Modern military missions require warfighters 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. Authoring By Cultural Demonstration (ABCD) is an innovative combination of cognitive science, technology, and COTS scenario-authoring tools that that enables warfighters and instructors to author culturally relevant training scenarios in a game-engine agnostic environment. A key innovation in ABCD is the division of authoring into several components: (1) machinima tools to enable input of real events to support generation of a single non-interactive plot script, output as machinima; (2) interaction tools to specify interaction choices and consequences, resulting in an interactive scenario; (3) contrasting cases tools to ensure scenarios revolve around key training principles in the form of interaction patterns; and (4) an asset library that provides culturally relevant physical locations, avatars, props, etc.. Separating the authoring process into these pieces allows existing tools, such as AI-based cinematography, conventional video editing, and radial-category-oriented stimulus and response creation, to be brought to bear on the task. The net result is a quick, easy, and nontechnical solution.
Keywords: Serious Games; Scenario Generation; Training; Computer Generated Forces; Radial Categories; Machinima; Contrasting Cases
