Abstract
Understanding culture is an integral part of international operations in developing countries and conflict zones. Cultural encounters in countries such as Afghanistan might introduce a number of challenges. This article presents the experiences with the CAMO project (Cultural Awareness in Military Operations) seeking to address these challenges. While game-based simulations are to an increasing degree used for military training, most of such systems are expensive to develop. The goal of this project has been to create a low-cost simulation in the 3D virtual world of Second Life for pre-deployment cultural awareness training among Norwegian military personnel preparing for service in Afghanistan. We provide a detailed description of the methodology and training scenarios, based on examples of cultural challenges the participants were expected to face. We also report the results of evaluation of the system with the cadets of the Norwegian Military Academy. Finally, we discuss how the proposed methodology could be extended for non-military use, since due to the gradual withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan training cultural awareness among civilian personnel becomes more important.
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Prasolova-Førland, E., Fominykh, M., Darisiro, R., Mørch, A.I., Hansen, D. (2014). Preparing for International Operations and Developing Scenarios for Inter-cultural Communication in a Cyberworld: A Norwegian Army Example. In: Gavrilova, M.L., Tan, C.J.K., Mao, X., Hong, L. (eds) Transactions on Computational Science XXIII. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8490. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43790-2_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43790-2_7
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