Creating a Virtual Training Environment for Traffic Accident Investigation for the Dubai Police Force

Serious games are successfully applying game engines for purposes that go beyond pure entertainment However this
results in a serious game being dependent on a particular game engine. This undermines the ability to keep the serious
game up to date with the latest in gaming technology and also causes insecurity due to the possibility of the
discontinuation of a game engine or the possibility of its support dwindling. In this thesis, the 'game' is separated from
the game engine in order to make it portable between game engines. The game elements this work makes portable are
the game logic, the object model and the game state, which represent the game's brain, and which are collectively referred
to as the game factor, or G-factor. This separation is achieved by using an architecture called game space architecture
(GSA), which ,combines a variant of the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern to separate the G-factor (the model) from
the game engine (the view) with on-the-fly scripting to enable communication through an adapter (the controller). This
enables multiple views (i.e. game engines) to exist for the same model (i.e. G-factor).
The success of GSA in achieving its objective is evaluated by two types of evaluation: structured and unstructured.
The principal findings from the evaluation process reveal that GSA is capable of servicing the same G-factor to multiple
game engines and that it supports modifiability. They also reveal that GSA adds little development overhead. The ability
of GSA to scale to real world applications is demonstrated by the development of a serious game for traffic accident
investigators (SGTAI).
SGTAI itself is used to investigate the suitability of a serious game to address the Dubai police force's current traffic
accident investigation training needs. These needs were identified in a field study conducted in the summer of 2004 to
assess the current training methods oflectures and on-the-job training. SGTAI was then developed by combining game
design and instructional design to ensure the learning objectives were integral to the gameplay. To assess the learning
effectiveness of SGTAI an experiment was conducted in February and March of 2006 for fifty-six police officers from
the Dubai police force. They were divided into two groups: novices (0 to 2 years experience) and experienced
investigators (with more than 2 years e.'{perience). The experiment revealed significant performance improvements in
both groups, with the improvement reported in novices significantly higher than the one reported in experienced
investigators.