Design and evaluation of a Serious Game for immersive cultural training

3D Virtual Worlds have the potential to expand the knowledge of a foreign culture by presenting the information in a visual context. In this paper we describe the design and evaluation of ICURA, a Serious Game that provides an opportunity to learn more about Japanese culture and etiquette. ICURA incorporates different game design and learning principles to effectively communicate knowledge. The main goal is to combine aspects of learning and fun in an immersive 3D Environment to make the communication of knowledge an entertaining experience. We evaluated the game through a user study with 20 participants. The comparison of pre- and post-test results highlights the positive learning effect of ICURA.