Serious Games for and as Cultural Heritage

Abstract

Contemporary methods of preserving cultural heritage rely highly on digitization and archiving as foundations for developing various virtual heritage applications. During last two decades, video games proved to be an interactive visual media able to incorporate virtual heritage in amazing and highly appealing ways. At the same time, each video game represents a valuable artifact reflecting technological, socioeconomic and historical issues of its creation. Therefore, video games are an essential and integrated part of modern cultural heritage and themselves need preservation efforts. The present paper discusses video games as a modern tool for presenting cultural heritage by integrating art, storytelling and digital technology. It focuses on both entertainment games and serious games for cultural heritage and provides some illustrative examples of such games with discussing their approach and novelty. On the other hand, video games are viewed as interactive artifacts that are a valuable part of the modern cultural heritage, which requires specific efforts for their preservation together with technological platforms and gaming environment.