My Dream Theater

Conflict is something that cannot be avoided in life. At a social level, it is of great importance to solve conflicts the best way possible, as an unresolved or badly handled conflict can lead to unpredictable events and have negative consequences for everyone involved. The goal of this work is to design and validate an educational serious video game that supports educators in their task of teaching children about conflict and conflicts resolution. This work represents a new approach to conflict resolution software as it creates a safe environment in which children can experiment different ways to handle conflict situations and understand what an why those decisions have specific outcomes. To achieve this, the proposed game design implements several concepts from social and psychological theories of conflict into the rules and mechanics of the game, following several learning theories and design principles from the field of educational video games. This document presents the research concerning the two main fields of this work, conflict and educational video games. The rules and game mechanics are then presented along with the educational principles followed to obtain that game design. It is then detailed the development of a prototype which was used to validate the design with children. Several tools to support the design were also implemented, including a game simulator and several playing strategies which allowed to balance the game. Finally this work describes the implementation and results obtained using and adaptation model which allows teachers to personalize the game experience.