Towards a Game-Chatbot: Extending the Interaction in Serious Games

Game environments tend to be highly responsive and demanding and thus provoke active learner involvement. Surprisingly, gaming and in the same line also serious gaming, still make little use of one of people’s most common type of interactions i.e. natural language. Despite the presumed positive effect in e-learning of interactive online characters, the use of virtual characters or so-called Non Player Characters still seems in its infancy. In this work, therefore, we started to look at the use of relatively simple chatbots for serious games. We describe the first step of our exploration i.e. to extend EMERGO, an existing serious game environment, with a chatbot to enhance the interaction with the student. EMERGO is a toolkit and methodology that enables to develop new cases with relative ease and limited time. We will introduce EMERGO and give an overview of chatbot technology fitting our case. Next, we will explain the EMERGO case under development, and how it makes use of the chatbot selected and the technical architecture enabling the chatbot – EMERGO integration. We will conclude with a description of the evaluation planned.