Towards computer-supported self-debriefing of a serious game against cyber bullying

Abstract

It is argued that reflecting on the in-game performance in a serious game is important for facilitating learning transfer. A way to facilitate such a reflection is by means of a so-called debriefing phase. However, a human facilitated debriefing is expensive, time consuming and not always possible. Therefore, an automatic self-debriefing facility for serious games would be desirable. However, a general approach for creating such an automatic self-debriefing system for serious games doesn’t exist. As a first step towards the development of such a framework, we targeted a specific type of serious games, i.e., games displaying realistic behavior and having multiple possible paths to a solution. In addition, we decided to start with the development of a debriefing system for a concrete case, a serious game about cyber bullying in social networks. In particular, in this paper, we focus on different visualizations that could be used for such an automatic debriefing. We combined a textual feedback with three different types of visualizations. A prototype was implemented and evaluated with the goal of comparing the three visualizations and gathering first feedback on the usability and effectiveness. The results indicate that the visualizations did help the participants in having a better understanding of the outcome of the game and that there was a clear preference for one of the three visualizations.