Be Civic: An Immersive Serious Game

Abstract

Nowadays, serious games are one of the biggest existing industries and it is still growing steadily in many sectors. Particularly, the use of virtual worlds and serious games in education is growing. This paper introduces the development of a serious game in an immersive learning environment for teaching Civics. The work’s idea is to develop a game to motivate, educate and train learners on civic rules by placing users in different civic roles and giving them agency to address real-world problems and issues. In order to improve the user’s experience, the game was developed to work in a cave-like immersive environment by using a conversational character for a new kind of Human-Computer Interface. The game includes static and dynamic 3D environments, allowing players to share the experience of navigation in the scene among the users, even geographically distributed. In order to evaluate the game’s performance, a between groups experiment with thirty participants was designed. Received on 10 November 2016; accepted on 13 July 2017; published on 5 January 2018