MainTrain: a serious game on the complexities of rail maintenance

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.

@InProceedings { AVSBB19,
  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    = "Games and Learning Alliance",
  series       = "Information Systems and Applications, incl. Internet/Web, and HCI",
  volume       = "11385",
  pages        = "82--89",
  month        = "jan",
  year         = "2019",
  editor       = "Manuel Gentile Mario Allegra Heinrich S{\"o}bke",
  publisher    = "Springer International Publishing",
  note         = "7th International Conference, GALA 2018, Palermo, Italy, December 5-7, 2018",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/2019/AVSBB19"
}