Gamifying Cultural Heritage. Education, Tourism Development, and Territory Promotion: Two Italian Examples

Introduction

In recent years, information and communication technologies have widely affected the cultural heritage sector, offering incredible opportunities to enhance the experiential value of heritage assets. The relationship between the cultural heritage domain and new technologies has always been complex and dialectical, often characterized by the pursuit of technologies that can become a “deadweight” during users’ cultural experiences (Cameron & Kenderdine, 2007), especially if they propose non-sustainable solutions, they are too invasive and they are not designed with a specific attention to the context and to users’ needs.

In the last decades, with the increasingly widespread use of advanced personal devices technology such as smartphones and tablets and thanks to broadband internet access, the number of multimedia products developed within the cultural heritage community has certainly increased (Economou, 2015). Researchers have witnessed how innovative applications and services can shorten the distance between cultural spaces, such as museums, art exhibitions, historical centres archaeological parks, and citizens: technology can become a facilitator of interactions and connections between all involved actors, and create that common (digital) space where interventions can be sustainable, where enjoyment can be enhanced and where people can discover new places and learn more effectively about culture.

Digital tools have proved to be powerful instruments for improving cultural activities, and at the same time, they represent new paradigms for enhancing the diffusion and acquisition of the cultural message. Techniques like augmented reality, virtual reality, and, more broadly, all multimedia technologies are providing visitors with new ways to interact with cultural activities.

Furthermore, another trend has gained significant attention: increasing users’ engagement through gaming and gamification. Several studies have shown the efficacy of gamification and serious games in dissemination and education, revealing improvements in learning achievements (Faiella & Ricciardi, 2015; Mortara et al., 2014; Read, 2015), public outreach activities (Mariotti 2021) and touristic outcomes (Dubois & Gibbs, 2018; Sajid et al., 2018).

The progress of human-machine interfaces, virtual reality, 3D, computer graphics and animation allowed to transfer the gamification approach and game-thinking in more serious contexts, including the cultural sector.

Gaming (or electronic games) provide players with an immersive and interactive entertainment experience often through dynamic and real-time interaction with their context, local organisations and fellow players (Doughty & O’Coill, 2005). With the rapid development of mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, gaming becomes mobile and allows dynamic interaction at the location of the user. Smartphones enable players to interact with their real-world environment in real-time. Researchers suggest that mobile games have changed the game players’ experiences in many ways. One of the fundamental changes is that gaming experiences have been extended into the real world, and are potentially available at any place and at any time.

Gaming, as a cutting-edge concept, is emerging as a useful tool and has also been used by many tourism organisations for marketing, for dynamic engagement with users, and in general, for audience development (Xu et al., 2015). As a new approach to promote tourism destinations, gaming provides tourism organisations, cultural institutions and destination marketers an opportunity to create informative and entertaining settings for successful brand awareness, interaction and communication.

This chapter aims at presenting the potential of digital gamification applied to the heritage sector through the presentation of two Italian case studies regarding two different digital games projects for mobile devices developed by Entertainment Game Apps, Ltd. (EGA), a serious game company whose mission is to create historical-archaeological videogames enhancing cultural heritage thanks to contents accurately conceived and designed in collaboration with researchers and experts in the specific fields.