Abstract

The VESSEL Damage Control Trainer (DCT) was designed to augment classroom instruction at the Navy Great Lakes Recruit Training Center. This game allows students to have practice opportunities and to demonstrate their skills in communication, shipboard navigation, and basic damage control concepts. The game’s primary goal was to increase performance in the mixed reality simulation Battle Stations 21, which serves as the final culminating event of Navy recruit training.

The design of the DCT game was sophisticated in its ability to leverage prior experiences and affordances its primary audience might have with 3-D games, while creating a motivating learning environment that anyone should be able to quickly find intuitive. By incorporating game design principles like continuous feedback, menus and goal structures, and difficult problems, DCT has created an engaging and challenging game that should increase its players’ ability to perform in their real-life tasks.

Introduction

When a player launches a game for the very i rst time, they do so with a myriad of expectations about what the experience that lies before them might include. When the game that you’re about to play is a serious game, a serious game specii cally that relates to skills that might ultimately save the lives of you and your friends, that expectation becomes different. Maybe it is not so important that this game be fun, or good looking, or even all that easy to play. Imagine you’re a naval recruit, and you’re about to play a game that was designed to help you practice THE culminating event of your training. You know there will soon be a real-life test on all the material that this game is supposed to help you practice and failing that test has consequences that you don’t want to think about.