No abstract

Lack of standard methodologies to guide and organize game design can result in longer and less predictable game production processes. Moreover, the need for interaction among domain experts (providing the instructional content) and game developers is a peculiar aspect of serious games that makes their development more difficult. This paper focuses on the design of games for procedural training, and proposes to adopt a task modeling technique (ConcurTaskTrees, CTT [15]) in the modeling of training scenarios. In particular, we show how CTT can be used to (i) analyze and structure pedagogical content about the procedures, (ii) support and monitor procedure execution in the game. We also describe how we employed CTT in the design of a serious game for training nurses in emergency medical procedures on disabled patients.

Serious games can help in training medical first responders by providing emergency simulations which are always available, safer and possibly cheaper than real-world simulations. However, serious games for training emergency medical services (EMS) nurses must take into account the familiarity of the users with 3D videogames, which could be very low. In this paper, we present a prototype of the serious game we are developing for training EMS nurses in decision making and the results of a user study we have carried out with its intended users. The main purposes of the study were to assess nurses' acceptance of this kind of application, as well as to collect suggestions and requirements from nurses.