If someone fails in a real social situation, the repercussions can erase any potential for learning. However, when the situation is modeled within our game, the penalties are minor and non-threatening. The player can explore choices both stupid and brilliant without being ostracized. This allows him to recognize the strategies that work and might be applicable in the real world.
A crucial part of the our solution is the idea of a “sandbox” where players can freely experiment and make errors with their interactions with others - errors that in real life, often yield painful or costly consequences in physical, psychological, and/or monetary terms. In our games players can learn from their mistakes without penalty.
Allowing experimentation aimed at realistic simulated people in realistic scenarios provides the player the opportunity to learn from their mistakes, possibly even to intentionally make “mistakes” to see what could happen.
Providing this comfort zone encourages the reuse of the game as a learning tool.
Because of our close connection with therapists, educators and researchers, we plan to provide them additional tools to make better use of the game in their own settings. These tools allow them to customize the experience to the people they work with. The professionals can monitor and change the experience iteratively.
For those children exposed to the game in a professional setting, the full game allows them to explore these skills at home, at their own pace. Nothing delights our children more than a new excuse to spend more time tied into electronic entertainment!
In order to provide the most effective assistance for those whose interpersonal skills issues have brought them to professionals for assistance, we propose a two-pronged system. For the most players there is the full game - an entertaining and engaging practice arena outside the therapeutic setting.
For the professionals we provide a series of lessons activated by a simple menu selection interface, which we call the Administrator Console. The lessons, derived from the content of the game, are intended to be used under the direction of a specialist in the therapeutic setting. The two parts reinforce one another.
Each lesson in the system teaches a specific interpersonal skill, using the colorful “virtual characters” and artificial intelligence from the game to immerse the player in the experience and make it come alive.
The administrator is able to select, initiate, track, display, pause, and restart the lessons being worked on and could provide a chat capability with the player's machine via the console.
The two parts are seamless in their content to the subject player. In other words, every lesson used for the therapeutic portion of the system is lifted directly out of the game so that they play the same way, with the same characters, and offer the same short-term feedback/results.
By using the same gameplay, these lessons become positive feedback to the player as they encounter them in the game. If they run into an issue in the game, they can bring it up in therapy. If they come across a difficult concept in therapy, they can seek out similar situations in the full game.