A Maze Life is a
Serious Game
allowing to learn, in a simple and easy way, the main principles of the
Developmental Psychology
using the multiple intelligences model proposed by
H. Gardner.
During the game Human - a virtual creature depicted as a "pulsing sphere" - explores different social enviroments,
rappresented as static coloured spheres. The virtual creature and the enviroments are described by a spectrum of multiple intelligences,
and this comparison produces the different possible interactions: liking, anxiety, learning, disliling etc.
A Maze Life emulates the evolution of a human life from birth to death. The protagonist of this virtual experience,
named Human, is represented by a cyan-green small disk which becomes visible (for a very short time) only when the
creatures moves from an enviroment to another.
As long as Human lives within a given enviroment is possibile to detect it looking for the enviroment which is
pulsing with a rythimic similar to the heartbeat.
Human is described by many
parameters,
some of numeric type (discrete spectrum variables), other of functional type (continuous spectrum variables).
The learning objectives of the game are:
A Maze Life can be played in many different ways:
The game starts with Human placed in the “mother” environment. Depending by “movement capability”
of the virtual creature, the player can try to move Human from an environment to another environment.
Such movement is not deterministic, since there is a certain degree of uncertainty, due to the presence of other factors,
which are: Human's unconscious desires; attractive or repulsive forces between Human and all the surrounding environments.
To move from an environment from another the player must drag the mouse from the starting location
to the target location (where the player aims to move the creature).
When the mouse is released, three colored arrows will be shown: the intentional direction of the movement
(red – the Freudian IO concept), the social conditional force (blue - the Freudian SUPER-IO concept) and the total force
resulting from the sum of the unconscious desires (yellow - the Freudian ES concept).
When these three arrows appears, the player could choose following actions:
Action
bar (placed on the top left of the board).Aside from moving from an environment to another, the player could also:
Notice that the action “stay”, available when the IO, SUPER-IO and ES arrows are visible, is different from “doing nothing”.
The choice of “doing nothing” is the default behavior that Human has in every day life, when he just goes on with
the normal activities, as usual.
The “stay” action means instead changing something in the current environment, without leaving that type of environment.
For example, if Human is in the “School” environment, choosing “stay” in that environment could mean to change
the exams study plan, changing classroom or even changing the school location because moving from a town to another town:
in all these cases Human will not leave the school environment, but will change his relationship with the environment.
This approach to definition of “changing an environment” is taken from the psychological theory developed by Mischel (1973).
The goal of the player is to find a dynamic set of strategies from moving to an environment to another,
in order to maximize all
game parameters,
which will be summed together to produce an overall score rating.
Hence the player could simply focus on the task to get the highest possible score, this should correspond
to the situation where the player best understandd the learning objects of the game.
The mathematical model used to describe the psychological principles is based on the application of the
fuzzy logic,
as suggested by the huge success of the researches on the Artificial Intelligent exploiting such approach.
The mathematical structure to depict some of the
game parameters
relies on the wave functions used in Quantum Mechanics, this can be explained in two ways:
from an historical point of view this choice is a possible interpretation of the Isomorphism principle in the Gestalt Theory,
and of the field theories introduced by Kurt Lewin. From a mathematical point of view the Quantum Mechanics approach,
using a not deterministic paradigma, offeres a simpler model with respect of
BDI agents, and the
OCC Theory of emotions,
because it does not require to know the subject state, which remains unknown.
The model does not pretend to emulate all the emotinal states experienced by Human, it aims instead to
describe directly the
epiphenomena
that should correlate the cognitive aspects (interaction between subject and enviroment) with the creature's evolution
and the resulting gratification (the satisfaction of the Human's needs).
Bibliography