Storyboarding Serious Games for Large-scale Training Applications
Sebastian Arnold, Jun Fujima and Klaus P. Jantke
Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology, Children’s Media Dept., Erich-K¨astner-Str. 1a, 99094 Erfurt, Germany
Keywords:
Game Based Learning, Game based Training, Storyboarding, Staff Training, Disaster Management.
Abstract:
Beyond the limits of conventional media such as motion picture and theater dominating the passed centuries,
storyboarding means the design of interaction to meet anticipated affective and effective human experience.
Storyboarding plays a key role in research and applications in areas such as interactive digital storytelling,
but in e-learning, in general, and in game based learning, in particular, there shows an enormous deficiency.
There is abundant evidence for the need of establishing storyboarding in the design of game based learning.
Large-scale training applications reaching thousands of trainees in operation are particularly demanding.
A certain game developed and implemented for training of staff in disaster management demonstrates the
inevitability of storyboarding as a key technology of design supporting adaptive system behavior, in particular.
Storyboards are digital objects within a systematic design and development process. Storyboarding supports
the completeness and correctness of the design. Visual features of a storyboard allow for checking different
balances such as the one between learning about a human learner and adapting to the learner’s individual needs,
desires, and preferences. Furthermore, storyboards allow for an intuitive editing of the interaction scenario.
1 THE AUTHORS’ POSITION
Digital games to be deployed for realistic large-scale
learning and training applications are highly com-
plex digital systems. The manifold of possible inter-
action sequences is enormous; the storyboard in use
throughout this paper, just for illustration, contains
13 006 893 219 840 paths from the start node to one
of the end nodes.
Games purposefully designed and implemented
challenge the human imagination of forthcoming
sequences of human-system interactions and their
potential points of branching or confluence. Story-
boards are tools to represent anticipated experiences
(Jantke and Knauf, 2005).
Consequently, one should imagine storyboarding
investigations to play a certain role in educational
research and reflections thereon. Far from it, just for
illustration, the whole proceedings of the last CSEDU
conference contain only a single paper dealing with
storyboarding (Jantke and Knauf, 2012) and one more
paper using the term (Colasante and Lang, 2012).
In response, the authors present this submission
to advocate storyboarding by means of a large-scale
training application currently used by the German
agency for civil protection and disaster management.
2 TRAINING OF PREPAREDNESS
FOR DISASTER MANAGEMENT
The German Federal Agency for Civil Protection and
Disaster Management (German acronym: BBK)–an
Agency of the Federal Ministry of the Interior–in its
academy located near Ahrweiler is providing training
to more than 1,000 people of staff per year to be well-
prepared for any type of natural or technical disaster.
The present authors provide software modules for
game based training to the BBK’s academy.
It is difficult to predict, especially the future, is a
saying ascribed to the Danish physicist Niels Bohr.
This applies to forthcoming disasters, in particular.
Staff members of crisis management groups can
not be confronted to all possibly forthcoming details.
In addition to some large amount of knowledge and to
the acquisition of behavioral skills and patterns, staff
needs to familiarize with acting in the conditions of a
crisis. Repeated game play in varying situations is an
appropriate methodologyof developing preparedness.
The aim of this paper is to advocate the authors’
position that storyboarding is a valuable technology
of serious games design and implementation and to
convince the readers by means of a certain practically
relevant serious game for real training operations.
651
Arnold S., Fujima J. and P. Jantke K..
Storyboarding Serious Games for Large-scale Training Applications.
DOI: 10.5220/0004415606510655
In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2013), pages 651-655
ISBN: 978-989-8565-53-2
Copyright
c
2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
3 STORYBOARDING FOR
PURPOSES OF EDUCATION
This paper uses storyboarding as a technology, but
does not aim at anything such as an introductory
course to storyboarding. The authors rely on the ideas
introduced by (Jantke and Knauf, 2005) and con-
fine themselves to those notions and notations needed
for storyboarding game-based learning. Recent work
on storyboarduing digital games such as (Jantke and
Knauf, 2012), e.g., is worth some comparison.
Figure 1: Cutout of some storyboard of a digital game
showing two alternative graph substitutions for one episode.
Storyboards are hierarchically structured graphs.
The composite nodes are named episodes, whereas
the atomic nodes are named scenes. Composite
nodes may be subject to substitution by other graphs.
Atomic nodes, in contrast, have some semantics in the
underlying domain. They may represent documents
such as videos, pictures, or text files in any format,
but they may also represent some activities of human
learners, teacher, tutors, or those actions performed
by certain digital systems. The usage of composite
nodes in a graph allows for the representation of an-
ticipated experiences on different levels of detail.
Just for illustration, fig. 1 above is showing two
alternative substitutions for an episode. The graphs
for substitution on display contain only scenes which
have a particular operational semantics. In general,
subgraphs may also contain episodes.
Graphs may contain branches and loops, where
there are different branches for indicating alternatives,
multiple choices, parallelism of action, and the like.
Every storyboard specifies a usually rather large
number of paths through the storyboard describing,
for instance, varying experiences of game playing or
different ways of learning.
The art of storyboarding is to anticipate and to
specify in detail the manifold of forthcoming actions
including human-computer interaction. It takes into
account off-line activities as well as human-human
communication and physical interaction.
4 STORYBOARDING FOR
EDUCATIONAL ADAPTIVITY
There is no need at all to advocate adaptivity on a
conference of computer supported education, because
every good teacher is used to adapt to the needs of his
students. There are excellent publications in the field
such as (Brusilovsky, 1996), (Brusilovsky, 2001), and
(Brusilovsky and Maybury, 2003).
Adaptivity came first up in natural language pro-
cessing research (Perrault et al., 1978) and found
some consolidation in the middle of the nienties of
the last century (Oppermann, 1965).
Nowadays, adaptivity is widespread and opinions
vary largely. Many authors prefer a low expectations
approach seeing adaptive hypermedia systems as any-
thing which reflects some features of the user in the
user model and apply this model to adapt various vis-
ible aspects of the system to the user, as expressed by
(Henze and Nejdl, 2004), for instance.
Largely independent and unrelated research work
in educational and developmental psychology, in par-
ticular, and cognitive science, in general, suggests
deeper modeling approaches like, e.g., Conceptual
Change Theory (see (Carey, 1985), (Carey, 2000), and
(Thagard, 2012)).
Taking such background research of adaptivity
into account, apparently user modeling may be seen
as theory induction (Jantke, 2013). A system being
adaptive is inductively building some theory about its
current user’s needs and desires. The digital system’s
behavior, at every moment in time, is based on the
recent state of the hypothesized theory.
This view does perfectly apply to all the well-
established learner models, user model, and player
models currently in use.
For demonstrating storyboarding serious games in
use in large-scale training applications, the authors
have chosen the learner model of (Felder and Silver-
man, 1988) which meets the requirements of learning
to act in the focused application domain.
After the two short introductory sections on the
present page of the position paper, the following
pages will contain detailed material of the authors’
application project.
When certain user profiles are on display, they
represent Felder-Silvermann-based theories on some
current learner. The storyboards report the authors’
design process in which human playing and learning
experiences are anticipated.
The storyboards are represented in XML (more
precisely: RDF) such that the running system works
by interpreting the specified interaction opportunities.
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5 PRACTICAL STORYBOARDING
OF STAFF TRAINING TOWARD
DISASTER MANAGEMENT
PREPAREDNESS
This section is demonstrating the authors’ position by
means of a report about some relevant application.
The TRAST system developed for the German
Federal Agency for Civil Protection and Disaster
Management has been implemented in UNITY as a
Figure 2: Storyboard of one of the seven staff positions in the training system TRAST; storyboard cut into four pieces.
3D game module. For major roles in a crisis manage-
ment staff, storyboards like the one on display in fig. 2
have been developed. It is not intended to read any of
the inscriptions in the storyboard graph below, but to
get an impression of some storyboard as a whole.
The rectangular nodes represent particular scenes
in the game story. A node includes some actions ac-
tivated by the system when the game state is reaching
the node. Actions may be any atomic system behav-
iors such as showing a text message dialog, showing
some pictures, or setting up an interaction button on
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an object in the game. Nodes are connected with tran-
sitions (represented as arrows in the figs. 2 and 3).
Some transitions have labels which indicate names of
Figure 3: Cutout of the TRAST storyboard at node 100.
events fired by the system according to users’ choice
in the game play or their profiles. When the system
detects an event in a specific node, the system selects
the transition which is labeled with the corresponding
event name and takes the transition to proceed.
Figure 4: Moment of the learner’s choices when playing.
Due to the restricted space within this position pa-
per, the authors confine themselves to an illustration
of the storyboard’s relevance for implementing the
key feature of adaptivity.
At all nodes colored in red, the players have
choices which are interpreted by the digital system
and reflected in the user profile. The nodes colored in
green include different system behaviors according to
the user profile.
The scenery on display in fig. 4 shows the sys-
tem’s interpretation of the storyboard cutout in fig. 3.
In scene 100, the learner has three different choices
to act indicated by orange buttons (from left to right):
Writing a message, talking to the staff member next
to the map, inspecting the map.
The players choices are interpreted as preferences
and used for another step of user profile induction.
The following picture illustrates different changes
of some user profile in dependence on the observed
player’s behavior.
Figure 5: FELDER/SILVERMAN Theory Induction.
Assume the player did arrive at the scene denoted
by node 100 having a profile in the background which
is shown by the topmost configuration on display in
fig. 5. When players prefer to write a message, pro-
files change to the one displayed in the middle. When
talking to the staff member at the map instead, the
profiles change to the one displayed at the bottom of
fig. 5 because an “active” person tends to prefer con-
versation with others.
According to the user profile, the system behaves
differently in the green nodes. For example, for a
player modeled as a “visual” person, as it is assumed
that such a person prefers visual representation to
text-based representation, the system shows more pic-
tures or videos for giving information to the player.
The visual appearance of storyboards supports di-
dactic design as well as goal-oriented adaptivity. The
location and distribution of branching points, where
theory induction is triggered, may easily be controlled
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as well as the location and distribution of points where
the system behaves adaptively. By means of direct
modifications in the storyboard, alternatives may be
easily checked.
Storyboards form a suitable basis for interdisci-
plinary discourse, because domain specialists, educa-
tional specialists, and system developers may take the
same document as a basis for inspection, for asking
question, for making proposals, and the like.
Note that the RDF storyboard is not only a speci-
fication of forthcoming playful interactions, but at the
same time an implementation of the system’s part in
the interaction. This system is reading in the story-
board and acting accordingly. This bears potentials
for further extensions of adaptive behavior in practice.
6 CONCLUSIONS
The project TRAST reported in the present paper is a
proper application case of game based learning in use
for quite serious purposes of learning and training.
When projects of computer supported education
are under development, a large number of aspects
have to taken into account and a wide spectrum of
needs and desires have to be satisfied. There arises
abundant evidence for the need of planning.
Storyboarding is the methodology advocated to
plan the rich manifold of potential human learners’
experiences.
In particular, the authors advocate throughout the
present paper the position that the developed story-
boards are not only design documents, but may serve
as components of the digital system anticipated.
If this is the case, the crucial problem of trans-
forming storyboards into some semantically correct
implementation disappears. The digital game system
is reading the storyboard and is interpreting the flow
of control and data specified by means of the graph
structure. Digital storyboarding is advantageous.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Part of the present work has been supported by the
German Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disas-
ter Assistance (BBK).
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