Design and evaluation of an avatar-based cultural training system

Donald E. Brown, Anne Moenning, Stephanie Guerlain, Benton Turnbull, Daniel Abel and Christine Meyer

The Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation, 2019, vol. 16, issue 2, 159-174

Abstract: The need for cultural training for members of the military, and supporting government and industrial organizations, has become more important because of the increasing expectations of effective collaborations between people of different cultures in order to achieve common security objectives. Additionally, the number and mix of countries, and cultural groups within those countries, make traditional classroom training less feasible. While good simulations have been built for cultural understanding, they have not been developed widely or used for pre-deployment training. This paper describes and evaluates an avatar-based game for pre-deployment training. The game is built around two scenarios from the Afghan culture: a market scenario, and a local leadership council scenario. The game also allows participants to reverse roles and play the part of an Afghan interacting with an American solider. To evaluate this avatar-based game, we developed an experimental design to test the effectiveness of the game versus commonly used video instruction, and to test the effectiveness of role reversals in training with games. Results show that participants trained with the avatar-based game had significantly improved understanding of Afghan culture ( p

Keywords: Role playing; serious games; simulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:joudef:v:16:y:2019:i:2:p:159-174

DOI: 10.1177/1548512918807593

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