Cascades of Concepts of Virtual Time Travel Games for the Training of Industrial Accident Prevention

Time travel games are a recent form of edutainment media having high potential in areas such as environmental education and prevention training. At TLIC 2021, the present authors delivered a contribution advocating planning of human training experiences as dynamically as driving a disturbed technical system back into a normal mode of operation. A trainee’s inappropriate actions may be possibly ruining a - fortunately only virtual - technical installation. Time travel backwards offers opportunities to influence the fate to make good of the damage. This requires concepts of Artificial Intelligence to plan and execute time travel adaptively according to a trainee’s training history, to a trainee’s strengths and weaknesses, and to possibly changing environmental conditions. There is introduced a cascade of gradually more intricate categories of time travel games. With every step from one category to the next, the deployed AI gets more powerful and effective in providing adaptive guidance of trainees. The most advanced time travel games are those that allow for the dynamic modification of events experienced in the virtual past. In this way, the game system evolves over time and adapts to the needs of human trainees with emphasis on guidance for trainees who fail repeatedly. Consequently, every trainee gets an individual training experience. The AI takes care that all trainees experience their individual success as a result of their own efforts - i.e., as a gratification for mastery. All concepts and their respective representations are illustrated through examples from a novel application. This includes the way in which concepts are used and the impact they have on affective and effective training.