Building virtual world for a project management game – A case study

Abstract

Virtual worlds are becoming prevalent and find application in a variety of fields. While technology enables us to build virtual worlds which look more realistic, the scenarios that we encounter in the virtual world is often not sufficiently close to real world. Hence, there is a need to develop a method that helps designers build a virtual world that not only looks real but also feels real. Such a method will help in the design of virtual environment using elements from the real world, which significantly improves the authenticity and user experience. We demonstrate such a method and an example of designing virtual world through a case study. We use software project management as the context and serious games as the medium in our case. We begin with an ontology for capturing the real-world elements of our context (such as time, space, task, people etc.). We then conduct a user study to identify and extract elements from the ontology that would help in representing the real world authentically in the virtual world. Further, we design a virtual world game based on the extracted elements. Finally, we do a post hoc analysis on whether the virtual world that we built was sufficiently authentic. This paper presents a literature review, method to design an “authentic” virtual world and an illustration of design through the case study of software project management game.