In the field of Serious Games, Virtual Game-Based Learning through educational video games has already begun to be adopted in various classroom lessons. Research has found that game-based learning improves attention retention and critical thinking skills. Aside from using entertainment as a tool for encouraging learning, video games can provide a virtual space for players to freely experiment and demonstrate actions and scenarios that may normally be difficult to replicate in the real world. The prevalent and effective type of video game used for this purpose is Sandbox games.

Sandbox games provide a highly interactable virtual environment, which may be used to demonstrate environmental events or phenomena such as deforestation, pollution, climate change, and overfishing. However, despite various games' attempts at representing these factors, there are no games for representing them on a global scale due to the computational limits of simulating a large world at once. Consequently, these games lose some level of immersion and emergence which may not fully communicate their learning goals.

This work aims to investigate and provide methods for simulating a large world without spending high computational resources to allow players to gain greater insight into how their actions can affect the environment on a global scale. In addition, this research will investigate how the implementation of these methods can replace current solutions for tackling these challenges, such as chunk freezing, average value estimations, and reducing world space.

Team:

• Tam Duong
• Dr Dale Grant
• A/Prof Jaime Garcia