The Impact of Multi-Players Serious Games on the Social Interaction among Online Students versus Face-to-Face Students

There are few attempts in the education field that investigate the use of serious games as an instructional tool. In this paper, collaborative virtual environment (CVE) will be used to build up multi-players serious games (MPSGs) platform to investigate how MPSGs promotes social interaction among students. Furthermore, we extend our analysis to how significantly MPSGs affects online students’ social interaction as opposed to social interaction among face-to-face students. A MPSG platform called The Village of Belknap was developed in Second Life for our experimental analysis. Then, statistical analysis using ANOVA has been to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach. We obtained promising results about how MPSGs may affect the social interaction among various groups of students. Key-Words: Collaborative Virtual Environment, Second Life, Educational Games, Serious Game, Role-Playing Game, Avatar.