Abstract
Players of serious games are culturally sensitive agents; by interacting with the game and other players they bring their own culture into the game. This can result in conflicting behaviour that hampers the players to reach the objectives of the game. It is therefore necessary that the design of the game architecture is adjusted to the players’ culture. Currently, game designers typically adjust serious games to their players’ culture by playtesting with their target group. However, since playtesting demands a lot of time, incurs high costs and may spoil the client’s first impression of the game, playtesting is not always possible or desirable. This chapter presents an alternative to playtesting which we call the Culture Driven Game Design Method. This method provides a tool to assess and represent the players’ culture as well as a set of guidelines to process this assessment and avoid conflicts between the players’ culture and the architecture of the game.
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Notes
- 1.
It should be noted that this statement, and thereby the theoretical basis of this research, conflicts with the theory of the magic circle. The magic circle is a widely used theoretical concept introduced by (Huizinga 1955) which claims that the world in which a game is played is completely isolated from the real world (Harvey 2006; Paras and Bizzocchi 2005; Salen and Zimmerman 2004). In this research (Consalvo 2009; Fine 1983) are followed who both concluded that the real world will always intrude into the gameplay.
- 2.
The individual differences in the group test are left out of the scope of this research as they can be explained by either personality or variation in the measurements.
- 3.
As stated in Sect. 13.2, this research is demarcated to the influence of informal institutions situated in the highest layer of the four layer model of Williamson. If other layers were to be included, the number of potential conflicts would increase as well as the amount and structure of the culture dimensions.
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Meershoek, C.J., Kortmann, R., Meijer, S.A., Subrahmanian, E., Verbraeck, A. (2014). The Culture Driven Game Design Method: Adapting Serious Games to the Players’ Culture. In: Dignum, V., Dignum, F. (eds) Perspectives on Culture and Agent-based Simulations. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01952-9_13
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