MainTrain
A Serious Game on the Complexities of Rail Maintenance
David Alderliesten (Student TU Delft)
Kotryna Valeckaite (TU Delft - Design Informatics)
N. Z. Salamon (TU Delft - Computer Graphics and Visualisation)
J. Timothy Balint (TU Delft - Computer Graphics and Visualisation)
Rafa Bidarra (TU Delft - Computer Graphics and Visualisation)
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Abstract
Commuters who travel by train often feel annoyed due to misunderstanding the causes of delays 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.