BBN Technologies

A Game-Based Testbed for Psychological Research

BBN Technologies is developing and testing a game-based experimentation environment, SABRE (Situation Authorable Behavior Research Environment) designed to facilitate basic research on how performance in teamwork skills, situation awareness, decision-making, and social interaction are affected by individual differences such as personality or cultural traits. SABRE supports complex task scenarios, featuring challenges such as information overload, unexpected failures, and interpersonal conflicts in an immersive, role-play, computer game environment.

A Flexible Behavior Research Environment

The SABRE testbed is based on a commercially available game, Neverwinter Nights™, and is designed to satisfy the need for an inexpensive, standardized experiment framework that can be deployed at multiple sites to explore basic research questions of interest to both academic and government investigators. SABRE allows behavior researchers to customize and extend experimental scenarios themselves, with minimal need for software developers.

SABRE is free to researchers and government personnel, and is in use by the NATO Leader and Team Adaptability in Multinational Coalitions (LTAMC) project.

Key features include:

• Multi-player format
• Versatility through authorable scenarios
• Hooks to facilitate entity control by human behavior models
• Teammates & opponents playable by humans & human behavior models
• Automated data capture
• Collection of in-game behaviors as well as out-of-game surveys.

Advantages of a Game-Based Testbed for Psychological Research

• Data is derived from observed actions and behaviors (albeit in a virtual world) rather than from speculation on hypothetical situations, self-reported behaviors, or answers to questionnaires.
• Data is generated in an immersive environment. Although there is no guarantee that participants won't try to present a positive image, there is a high likelihood that the absorbing play and continuously unfolding scenario will facilitate display of natural behavior.
• Tasks and situations can be repeated in a variety of different ways, both between and within scenarios. This replicability can permit a fine-grained measurement of behaviors over multiple contexts, which is difficult to access with a more traditional experimental paradigm.
• Data collection is easier since all actions take place through a computer so the participant can be detached from the experimenter. This allows the researcher and the subjects to be connected through the Internet, potentially allowing the experiment to reach a broader, larger subject pool.