Abstract
Commuters who travel by train often feel annoyed due to misunderstanding the causes of delays in train traffic. They oftentimes are unaware of the necessity of performing maintenance to stations, tracks, and trains. MainTrain is a serious game developed to teach commuters about rail-maintenance while simulating the difficulty of keeping passengers happy. It is a fast-paced strategy game with a top-down view in which a player can perform maintenance actions on stations, tracks, and trains. By using commuter happiness as a base metric, MainTrain attempts to elicit empathy from players dissatisfied with scheduled maintenance so that they gain a better appreciation of the need for scheduled maintenance. This is coupled with the need to schedule maintenance for several components of a rail network, encumbering a player while teaching them about different aspects of rail maintenance. To examine the effectiveness of the game, the results of a user study are presented.
D. Alderliesten and K. Valečkaitė—Equal contribution.
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Acknowledgements
Firstly, we would like to thank the project team, Kanav Anand, Floris Doolaard, Jesse Tilro, Tim Yue, for their time and patience whilst designing the MainTrain with us. Secondly, we are extremely grateful to Pawel Kolodziejczyk, who framed the project and gave insight into the world of rail maintenance. Lastly, we would like to express gratitude for the game testers - you provided us with the all too needed points of improvement.
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Alderliesten, D., Valečkaitė, K., Salamon, N.Z., Timothy Balint, J., Bidarra, R. (2019). MainTrain: A Serious Game on the Complexities of Rail Maintenance. In: Gentile, M., Allegra, M., Söbke, H. (eds) Games and Learning Alliance. GALA 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11385. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11548-7_8
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