Recent developments in HCI

In this article I critically discuss four studies in the area of Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) research. The focus is on distinct dimensions of culture including both verbal and para-verbal behavior in communication. My discussion is grounded in Weigand’s (2010) theory of dialogic action games (DAG), a pragma-linguistic theory which is based on a view of language as language action. The main question is whether or not the presented research leads in a direction towards making computers believable dialog partners.