War-themed game pushes troops' cultural awareness

"God willing, you can find those responsible for these attacks," the shopkeeper tells him. He sends the soldier to a nearby clinic for more information.

At the clinic, a nurse asks him for help getting medicine. He turns her down. She snaps at him and tells him she has no information for him.

"She wouldn't have been angry if I had done the proper thing," says John Deaton, playing the make-believe soldier in the make-believe scenario.

It's only a game, but the goal is deadly serious.

Deaton, director of the Human Factors Center in the School of Aeronautics at Florida Tech, is helping create a video game to teach soldiers to be culturally sensitive in a variety of circumstances they are likely to run into.

Deaton says the soldier should have offered to help find a solution to the medicine shortage in the village or direct the nurse to where she could get help.

The results in a real-life encounter could be critical to the troops' safety as they patrol war-zone streets.