OREANDA-NEWS. February 26, 2013. In an unusual collaboration, the Saudi Aramco Medical Services Organization and the Upstream Professional Development Center (UPDC) have won an award for an avatar-based 3D role-playing game that teaches health and safety practices for upstream professionals, reported the press-centre of Saudi Aramco.

Named the Health & Safety Initiative of the Year by the Oil and Gas Middle East Awards, the avatar application is completed, and will be dovetailed into the onboarding program for young professionals in 2013, said Ron Monsen, acting technology group leader at UPDC.

It was one of three awards given to Saudi Aramco and its employees; the others were Young Engineer of the Year and Innovative Oil Project of the Year.

The key to success, Monsen said, was the collaboration between SAMSO and the IT Future Center, which provided facilities for the avatar game to be developed and tested.

“We approached SAMSO for obvious reasons,” said Monsen.

“When you look at the goal of an application like this, you are raising demographic awareness on issues of health and safety. And when you look at our young workforce, we asked, ‘can we use a 3D approach to teach how to live and work in an upstream environment?’”

“This is a game about behaviors and choices,” said Samantha Horseman, a project co-leader from SAMSO. “Rather than tell people, ‘you should eat this, or you should do that,’ this game allows people to make decisions and see the consequences of their actions. And because the brain stores 3D images much longer than paper tests or speeches, we took the day in the life of an upstream professional and turned it into a game.”

The game begins at the start of the day, and every choice the player makes has consequences that affect the game later on, Horseman said.

Players can choose different kinds of food for breakfast, everything from really sugary cereals to fruit and toast. On the drive to work, players are given the choice to use a seat belt or not, use a mobile phone while driving or not. In the field, players can choose to wear personal protective equipment, whether to smoke, and if the player does smoke, whether to smoke in a designated area.

Perhaps the most innovative element of the project was the way in which the research team demonstrated the proof of concept. By measuring brainwaves with an electroencephalograms and asking players to rate their own engagement on a scale of 1-5, researchers could prove that the health and safety messages were sinking in.