Designing Virtual Players for Game Simulations in a Pedagogical Environment: A Case Study

  • Jean-Marc Labat
Conference paper
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 5093)

Abstract

The development of learner’ activities is a key element in the design of a pedagogy based on constructivism. A classic way to implement this pedagogy in practice consists in using simulation. When the simulation is a game, the learner is stimulated by competition with other learners. But, sometimes, there are not enough human players. In order to increase the “playability”, we need to introduce virtual players. These virtual players must be defined with respect to 4 properties: (i) to play in a normal way, neither too well nor too poorly, (ii) their behaviour must be unpredictable, (iii) they must not cheat and (iv) they must not be distinguishable from human players. In this paper, we propose a methodology to define such virtual players and we illustrate it in the case of the SIMPLUS project, a business game.

Keywords

Learning Environments virtual player business simulation reverse-engineering knowledge-based system 
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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008

Authors and Affiliations

  • Jean-Marc Labat
    • 1
  1. 1.Lip6 LabUPMC (Paris 6)ParisFrance

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