While the feedback was quite positive, all our team’s ideas were approved of. we decided to focus on our AR guide and Mini-games ideas for our game brief. Putting together an experience around our guide who would inform users about history within their context while bringing them to designated locations to play mini-games and for the guide to give their opinion of historical figures and events. Using the guide for education and a unique historical experience while having mini-games to increase engagement, interactivity, and memory retention. Making an overall experience that we, as people, qualify for the target audience would want to have and go to.

Genre: Exploration Minigames

Audience: Teens to Young Adults

Primary Objective: Educate the user about the events at gettysburg as well as create an interesting and repeatable experience to both attract newcomers and get returning visitors

Introduction to the Game: Upon entering the park and activating the app the visitor is assigned a historical entity that will follow them around teaching them about the battlefield based on where they are currently. The historical figure could also lead them on the path they took in the battle telling them their story and experiences. Having the historical figure will allow them a more interesting way to learn about the battlefield and provide a better interactive experience. Having minigames scattered throughout the park will tie the information the visitor is getting to actual actions which will improve the retention of information as well as give a more engaging experience overall.

Game Control:  The player controls their location by walking throughout the park. Minigames are controlled through a combination of buttons on their touch screen and motion.

Objectives: Minigames have competitive scoring much like arcade machines. You can post your minigame results on social media.

Interface/Information: Most interface is an interactive map which marks all of the interactive locations and tracks the players location in real time using GPS.

Main User Mechanics/Actions:

Move: the vast majority of the mechanics in the game are based on motion and location.

The minigames would each have their own blocks and this would vary game to game.

Levels/Environment: The environment is the map of gettysburg and the levels are the different minigames the player plays.

List of suggested minigames:

-Reloading a musket
-Rearming a cannon

-Cooking a soldier’s meal

-Preparing rations

-Setting up a tent

-Target practice with a Musket

-Making Musket charges (Ammunition)

-Soldier injury diagnosis

-I spy with my little eye…. Hostiles!! (Find enemies with a spyglass)

-Making attack plans (Showing how successful their military tactics might have been)

-Learn basic bayonet duel

-Soldiers physical training regime

-Play a marching drum pattern or patterns

-Amputating an injured leg

-Amputating an injured hand

–And more as needed

Obstacles, Interactive Elements, Npcs, etc: The main NPC they will interact with is the historical figure, interactive monuments that will trigger their guide to tell you about the monument, and the various aspects of the minigames.

How does it meet the theme entity and objective: By allowing players to compete and tweet their minigame results it promotes the spread of information about gettysburg which will pique the interest of people who might wish to either return to the park or go to the park for the first time.

Sixty seconds of play: The visitor approaches a monument and the guide appears and tells you about the monument. Once it has finished its description of the monument a minigame may appear.

Similar Gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdqDRR9-w0A

Team Members:

Myself,

Noah Dartt,

Chris Reitz,

Seth Nunley.

Since we got a new more specified set of parameters after and from our brainstormed ideas, we were tasked with assembling a product from those parameters. We also needed to make it more engaging than a basic task simulator, so that firefighters would want to train more instead of thinking it was bother.

Game Brief:

Genre: VR Simulation

Audience: Firefighters receiving training

Primary Objective: The primary objective of this game is to train firefighters to deal with horses in barn fires by using detailed horse simulation split into two parts, a horse interaction stage and a barn fire simulation stage.
Firefighters would receive scores based on their speed in saving a horse and each fire station would have its own score which would encourage firefighters to spend more time training with the game and encourage them to take it more seriously.

Introduction to the Game: Firefighters will cooperate in and out of the VR in order to get the best speed gaining them a better score. Multiple firefighters in VR will cooperate with each other and with firefighters outside of VR to promote cooperation and communication in these situations. Firefighters in VR will be in a simulated barn while the firefighters outside the barn will have maps and data which they will need to relay to the firefighters in VR.

What mechanics are you using to actualize the objective: The cooperation between the firefighters in VR and out of VR using maps and information not available to both parties promote communication and teach firefighters how to deal with horses both in dire situations and out of dire situations.

The detailed horse AI will help get firefighters used to equine behavior without having to put themselves or the animals in real danger. Having multiple stages allows the firefighters to get used to both the VR and the animal in non dire situations allowing for greater understanding to be achieved.

Before each session there would be a speech or recording of a firefighter telling a story about their own experience working on a barn fire or saving horses from a fire.

Game Control: Full VR immersion using both full head control and handheld interactors. Movement would be achieved using Gorn like dragging. EX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFxfwKlforE  

Score/Objective: The objective would be two fold, to rescue the horse (if possible) as quickly and with minimal risk as possible.

Interface/information: In the first stage the HUD will have information regarding the horses mood, reactions, health, and the environment while you interact with it. This could be disabled externally to promote learning from just the horses reactions and appearance if needed.

In the second stage the VR headset and the in VR view will match the view from inside a firefighters helm as closely as possible with most if not all the information being viewed by firefighters outside of the VR simulation

Main User Mechanics/Actions:

Communicate: One of the core aspects of this game is the communication between the VR user and those outside of VR games.

Avoid: The user must avoid dangerous situations and areas such as fire, rearing horses, or collapsing structures.

Levels/Environments: There would be two levels/environments. The first would be a completely blank area except for the horse itself allowing you to interact with it an learn without the danger. The second would be a barn fire with a number of horses inside. The barns layout would be drawn from a large number premade layouts and the situations would be randomized each time.

Obstacles: The fire and structure itself as well as the horses themselves.

Describe and Explain the unique ways in which your game idea meets the needs of the theme, entity, AND objective: The game promotes communication between firefighters both in and out of the simulation in order to train multiple firefighters at the same time in both interacting with horses and barn fires.

Sixty Seconds of Play: The training instructor would boot up the game and set up the simulation. The VR users would enter the simulation environment and those outside the simulation would get access to the maps and simulation data. They would work together to save the horses.

Link to Video of Similar Gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYunaBkn9Ng

Team Members

Myself,

Noah Dartt,

Chris Reitz,

Seth Nunley

Having been to Gettysburg only a few years ago, this was an interesting subject and challenge. How to get younger people to visit and how to get people to return more than once or even often. i took experience i have and have had with educational organizations like museums and historical sites to develop for this goal. I always learned more and was more interested in exhibits and subjects when they were interactive, its why science museums and aquariums are so great for a younger audience, they can appreciate it if they can interact with it.

So i designed an equivalent of the physical interactive “games” of science museums into a AR format to be used on the Field of Gettysburg. They can also add more mini-games like a museum adds new exhibits.

Brainstormed Game Idea:

1. Location AR, Education, and Mini-game selection
2. Scanning signs, Posts, Statues. Resulting in small location based mini-games with competitive scoring and optional multiplayer interaction. like reloading firearms of the time, loading a cannon, cooking military meals, supply management, medical work.
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CgDa3f8bLU, Pokemon go as it is travelling about doing small tasks at defined locations.
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGdm0eOEKEc, civil war video game. Defined graphics that give a sense how things actually might have looked in context
5. Give an interactive way of learning about the battle and the armies that fought at it, the actions and conditions.
6. This interactivity will also draw in a younger audience and the competitive/multiplayer will keep people coming back. The game can also be expanded by simply adding a new mini-game, furthering its life span and causing more reason for people to return when a new mini-game or new set of mini-games are made.
7. Can be completed in parts easily, holds a player for a good amount of time while educating them in a interactive and meaningful way. Multiplayer also allows for group attendance and group fun.

Team Members:

Myself,

Noah Dartt,

Seth Nunley,

Chris Reitz

Research:

We learned a lot from our entity in class, we took pages of notes. For the Serious game idea i came up with, we need an immense amount of expertise, we need it from BART among other sources to accurately represent horses and their behaviors, especially when the horses are scared/stressed, so that an horse AI can be programmed accurately, and it needs to be incredibly accurate for both the lives of horses and firefighters. We also need a large catalog of horse barn layouts with their building materials for accurate Massachusetts representation, so that when the firefighters train using this game, the setting is more likely to be useful and accurate. We also need the expertise of firefighters who have dealt with barns fires, preferably horse barns as to make sure the progression of the fire while firefighters are trying to save horses is also accurate.

I’ve said accurate plenty of times while writing, but lives are on the line, if something isn’t accurate enough it could get not only horses killed but firefighters as well.

Brainstormed Serious Game Idea:

1. Genre: VR Firefighter Horse Rescue Simulator.
2. Core Mechanics: Real-time horse barn fire with accurate horse decision and action of which the firefighter must interact with in an attempt to save them from the ongoing fire. No direct firefighting as the firefighters already know how to do that, only saving horses under a strict time limit and dangers. Multiple Barn setups and randomized fire and horse situations.
3. Game Reference: Note: There are practically no games with direct animal rescue mechanics (I found a VR puzzle game video instead, as this game needs to be highly interactive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQx_RkCZpMU)
4. Style Reference: clean, no need to distract if not mechanical https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXuyOKNmFHE
5. Main Goal: The main goal is to teach firefighters how to not only save horses during a barn fire but also to teach firefighters practices that will save their own lives while also rescuing horses.
6. Meeting the Goal: We do not need to to teach firefighters how to fight fires but we do need to teach them how to handle horses. We can do that by allowing the firefighters to interact with virtual ones in the immersive environment of VR, with it we can give firefighters the closest thing to hands on experience without actually setting any barns ablaze with horses inside.
7. Unique Attributes: Real-time simulation of possible events, the realistic event where the firefighter cannot save them all sometimes, and also showing the dangers to the firefighter’s own life when dealing with scared horses.

Team Members:

Myself,

Noah Dartt,

Chris Reitz,

Seth Nunley

Research:

I decided to research, in particular, on whether a game would be the correct course of action for the replacement of an Implicit Bias lesson, what works and what does not. Finding a digital game other than or in reference to Fair Play (Talked about here http://wiseli.engr.wisc.edu/fairplay.php ), was practically impossible, digital games dealing with Implicit Bias seem unpopular or at least uncommon. Fair Play is well done and does what it set out to do, exposing college professors and those in the STEMM field to Implicit Bias awareness. Fair Play was successful enough that a another game went underdevelopment from the University of Wisconsin last year targeting K-12 educators (https://newsone.com/3727367/video-game-teacher-implicit-racial-bias/ ), deciding to take the Virtual Reality route to further increase the emersion.

After figuring out that people truly believed their value, I looked into whether it statistically helped to play games designed around exposing Implicit Bias, if it in actuality did not help we would have another issue to deal with. So I went looking and found some confirmation and some helpful information on not only approach but design. From this study on Cyberpsychology https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151026092922.htm they designed two card games around Implicit Bias and used them to test whether playing a game that exposed Implicit Bias made people test differently, affected by it. They discovered that it not only makes a difference but a major one, and figured out some beneficial design philosophies to boot. The design philosophy was that subtly in its message was key, making the card games only partially refer implicit bias and none of the players were told it was about it. Helping them unconsciously retrain themselves. The below chart was the result of their testing on the card games. The chart shows the percentage of people who assigned scientist to a female character in the post-card game test.

The Bias game was their card game unaltered in its full form, the neutral game was when they removed all the bias cards from their game, and the control group never played the card game.

After all this I am convinced that a game can be provided that replaces the Implicit Bias lesson but there are some design problems, because of the week long Implicit Bias training we cannot take the covert approach used by the University of Wisconsin, so we must take a more direct approach similar to Fair Play to expose the learning teachers to implicit bias.

Brainstormed Group Serious Games Ideas:

1: Story driven decision tree point and click adventure

• Adventure, RPG
• Decision trees, impactful decisions
• Telltale Walking Dead Playstyle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9SnHso3ezE
• Sims style: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7BAUNzJvts
• Reveal and educate the player about implicit bias
• The player’s decisions will show how their implicit bias’ affect others as their decisions have long-reaching implications
• Impactful decision making, Ability to react to bias in conversations

2: Teacher Grading Game

• Puzzle?
• “Grading” papers after only seeing their appearance and some notes about each student. Read over and give a grade. All questions would have very open ended answers.
• Papers Please: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApbpdKmf1_8
• Paper Please: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApbpdKmf1_8
• Force the player to use their opinions and judgement on grading students work with only a little information
• The game will force the players to only rely on their own opinions and judgement and force them to consider if they are really being fair or if there is some bias influencing their actions which has been shown to help reduce implicit bias in previous studies
• Showing how bias can potentially impact grade or class performance

3: Classroom Simulation with prioritizing mechanics based around students

• Classroom management, isometric
• Managing the needs of students as they pop up in multiple places
• Diner dash playstyle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mhwkNR2nrk
• Diner dash style: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jsv6S1uNuZo
• Reveal how the player prioritizes students to show implicit bias
• The player will be forced to assist students as they all have multiple issues
• Balancing the player’s effort around the classroom, in order to see who they prioritize

Group Members Link:

Myself,

Noah Dartt

Chris Reitz

Seth Nunley