Last Friday, myself and Eike Anderson, another colleague from Interactive Worlds Applied Research Group (IWARG), have presented a paper with title ‘Serious Games in Cultural Heritage’ in the 10th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage (VAST09), State of the Art Reports session. The conference was held in Malta between 22 - 25 September and it is one of the most significant conferences of the field. The paper supported that although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology.
As a result the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented.
A draft version of the paper can be downloaded from here.
A draft version of the paper can be downloaded from here.