Evaluating the effectiveness of serious games for cultural awareness: the Icura user study

There is an increasing awareness about the potential of serious games for education and training in many disciplines. However, research still witnesses a lack of methodologies, guidelines and best practices on how to develop effective serious games and how to integrate them in the actual learning and training processes. This process of integration heavily depends on providing and spreading evidence of the effectiveness of serious games This paper reports a user study to evaluate the effectiveness of Icura, a serious game about Japanese culture and etiquette. The evaluation methodology extends the set of instruments used in previous studies by evaluating the effects of the game on raising awareness, by avoiding the selective attention bias and by assessing the medium-term retention. With this research we aim to provide a handy toolkit for evaluating the effectiveness a serious games for cultural awareness and heritage.