An Ontology for Integrating Didactics into a Serious Training Game

Serious games offer high potential for immersive, effective, and autonomous training. However, research has shown that trainees need guidance and structure during training. This could be achieved by means of well-chosen scenarios and targeted adaptations of the storyline based on didactic considerations. This paper discusses some of the challenges posed in adaptive game design. Additionally, the paper outlines the design rationale behind the adaptive game architecture for training (AGAT). An ontology is proposed that serves as a foundation and knowledge base for a system able to orchestrate the game’s storyline in a didactically desirable fashion. The ontology’s use is versatile: it supports requirements elicitation and refinement, results in traceable underlying assumptions and design choices, and provides the knowledge base used by the system itself. The architecture is illustrated by means of a case study. Future work focuses on the development of a generic set of procedural rules to operate on this ontology and generate user-tailored didactically-driven adaptive scenario content.