Serious games for forensic science: the CSI project and a virtual lab

The CSI Serious Games Project belongs to CSI The Hague, a public-private collaboration in which the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) works with TNO, Delft University of Technology and the developer E-Semble. The project's kick-off took place on 13 January in the Field Lab of the NFI, and a pilot was planned for May 2012.

E-Semble set out to build a training game that combines board game elements with virtual reality. Its learning objective is forensic awareness: noticing the traces on an incident scene or crime scene before they are disturbed. The game also teaches rescue professionals where they fit into the forensic chain. Several forensic scenarios were to be developed for it, and the CSI Lab that opened with the project was meant to give police forensic detectives new training options.

The Virtual Forensics Laboratory at Boston College puts students into a three-dimensional recreation of a crime scene. They practice photographing and collecting evidence such as fingerprints, blood spatter and weapons, and they read related case materials: 911 calls, psychological examinations and police interrogations. Working through the evidence and reconstructing the events trains the critical thinking needed to deduce motives and identify likely offenders.

Nursing professor Ann Burgess received an ATIG grant to build the lab. Before it existed she staged simulated crime scenes with manikins and fake blood, and she wanted a richer, more interactive setting for teaching forensic methods through game-based learning.

E-Semble's website, e-semble.com, now shows a parked placeholder page. The English-language project page for CSI The Hague, at its old address on that domain, shows the same placeholder, so the game itself has no page of its own to open.

The Netherlands Forensic Institute still lists a serious game of its own, the Forensisch Sporenspel. On the institute's training page it is described as an introduction to crime scene investigation: a group plays forensic investigators in a virtual incident scene, chooses which traces go to the laboratory to score the highest trace value, and then sees the analysis results and the solution of the case. A session lasts about 1.5 hours and can be held at the institute or on location for groups of 6 to 100 people.

The CSI The Hague project also has a page at Delft University of Technology, one of the original partners. It presents a related line of work, an augmented reality system that lets remote crime scene experts support first responders who must collect time-critical evidence, and says a first proof of concept has been developed and tested.