Computer Graphics and Visualization • Publications

In Proceedings of GALA

MainTrain: a serious game on the complexities of rail maintenance

David Alderliesten, Kotryna Valeckaite, Nestor Z. Salamon, J. Timothy Balint, and Rafael Bidarra

A sample train layout, with Tramsterdam selected. In the upper left corner are stats related to the track reach the station. A train will soon run between two other stations, indicated by the card on the top right side.

Commuters who travel by train often feel annoyed due to misunderstanding the causes of de-lays in train traffic. They oftentimes are unaware of the necessity of performing maintenance to stations, tracks, and trains. MainTrain is a serious game developed to teach commuters about rail-maintenance while simulating the difficulty of keeping passengers happy. It is a fast-paced strategy game with a top-down view in which a player can perform maintenance actions on stations, tracks, and trains. By using commuter happiness as a base metric, MainTrain attempts to elicit empathy from players dissatisfied with scheduled maintenance so that they gain a better appreciation of the need for scheduled maintenance. This is coupled with the need to schedule maintenance for several components of a rail network, encumbering a player while teaching them about different aspects of rail maintenance. To examine the effectiveness of the game, the results of a user study are presented.

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Publisher Paper preprint Presentation

Citation

David Alderliesten, Kotryna Valeckaite, Nestor Z. Salamon, J. Timothy Balint, and Rafael Bidarra, MainTrain: a serious game on the complexities of rail maintenance, In Proceedings of GALA, pp. 82–89, 2018.

BibTex

@inproceedings{bib:alderliesten:2018,
    author       = { Alderliesten, David and Valeckaite, Kotryna and Salamon, Nestor Z. and Balint, J. Timothy and Bidarra, Rafael },    
    title        = { MainTrain: a serious game on the complexities of rail maintenance },
    booktitle    = { In Proceedings of GALA },
    year         = { 2018 },
    pages        = { 82--89 },
    doi          = { 10.1007/978-3-030-11548-7_8 },
    dblp         = { conf/gala/AlderliestenVSB18 },
    url          = { https://publications.graphics.tudelft.nl/papers/116 },
}