Institute for Creative Technologies

Imagine you are a soldier assigned to rebuilding efforts in an Iraqi town or you're an officer tasked with keeping the peace in an unstable city. Earning the trust and respect of the citizens you are trying to help is of the utmost importance. Should you bring a gift to your meeting? Should you shake hands? Does the person with the highest title actually hold any power, and how do you find out? Cultural sensitivity and situational understanding are among the necessary tools in your arsenal.

Created in collaboration with the USC School of Cinematic Arts Game Innovation Lab and the USC Rossier School of Education, the Enhanced Learning Environments with Creative Technologies (ELECT) suite of products are portable, PC-based training programs designed to develop real-world skills. Actual examples taken from interviews with people who have successfully completed such complex negotiations and stability operations, as well as experiences from live training exercises, are incorporated into the situations students are faced with. ELECT applications utilize the PsychSim social simulation system, and an intelligent coach and tutor to provide the student with pedagogical feedback about social and cultural issues. ELECT is possibly the first game-based training application built from the ground up with end-state learning objectives in mind. This approach starts with a critical assumption: the game environment is not the vehicle by which learning is delivered, but rather provides the practice from which learning will be extended and enhanced.

Current ELECT applications are located in a virtual Iraq. But the project team is working on methods to abstract the cultural components to create a generalized data template for customizing the application to any cultural area. The development process in ELECT has already yielded much, in the way of understanding and defining a deliberate approach for the development of game-based learning applications. The ELECT prototypes are both test-beds for how games can be used for learning and examples of how effective they can be.

This project differs from others in the following ways:

• ELECT delivers a simulation (town of virtual characters and scenarios) and training components (learning objectives) that are flexible, enabling future modification and authoring of new training content.

Tags: culture, game, power, simulation, social, trust

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