« Simuler » l’activité passée pour aider à concevoir un serious game : les apports de la démarche de simulation rétrospective

Abstract

The rise of new technologies, like serious games, opens up new horizons in terms of training, skills development and knowledge acquisition. The design of these serious games which have educational goals is based on various requirements. The retrospective simulation approach that is the subject of this paper was developed as part of the design of this type of innovative serious game. It is guided by ergonomic and work psychology. The innovative dimension involves designing realistic behaviours, emotions and profiles of non-player characters (NPCs). The retrospective simulation allows to access and model real situations of change involving emotions and social behaviours. The purpose of this paper is to report the contributions and limitations of the retrospective simulation of social-emotional activity. The deployed methods have three different goals: comprehensive goal, re-situating goal and finally projective goal. The sample consists of 27 participants, 13 women and 14 men, with an average age of 45 years. They have experienced all types of change: professional, structural, organizational and technological. Thanks to the results, we were able to reconstitute for each participant chronicles of socio-emotional experience. These chronicles make it possible to recompose the situation of change as well as to associate the various events to the participant's emotional experiences and social behaviours. In addition, personas – archetypal representations of different profiles of people with similar characteristics – have been developed. They are resources for designing NPCs and for the script of the serious game. In this way, the retrospective simulation, turned towards a past activity, allows on the one hand, accessing and modeling the emotional and social experiences and on the other hand, to contribute to the development of the prospective simulation that is serious game.