Serious Games Applications for Cultural Heritage: Benefits and Main Design Issues

Introduction

The mission of cultural institutions has two main dimensions: to take care and preserve cultural heritage, and to promote its knowledge and enjoyment, engaging audiences (see among others Black, 2012; Falk, 2016). This is clear in the ICOM definition of what a museum is and does to be “in the service of society and its development”: in addition to acquisition, preservation and research activities, a museum “communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment” (Museum Definition, n.d.). Cultural organizations, within their domain and according to available resources, put effort into promoting and diffusing culture, connecting and engaging audiences.

As pointed out by several scholars (see among others Black, 2012), museums and other cultural institutions are on one side eroding their traditional audiences, and on the other side appear not able to turn out to be attractive enough for new audiences. A particular concern regards young generations, which often appear to be a hard target to reach. Children attend museums, when carried there by their teachers in school field trips or by their parents, somehow conscious, on rainy Sundays. As reported by Falk (2016) from a survey on several US museums, families -meant as groups with at least one adult and one or more children- are the most frequent type of museums visitors. The survey pointed out that on average most represented people are adults aged 25-44 and children aged 5-12 years old; some distinctions occur considering the type of museum, as the average audience age is older for art and history museums and younger for science museums (Falk, 2016). But will these non-voluntary children visits generate free-choice young visitors? The distance with certain audiences is a problem of promotion, as well as contents and used languages. So it appears to be strictly related to communication. Cultural organizations need to find fitting means and codes to reach and engage their publics (Black, 2012). Serious games applications to cultural heritage (Anderson et al., 2009) can be an effective tool, especially for young people, who are used to these and enjoy playing videogames (Apostolellis et al., 2018; Yanev, 2019).

Games attractive potential and people inclination to a frequent play got the attention of both managers and researchers, and found interesting applications in many different for profit and not-for-profit environments in recent years (Djaouti et al., 2011) for different goals (Kuo, 2015a).

Game-based applications make game elements enter the cultural context (Anderson et al., 2009; Apostolellis et al., 2018), to reach educational goals. These applications also have has a promotional aim, as cultural organizations need to develop their audiences, improve their brand image, increase their visibility and revenues.

In this perspective, the purpose of the chapter is to explore how serious games can provide cultural organizations opportunities to engage audiences. Both academic and technical literature are examined. In the background main concepts are defined and some features of players, as well as game-related aspects (mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics) are identified and described. Then the chapter presents main features of an effective design of serious games for cultural heritage, providing evidences from some international applications. The third part identifies and describes some controversial aspects, main related problems and some possible solutions.