Learning Game and Simulation Design through Multilayer Synchronous Collaboration in a Virtual Reality Environment A Pre-Prospectus Proposal Lewis F. Jones III April 29, 2011

Abstract Game & simulation design needs teamwork Tools for collaboration missing in established game & simulation design programs Design a tool with collaboration principles within existing virtual reality environment Test subject and objective validity of built-in collaboration tools

Preliminary Study What is collaboration with regard to game and simulation development? Developing the game idea Communicating Sharing and managing assets / code Play-testing Documentation

Preliminary Study How can collaboration be done? Face-to-face interaction Third party forums Third party chat programs Lack of built-in collaboration tools

Preliminary Study How can collaboration be improved? Interactive sub-groups Event based alert system Knowledge sharing visualization

Applicable Experience Projects  Educational construction scheduling game within the Second Life VRE  Asynchronous collaboration tool for annotating VRE-based building information model data

Applicable Experience Classes  Software Process Management  Software Engineering  Virtual Reality Services Employment  Social Services software group (SWORD)  Naval Research Laboratory

Objective Address the lack of efficient collaboration tools for game and simulation design Gather and discuss the necessary aspects for effective developer collaboration Implement these elements in a built-in collaboration tool and test its validity towards further development within established design programs

Methodology Use the pre-existing OSBEST VRE as the game and simulation design program Design and implement a collaboration tool directed towards game and simulation developers who have little programming experience Developers should be able to add, edit, move, or delete portions of scripts which are represented as visual tiles

Methodology Tiles are interconnected and linked by the developer and displayed in a flow-chart manner  Take cues from JS toolkit “InfoVis” Developers should be able to view different layers of connections between content, such as scripts, missions, regions, worlds, and finally entire games

Methodology Once the design tool is in place, collaboration capabilities will be added Developers should be able to interact and discuss the concepts behind their games and simulations, including leaving notes for later viewings Developers should be able to see each other's changes to the designs in real-time from remote locations

Collaborative Design Tool

Expected Results Experiment involving two groups of student developers that use the collaboration tools Subjective Results  Participants will find the built-in collaboration tools to be much easier to use and more helpful than third- party collaboration tools Objective Results  Games created using the built-in collaboration tools will be much more efficient in terms of time spent in development and playability

References Bresciani, S. and Eppler, M. J. (2009). “The Benefits of Synchronous Collaborative Information Visualization: Evidence from an Experimental Evaluation.” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. Vol. 15, No. 6. pp Chounta, I. A. and Avouris, N. (2010). “Study of the Effects of Awareness on Synchronous Collaborative Problem-Solving.” 2010 International Conference on Intelligent Networking and Collaborative Systems. pp Duarte, L. and Carriço, L. (2009). “A Session Engine Approach for Synchronous Collaborative Environments.” 2009 Seventh International Conference on Creating, Connecting and Collaborating through Computing. pp Fan, S. B., Johnson, B. R., Liu, Y., Robison, T. S., Schmidt, R. R., and Tanimoto, S. L. (2010). “Analyzing a Process of Collaborative Game Design Involving Online Tools.” 2010 IEEE Symposium on Visual Language and Human-Centric Computing. pp Masuch, M. and Rueger, M. (2005). “Challenges in Collaborative Game Design Developing Learning Environments for Creating Games.” Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Creating, Connecting, and Collaborating through Computing.