Serious games are successfully applying game engines for purposes that go beyond pure entertainment However this results in a serious game being dependent on a particular game engine. This undermines the ability to keep the serious game up to date with the latest in gaming technology and also causes insecurity due to the possibility of the discontinuation of a game engine or the possibility of its support dwindling. In this thesis, the 'game' is separated from the game engine in order to make it portable between game engines. The game elements this work makes portable are the game logic, the object model and the game state, which represent the game's brain, and which are collectively referred to as the game factor, or G-factor. This separation is achieved by using an architecture called game space architecture (GSA), which ,combines a variant of the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern to separate the G-factor (the model) from the game engine (the view) with on-the-fly scripting to enable communication through an adapter (the controller). This enables multiple views (i.e. game engines) to exist for the same model (i.e. G-factor). The success of GSA in achieving its objective is evaluated by two types of evaluation: structured and unstructured. The principal findings from the evaluation process reveal that GSA is capable of servicing the same G-factor to multiple game engines and that it supports modifiability. They also reveal that GSA adds little development overhead. The ability of GSA to scale to real world applications is demonstrated by the development of a serious game for traffic accident investigators (SGTAI). SGTAI itself is used to investigate the suitability of a serious game to address the Dubai police force's current traffic accident investigation training needs. These needs were identified in a field study conducted in the summer of 2004 to assess the current training methods oflectures and on-the-job training. SGTAI was then developed by combining game design and instructional design to ensure the learning objectives were integral to the gameplay. To assess the learning effectiveness of SGTAI an experiment was conducted in February and March of 2006 for fifty-six police officers from the Dubai police force. They were divided into two groups: novices (0 to 2 years experience) and experienced investigators (with more than 2 years e.'{perience). The experiment revealed significant performance improvements in both groups, with the improvement reported in novices significantly higher than the one reported in experienced investigators.

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This thesis describes a biologically-inspired body-mind architecture for emotions, behaviour and belief regulation. The interest lies in modelling the conditions to the emergence of emotions instead of programming emotions. Emotions are not defined explicitly, but evolve from modulation of perception, motivation, actionselection, planning and memory access. The resulting agent acts as a contextaware mobile tour guide, guiding visitors touring an outdoor attraction, as well as presenting stories about the site and events. In addition to giving the illusion of life, the guide emulates a real guide's behaviour by presenting stories based on factors such as the user's interests, its own interests and its current memory activation. It possesses emotional memories that hold information about its past and its ideological perspectives, providing it with a personality. This allows the guide to present its autobiography,on top of facts. The related literature and the steps involved for the realisation of the proposed guide are presented. By having the body-mind .architecture, the guide shows plausible, flexible and adaptive . emotions, behaviour and belief. The system has been successfully evaluated and the result shows that the body-mind architecture is able to create a guide that provides a more interesting and enhanced tour experience.

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Objectives: Large displays and new technologies for interacting with computers offer a rich area for the development of new tools to facilitate collaborative concept mapping activities. In this thesis, WiiConcept is described as a tool designed to allow the use of multiple WiiRemotes for the collaborative creation of concept maps, with and without gestures. Subsequent investigation of participants' use of the system considers the effect of single and multiple input streams when using the software with and without gestures and the impact upon group concept mapping process outcomes and interactions when using a large display. Methods: Data is presented from an exploratory study of twenty two students who have used the tool. Half of the pairs used two WiiRemotes, while the remainder used one WiiRemote. All pairs created one map without gestures and one map with gestures. Data about their maps, interactions and responses to the tool were collected. Results: Analysis of coded transcripts indicates that one-controller afforded higher levels of interaction, with the use of gestures also increasing the number of interactions seen. Additionally, the result indicated that there were significantly more interactions of the 'shows solidarity', 'gives orientation', and 'gives opinion' categories (defined by the Bales' interaction processes assessment), when using one-controller as opposed to two. Furthermore, there were more interactions for the 'shows solidarity', 'tension release', 'gives orientation' and 'shows tension' categories when using gestures as opposed to the non-use of gestures. Additionally, there were no significant differences in the perceived dominance of individuals, as measured on the social dominance scales, for the amount of interaction displayed, however, there was a significant main effect of group conversational control score on the 'gives orientation' construct, with a higher number of interactions for low, mixed and high scores of this type when dyads had one-controller as opposed to two-controllers. There was also a significant interaction effect of group conversational control score on the 'shows solidarity' construct with a higher number of interactions for all scores of this type when dyads had one-controller as opposed to two-controllers. The results also indicate that for the WiiConcept there was no difference between number of controllers in the detail in the maps, and that all users found the tool to be useful for the collaborative creation of concept maps. At the same time, engaging in disagreement was related to the amount of nodes created with disagreement leading to more nodes being created. Conclusions: Use of one-controller afforded higher levels of interaction, with gestures also increasing the number of interactions seen. If a particular type of interaction is associated with more nodes, there might also be some argument for only using one-controller with gestures enabled to promote cognitive conflict within groups. All participants responded that the tool was relatively easy to use and engaging, which suggests that this tool could be integrated into collaborative concept mapping activities, allowing for greater collaborative knowledge building and sharing of knowledge, due to the increased levels of interaction for one-controller. As research has shown concept mapping can be useful for promoting the understanding of complex ideas, therefore the adoption of the WiiConcept tool as part of a small group learning activity may lead to deeper levels of understanding. Additionally, the use of gestures suggests that this mode of input does not affect the amount of words, nodes, and edges created in a concept map. Further research, over a longer period of time, may see improvement with this form of interaction, with increased mastery of gestural movement leading to greater detail of conceptual mapping.

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This thesis presents a principled method of coding redundancy relations directly into phonological representations; an approach which we term STRUCTURED SPECIFICATION. The approach draws on a number of related ideas from the fields of unification-based lexicons, knowledge representation, and the algebraic theory of lattices. This move has a number of implications for phonological theory. It resolves the long standing problem of the reciprocal dependency of phonological features; it reveals a connection between the notion of distinctiveness and the elsewhere condition; it results in a lexicon structured as a single lattice, a storage structure which has implications for recognition, acquisition, and lexical access; it extends naturally to the notion of default properties, which also exhibit a lattice structure based on subsumption; it provides a straightforward formalization of the notion archiphoneme, and permits us to distinguish partially specified from redundantly specified segments; analogously, it provides a means of making a principled distinction between unspecified and unmarked segments; it resolves formal and conceptual inconsistencies which result from combining underspecification theory and the theory of feature geometry, with respect to both subclassification and the treatment of monovalent features; its results in a non-derivational approach to specification theory, an approach which makes different empirical predictions from those of current underspecification theory, predictions which we show to be correct. Finally, structured specification is fully compatible with a constraint-based approach to phonology, and thus constitutes the first appropriate theory of specification for this emerging paradigm.