Classification of Gameplay Interaction in Digital Cultural Heritage

Digital heritage has matured over the past twenty years and now calls are being made for interactive experiences that augment digital representation with digital performance. The paper considers sources for such a performance: be it documented sources, contemporary cultures, or gameplay from other entertainment game genres. It considers the needs of various stakeholders: the archaeologist, the historian, the game designer and the target audience and suggests thematically consistent multiple gameplay options that serve the different needs while reusing game assets and characters. This aims to contribute to the collaboration with the DiGRA community on serious cultural heritage game development, focusing on the player as performer, rather than just as an observer.

Cultural Heritage and Environmental Communication Through Digital Games

The politics of game canonization: Tales from the frontlines of creating a national history of games

In this paper, we provide insight into the politics of forming a national games canon by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, one of the biggest audiovisual cultural heritage institutions in the Netherlands. From a historiographical perspective, the paper investigates how different stakes and commitments of the different actors involved (the authors included) during the different stages of admission and selection are inherently connected. From a unique insider's perspective, we recognize that more pragmatic concerns around preservation and archival efforts of the Institute collapse with the socioculturally-driven aims of the canon as a history of Dutch games, a process we call the politics of acquisition.

OFabulis and Versailles 1685: a comparative study of the creation process behind video games on historical monuments

This paper explores the specificities of the creation process behind video games focusing on historical monument through the comparison between two point-and-clicks: OFabulis and Versailles 1685. The study is based on the authors’ interviews, log books and work documents. The comparison seems to reveal that three elements are inherent to this type of video games: participation of cultural institutions in the game design right from the start, leading scenario with compromises between history and fiction, ad hoc multimedia systems with limited gameplay and realistic rendering.

Analysing Cultural Heritage and its Representation in Video Games

This paper outlines research towards strengthening our understanding of the representation of cultural artifacts in video games. The approach described outlines steps towards utilising a framework using dimensions of cultural heritage as reference points for games analysis. This framework is then used as a mechanism to analyse two games: Assassin’s Creed I and Unearthed: Trail of Ibn Battuta. The case study analysis presents concerns regarding cultural representation in the selected games. This is followed by a discussion of the main concerns coming out of the analysis. These concerns are effectively grouped under five sections: ‘cultural appropriation’; ‘hollywoodisation and beautification’; ‘selectivity’; ‘game dynamics rule design decision’; and ‘ideological constraints’. The research raises issues about how video game designers approach the inclusion of items with cultural meaning in their products. Next stages in the work involve interviewing of games designers to better understand how the design decisions presented in this paper occur.

Citizen Archivists at Play: Game Design for Gathering Metadata for Cultural Heritage Institutions

In this paper, we detail our design process for the Metadata Games project and discuss a number of design challenges involved in making a “metadata game,” such as incentivizing players to offer accurate information, devising and deploying methods for verifying the accuracy of data, and introducing effective motivations for ensuring high replay potential. We present our “Outlier Design” model for creating effective crowdsourcing applications, and offer the Metadata Games prototype One-Up as an example. This game’s design addresses the challenges of gathering increasingly higher quality metadata while creating a compelling play experience.

The Ethics of Indigenous Storytelling: using the Torque Game Engine to Support Australian Aboriginal Cultural Heritage

Digital Songlines (DSL) is an Australasian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID) project that is developing protocols, methodologies and toolkits to facilitate the collection, education and sharing of indigenous cultural heritage knowledge. This paper outlines the goals achieved over the last three years in the ethics of developing the Digital Songlines game engine (DSE) toolkit that is used for Australian Indigenous storytelling. The project explores the sharing of indigenous Australian Aboriginal storytelling in a sensitive manner using a game engine. The use of game engine in the field of Cultural Heritage is expanding. They are an important tool for the recording and re-presentation of historically, culturally, and sociologically significant places, infrastructure, and artefacts, as well as the stories that are associated with them in a highly situated context. The DSL implementation of a game engine to share storytelling provides an educational interface. Where the DSL implementation of a game engine in a CH application differs from others is in the nature of the game environment itself. It is modelled on the ‘country’ (the ‘place’ of their heritage which is so important to the clients’ collective identity) and authentic fauna and flora that provides a highly contextualised setting for the stories to be told. This paper provides an overview of the ethics behind and the development of the DSL game engine.

Where have all the games gone? Explorations on the cultural significance of digital games and preservation

It is now 50 years since the development of the first computer game but despite the proliferation of digital games in our society - with an industry which is flourishing and an average of 9 games sold every second of every day in 2007, it seems that these products are not as valued as the products of other cultural industries, such as film and television, and they are being excluded from the preservation of our digital heritage. This paper will focus on research interviews undertaken with people in the academic community. It will highlight that the growing academic interest in digital games is being hindered by a lack of research collections to support historical study. Researchers acknowledge that the study of digital games is a relatively new discipline and that outside academia, there is still little understanding of their cultural significance. However, they recognise the importance of protecting games as part of our digital heritage to ensure that future generations are able to understand the development of a valuable aspect of our social history. In other words, this research has underlined that games are considered a culture worth studying and something in need of preserving.