ABSTRACT
Modem military m1sswns 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 conununication is difficult, timeconsuming, and expensive. This chapter describes a method to simplify the creation of cross-cultural scenarios, Authoring By Cultural Demonstration (ABCD). ABCD allows authors to construct discrete cultural vignettes to represent key points in the story. It then guides the author to generalize those vignettes using an approach similar to Lakoff's (1987) radial categories applied to gesture, facial expression, language, and other cultural abstractions. ABCD connects the generalized vignettes into a cultural envelope that constitutes the scenario. Trainees' actions during scenario execution are then monitored to ensure that they stay within the envelope, so that they will encounter the cultural training opportunity that the author intended.
