures, or Team Fortress 2, a first-person shooter with no shipboard navigation content. After playing either of these games for 30 minutes, players then proceeded to play the Fallout 3 mod where they were asked to complete a quest to find various ship compartments. Player times for completing each quest were recorded as well as the number of navigation errors made. Initial findings indicated that those who first played VESSEL Damage Control Trainer were able to immediately transfer their bullseye navigation knowledge to the new platform, and were also more likely to complete all the quests. However, those who played Team Fortress 2 were still able to pick up the bullseye navigation system fairly quickly. This study, in turn, helped demonstrate that commercial off-the-shelf software can be inexpensively modified and used for improving training outcomes. While some usability issues do need to be worked out (not everyone could easily master the PC-based game controls), these results are promising. Future work could use this mod to create more detailed and interesting quests, complete with multiple stages, a more engaging narrative, and NPC interactions, to teach Navy recruits skills related to shipboard navigation.

Are you interested in reading more about modding serious games? You might want to check out the following articles:

• Fong, G. (2006). Adapting COTS games for military experimentation. Simulation & Gaming, 37(4), 452-465.
• Robillard, G., Bouchard, S., Fournier, T., & Renaud, P. (2003). Anxiety and presence during VR immersion: A comparative study of the reactions of phobic and non-phobic participants in therapeutic virtual environments derived from computer games. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 6(5), 467-476.
• Moshirnia, A. V. (2006). The impact of procedural generation and modding on the participatory design of educational video games. Proceedings of Computers and Advanced Technology in Education.
• Prensky, M. (2003). “Modding” – The newest authoring tool. Retrieved from here.