異文化理解のためのロールプレイゲームの開発と多国間比較実験の実施

Abstract

In many countries, especially in Europe, many cultural, ethnic and religious groups must live and work together. However, cultural differences can lead to social stresses and sometimes outright conflict. eCUTE is an EU FP7 project aiming at developing innovative IT technologies to learn cultural awareness and understanding. This paper reports a cross cultural study which was conducted as our collaboration with European universities under the eCUTE project. First, we describe the theoretical basis of the proposed serious game, and implement an agent-based role-play game TRAVELLER in which the users encounter animated agents with different cultural backgrounds. Then, we conducted a preliminary experiment to evaluate the role-play game using questionnaires. In our analysis, it was found that Japanese people felt more comfortable to interact with collectivistic agents compared to people in European countries. On the other hand European people felt that the individualistic agent was friendly, while Japanese people didn’t. Further study is necessary by adding more data and using statistical analyses.