A serious game to extract Hofstede's cultural dimensions at the individual level

Cultural dimensions are an important aspect of a user model and useful for many applications such as adapting user interface, managing marketing campaigns, customer relationship management, and human resource management. Traditionally, these dimensions are measured through CVSCALE, which is a reliable and standard scale provided to measure Hofstede's cultural dimensions at the individual level. The problems with the questionnaire-based data collection are low response rates, lack of willingness to complete, poor engagement of participants, and concern about the quality of data collected. To solve these problems, we present a serious video game called "Treasure Island" to measure the cultural dimensions of the player at the individual level (currently only for the Persian language). We have developed and validated a Persian-language version of CVSCALE applied to design the game. We developed the very first general game development process to build serious games for gathering the same data as a standard psychometric questionnaire. Treasure Island has been evaluated by statistical analysis of the data collected from a sample of 285 participants that have played the game and completed the questionnaire. The results indicate that Treasure Island is effective to measure the individual cultural dimensions. Moreover, the efficiency of the game has been tested in terms of task load imposed on the user during playing the game and completing the questionnaire. The results demonstrate that the game imposes less task load on the user, consequently, improves user satisfaction and engagement. Since individual cultural dimensions can be considered an important facet of a user model for certain applications, the proposed serious game can be applied for user modeling and personalization purposes.