1. Makahiki: A Serious Game Engine for Sustainability
Yongwen Xu
Collaborative Software Development Laboratory
Department of Information and Computer Science
University of Hawai`i at Mānoa

2. Compete To Reduce Sustainability education efforts:
Energy Competitions
Water Competitions
Goals:
Reduce consumption, save resource and money
Educate and hope for sustained behavior changes

3. College Campus involved
160+
CCN a nationwide competition that challenges college and university campuses to achieve the greatest electricity and water use reductions during a three-week period.
Map courtesy of Chelsea Hodge, 2010 Campus Sustainability Survey

4. Dorm Energy Competitions
Reduce energy use during the competition by 9% on average
Hodge, Chelsea, Dorm Energy Competitions, Presented at the Behavior, Energy, and Climate Change Conference, November 2010

5. Want to Run an Energy or Water Competition ?

6. A. Use a "minimal tech" solution such as a web page and manual posting of data and results
Harvard Green Cup

7. Oberlin Campus Resource Monitoring System
B. Out-source to a commercial provider
Oberlin Campus Resource Monitoring System
Lucid Design Group

8. C. Build your own custom in-house solution
The Kukui Cup 2011
3 weeks
1,035 first year students
418 players, 850 hours

9. Kukui Cup 2011 Technology
George Lee, M.S. thesis Makahiki: An extensible open-source platform for creating energy competition

10. d. Use an open source serious game engine The Kukui Cup 2012
Univ. of Hawaii Manoa
9 months Energy
Competition
Smart meter
Hawaii Pacific Univ.
3 weeks Energy Competition
Smart meter
East West Center
2 weeks Energy and Water Competition
No smart meter

11. Serious Game Engine Serious game
“a mental contest, played with a computer in accordance with specific rules that uses entertainment to further government or corporate training, education, health, public policy, and strategic communication objectives.” Zyda, Michael 2005
Game engine
“collection of modules of simulation code that do not directly specify the game’s behavior (game logic) or game’s environment (level data)” Lewis, Jacobson 2002, Game engines in scientific research.

12. Game engine definition (cont.):
“a framework comprised of a collection of different tools, utilities, and interfaces that hide the low-level details of the various tasks that make up a video game” Sherrod, 2007
Examples:
FPS: Unreal (rendering, physics, AI)
Mobile: Papaya
Healthcare: OpenLabyrinth
Educational Storytelling: Fabula
Sustainability: ??

13. Serious game engine for Sustainability
Energy Competition:
Energy real-time feedback
Competition elements:
Scoreboard
Prize incentives
Energy Challenge:
Energy real-time feedback
Game elements
Scoreboards
Prizes
Smartgrid game
Daily energy goal game
Raffle game
Participation game
Points and Badges
Compete
Play, Learn

14. Research Questions
Q1. What design elements are required in a serious game engine to facilitate the creation, administration and analysis of a family of serious game instances for sustainability?

15. Research Questions
Q2. How can we provide effective support for configurability and extensibility in a serious game engine for sustainability?

16. Research Questions:
Q3. What game mechanisms are needed to effectively support research in sustainability education, user behavior, and serious games in general?

17. Research Questions:
Q4. How can serious game engine evaluation provide insight into evaluation of framework in general?

18. Makahiki Game Engine Features
A collection of customizable games and game mechanics
A library of pedagogically organized learning actions
Real time game analytics for research and evaluation
Responsive (design) user interface supporting mobile, tablet, and laptop
Deployable to PaaS cloud as an inexpensive hosting option

19. System Design

20. Game Library

21. Admin Interface

22. Game Analytics

23. Responsive Design
Laptop view
Mobile view

24. Deploy to PaaS Cloud

25. Evaluation Methodology
Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), Davis 1989
Questionnaire instruments
Measurement scales
TAM2, UTAUT

26. Experimental Design 1 Evaluation:
Case study of 3 different game instances (UH, HPU, EWC)
Data collection:
1. Structured interviews (pre-game, in-game, post-game) to the system admins and game admins
2. In-game survey from players
3. game play logs and analytics data
Data Analysis:
1. TAM analysis of interview and survey data
2. quantitative analysis of game play data

27. The Kukui Cup 2012 Experience
Univ. of Hawaii Manoa
Energy Game
9 months
1067 students
near real time data
144 learning actions
Hawaii Pacific Univ.
Energy Game
3 weeks
198 students
near real time data
39 learning actions
East West Center
Energy and Water Game
2 weeks
129 residents
manual data
41 learning actions

28. Experimental Design 2 Evaluation:
Case study of multiple external developers who are tasked with making enhancements to the engine.
Data collection and analysis:
1. Log book of development activities from the developers (online Google form)
2. Code reviews
3. Questionnaires

29. Experimental Design 3 Evaluation:
Case study of research experience in UH game instance.
Data collection:
1. game analytics data
2. game logs data
3. energy data
Data analysis:
1. Social interaction in the game
2. Effectiveness of Eco-Feedback (real-time vs. daily)
3. Effectiveness of game mechanics such as Badge, Quest

30. Experimental Design 4 Evaluation:
Experience TAM, UTAUT, or proposed modification to TAM, in serious game engine evaluation, theoretical exploration of applying the same process to other generic software framework, such as Django
Data collection and analysis:
validation data of TAM related evaluation

31. Possible Contributions
An Open source game engine for creating sustainability related serious games and fostering serious game research
Applying the Technology Acceptance Model in evaluating serious game engine and possible software framework in general

32. Thank You!