Alternate reality game launching Fall ‘22 will measure resilience of first-year students
Alternate reality game launching Fall ‘22 will measure resilience of first-year students
Alternate reality game launching Fall ‘22 will measure resilience of first-year students
July 12, 2022
By Emily Cerf
Summary
These students were participating in a play-test session of "LUX," an alternate reality historical fiction game designed by researchers in UCSC's Game User Interaction and Intelligence Lab directed by computational media professor and department chair Magy Seif El-Nasr and the Interaction Dynamics Lab.
While resilience has been studied for decades by psychology researchers, the team of engineers hopes to leverage technology to create a game that can serve as a better, more innovative approach to this research.
The researchers are currently focused on designing the game to be engaging and discovering the best ways to measure the complicated topic of resilience.
"Our vision is to have a game or an application to give you a good estimate of your resilience, and then help you to find your weak points and work on it throughout the game, through practice," said Reza Habibi, the game's producer and a Ph.D. student in the GUII lab.
Players are enlisted to aid a fictional group called Kerr's Loyalists, who need their help finding a secret stolen artifact that they say is the key to returning the campus to its original values, which they claim were lost along with the artifact when the campus started implementing letter grades in the 80s. Teams of three or four students participate in the game over a session that lasts several weeks, communicating with each other and the game moderators on the messaging platform Discord.
The researchers have run two play test sessions during the 2021-22 academic year in order to gather more insight on how to best measure resilience and smooth out wrinkles in the game's narrative and execution before the official launch.
As they gear up for the official game launch this upcoming fall, the researchers note that feedback from their test sessions told them that not only were students genuinely interested in the story and characters of the game, they are making friendships through their teams and gaining deeper benefits from it.
Reference
Cerf, E. (2022, July 12). Alternate reality game launching fall '22 will measure resilience of first-year students. Retrieved July 19, 2022, from https://news.ucsc.edu/2022/07/lux-resilience-game.html