Authoring By Cultural Demonstration

Modern military missions require soldiers to communicate effectively and at a personal level with people whose cultures, languages, lifestyles, and beliefs are very different from their own. Constructing suitable, game-based, culturally relevant scenarios to prepare soldiers for effective communication is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. Aptima proposes an innovative extension of cognitive science, technology and COTS scenario-authoring tools to simplify the creation of cultural concepts by non-programmers that will run the existing scenarios in a game-engine agnostic environment. Authoring By Cultural Demonstration (ABCD) will use radial categories as a framework for generalizing from space and time to vignettes containing gesture, facial expression, language, and other cultural abstractions. ABCD will connect the generalized vignettes into a cultural envelope that constitutes the scenario. Trainee’s actions during scenario execution will be monitored to ensure that the trainee stays within the envelope and inevitably encounters the cultural training opportunity.