Attention abilities may be altered because of different factors since childhood or during the aging process and may influence the daily lives of peoples. Attention troubles may be caused by different diseases such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) which is responsible of many learning difficulties. The early diagnosis and surveillance of children's cognitive abilities can help in preventing the development of such diseases. Serious games may play an important role in helping tutors to assess the children's cognitive abilities and to get quantitative data about their progression. It can also be used as a personalized training tool that takes into account not only the individuals' abilities and training needs but also their motivation. In fact, training requires repetitive tasks which may decrease the individuals' engagement and motivation. In this paper, we present Keep Attention, a serious game designed to assess visual attention and to personalize the training experience. We highlight, in particular, the design framework we considered to deal with personalization issues.
Author Keywords
Serious games; attention training; design framework
ACM Classification Keywords
Applied computing → Computer games
INTRODUCTION
The success of video games and their implication in our
culture nowadays is a consequence of the evolution of
technologies and the diversity of internet facilities. Video
games have nowadays the potential to be more than just
entertaining. They are in particular used for other fields
such as learning and cognitive rehabilitation. The potential
of virtual reality systems and serious games has been
explained by the brain plasticity resulted from
environmental stimuli. The latter is considered among the
basic principles of therapeutic strategies for many cerebral
disorders [
Attention ability, or the mental focus on the most relevant
information [
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2
discusses the design and personalization of serious games
for attention training. In section 3, we introduce the game
design framework used to design serious games for
attention training. We explain after that the personalization
process in Section 4. Then, we present Keep Attention
game we designed following the previous framework.
Finally, we conclude this paper by presenting the primary
pilot study results and our perspectives for future works.
RELATED WORKS
Different works studied the design and the personalization
of serious games for attention training. The game feedbacks
and the difficulty of the game were especially considered as
the main strategies used to individualize the game
experience. Attention games are often designed following a
goal-oriented design method. They focus on a set of
repetitive exercises to train the player and attend a
particular learning goal. The player can be responsible to
choose the level of difficulty according to her
performances. For example, ATHYNOS is a Kinect based
augmented reality game designed to children with attention
deficits [
The rationale behind of other works is to reuse existing
casual games and try to adapt them to meet training
objectives. The purpose is to ensure that the game is not
composed only of a set of exercises but also offers to users
a game experience as given with classical casual games.
The finality is to enhance users’ motivation and their
acceptance of using the game as a training tool. For
instance, Rijo et al. [
Our objective in our work is to design a serious game that considers variability in game elements to maintain the individuals’ motivation that may be decreased following repetitive tasks. The design of such games should also take into consideration the personalization of the training to players’ abilities while offering a transparency of decisions and guidance proposed to players.
DESIGN FRAMEWORK As training requires repetitive tasks, having a large number of games is quite important to avoid boredom in long term. One possible solution for tutors is to reuse some casual games in training. However, these games are often not personalized and do not provide tutors with quantitative data about the trainee’s performance and progression on one hand. On the other hand, the development of various games may increase development costs.
In our previous work [
To deal with this issue, we propose a task-oriented design approach that considers learning tasks as the building blocks of the serious game. Game elements, such as scenario, feedbacks, storylines and rewards, are independents from the learning objectives. They are used to create the gameplay using these building blocks. Only the task that is related to learning objectives without a specific “matching” with game elements. This may offer to the designer the possibility of more creativity when designing the game and to personalize it. At the same time, this not means that the serious objectives will not be met. The creativity in the game design is limited to the required tasks, or the building blocks, that are fundamental in the training. This may also help in the explanation of personalization model decisions by highlighting only the learning objectives without putting the light on the game elements.
The task-oriented approach allows variability in game goals
that are not necessary planned for learning. We believe that
balancing dynamically the goals between learning and fun
according to the player’s performances and situations may
increase their engagement and acceptance of using games in
daily training. In particular, players may be discouraged,
tiered or loss attention during the training. These particular
situations are more observables in players with health issues
such as attention troubles [
Following this design framework, we consider therefore two levels to build a serious game: the task level and the game level.
The task level The task level determines the learning tasks that a player should perform to achieve learning goals. The task is represented though basic sequence of mechanics such as select a target, drag and drop objects, etc. It can be therefore represented by a pointing task defined by its difficulty that can be dynamically adapted following the player’s abilities and progression in the game. In fact, we assume that the difficulty in a serious game is related only to learning objectives. The task is related to the serious side of the game and can be for instance, in attention training, to reach a target within a timeout, avoiding obstacles, fire a target, etc.
The game level The task is independent from a particular game element, such as the story, rewards or a particular aesthetics that are usually used to motivate the player. Hence, the learning objectives are implicitly defined according to the kind of tasks, their number, difficulty and order. When the task is for example to find and reach a target quickly, the target may be for instance a treasure to find or to feed a particular animal in the game level. This complete separation between tasks and game goals allows creating various scenarios in the same game, which may reduce development costs. It also makes it possible to dynamically setting game goals with a variety of scenarios in order to maintain the player’s motivation.
KEEP ATTENTION GAME
We developed a serious game prototype for attention
training that follows the design framework described above.
The task level
We focused in this game on selective attention that is the
main responsible of school difficulties [
PERSONALIZATION The general personalization process is shown in Figure 2. At the beginning of each game session, the player can evaluate her attention by obtaining a daily score of her attention. This score is used to build the player’s profile and consequently personalize the game to the player’s current abilities and training needs. In particular, the number of successful targets found, including the presence of obstacles, the mean time on task as well as the total time to complete an exercise were collected to compute an attention score.
In our previous work [
Once the profile is updated, the difficulty adjustment module makes decision about the difficulty of suggested tasks of each game level using a rule based system. Rules depend on general attention tasks’ parameters such as: the number of targets, the presence of obstacles and the timeout. The decisions on difficulty are used then by the game level generator to set up the different game levels and goals, selected for training with adapted difficulty. Finally, the tutors and experts may update the game as well as the difficulty parameters at their request. They also can configure the attention evaluation process by adding their models used to compute the attention score. This may help also researchers to build models from empirical data and make decisions on learning to enhance the individuals’ attention.
PILOT EXPERIMENT
Eleven children aged between 8 and 11 participated to a
primary pilot study to evaluate their experience when
playing Keep Attention game. Participants performed the
attention assessment exercises then played the game. At the
end of the session, they answered the Game Experience
Questionnaire - Core [
We also recorded the subjects’ performances from the assessment exercises, such as the ratio of reached targets in each exercise and the mean time on tasks, to determine their attention level score. We analyzed questionnaire core data components, especially the competence, the challenge, the positive and the negative effect of the game.
The results of this pilot experiment show that the participants found the game personalized to their abilities. They realized that the game objectives were clear and the scenario follows their performances. They reported that the difficulty was adapted to their abilities (2.34 + 0.34) and the level of perceived challenge was balanced (2.29+0.68). Moreover, subjects were aware about their attention level provided by the guidance in the game and most of them asked to repeat the experience to enhance their scores. The difference between the perceived attention level recorded before the experience and the attention score recorded from their performances was not significant. Finally, most players enjoyed the game and found it engaging (3.33+0.43).
CONCLUSION We presented in this paper Keep Attention, a serious game designed to assess visual attention and to personalize the training experience to children. The objective of this game on one side is to help tutors to get quantitative data about children attention abilities in order to prevent attention decline and diseases. On the other side, the game may be played by children with different attention abilities, including players with attention deficits or troubles, to provide them with a personalized experience according to their training needs.
We focused on a task-oriented design framework that considers that the training objectives are independent from the game elements. This design framework helps us to develop various game worlds that are personalized to players. In particular, the personalization concerns the training tasks by dynamically adapting their difficulty according to players’ performances in the assessment exercises and during the game. It also allows balancing dynamically the game goals between learning and fun according to the players’ progression which may increase their engagement.
The results of the primary pilot experiment show that the players find the game personalized to their abilities. It will be important to study in future work, the effect of the serious game on players’ attention with a large number of participants. We will evaluate, in particular, the personalization technique and the effect of dynamic goal settings on players’ learning and motivation.