Making Decisions in a Virtual Operating Room

Abstract

Immersive Serious Games are collaborative virtual environments where learners are enabled to follow scripted educational activities by interacting in the virtual environment. The joint activity of several users requires the ability to make collective decisions, ideally preceded by an argumentation. During a decision process, opinions are given, arguments are used to back up the opinions, and a decision is made accordingly (or not). One critical feature of a serious game concerns the evaluation of the learners during, or most currently after, the game session. From an educational point of view, this evaluation considers that the argumentation preceding the decision is more important than the decision itself. Yet, the argumentation usually escapes the understanding of the game since the users argue verbally. Channeling the decision making within the boundaries of what a game or a computer system is able to comprehend is an important challenge in immersive learning games. In order to do so, we present the decision feature that we have developed and introduced in a learning game called 3D Virtual Operating Room. Users are enabled to collect information pertaining to the virtual environment. By means of a dedicated activity, users are enabled to make collaborative decisions with as much expressiveness as in real life, that is: expressing their opinion and advancing arguments supporting their opinions; or, should they be convinced by others, changing their mind and withdrawing their arguments. The decision system has been experimented by multiple teams of players and its usefulness has been highlighted by qualitative results. Future work aims to provide further evidence that the collaborative decision system is apt for assessment in a pedagogical context.