MainTrain: A Serious Game on the Complexities of Rail Maintenance

David Alderliesten, Kotryna Valečkaitė, Nestor Z. Salamon, J. Timothy Balint, Rafael Bidarra

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volumeConference contributionScientificpeer-review

3 Citations (Scopus)
131 Downloads (Pure)

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.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationGames and Learning Alliance - 7th International Conference, GALA 2018, Proceedings
Subtitle of host publicationProceedings
EditorsHeinrich Söbke, Manuel Gentile, Mario Allegra
Place of PublicationCham
PublisherSpringer
Pages82-89
Number of pages8
Volume11385
ISBN (Electronic)978-3-030-11548-7
ISBN (Print)978-3-030-11547-0
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2019
Event7th International Conference on Games and Learning Alliance, GALA 2018 - Palermo, Italy
Duration: 5 Dec 20187 Dec 2018

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume11385 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference7th International Conference on Games and Learning Alliance, GALA 2018
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityPalermo
Period5/12/187/12/18

Bibliographical note

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care

Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Keywords

  • Serious game
  • Educational game
  • Rail maintenance

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