Digital Learning and Videogames

At the Ackoff Center for Advancement of Stystems Approaches (ACASA), this research concerns how to use videogames and virtual world simulation to promote systems thinking in users. As complexity increases in organizations and in daily life, there is a greater need for interventions to help promote better systems thinking. Traditional teaching methods pose a number of pedagogical dilemmas and run counter to the expectations for learning in the new generation of employees. We are experimenting with artificial societies, transport into narrative worlds, poetics, animation, and alternative media and videogame designs in the context of several sponsored research projects. The game/training simulator creation platform we are building is a multi-agent, artificial society simulator capable of modeling individual agents’ physiology, stress, emotion, and course of action decision making that in turn leads to the emergence of macro-behaviors and punctuated equilibria. We are researching authoring tools that will help people to use our lessons learned while designing their own systems training and analysis games.

• Edutainment and games for training -- overview 
• Dr. Silverman's Remarks to Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center (WRMDC)
  
• Serious Games;
  
• HEART-SENSE: a game with virtual personas for heart attack symptom training (NIH/NLM/NHAAP);
  
• Terrorism and asymmetric conflict gaming; developing realistic synthetic personas for training simulators (Pentagon/DMSO/IMC);
  
• Agent Based Identity Repertoire (ABIR)