Mobile Serious Game for Enhancing User Experience in Museum

Abstract

Mobile technology offers new opportunities to enhance the visitor experience in museums. Mobile serious games can support experiential learning with authentic exhibits in an authentic museum environment based on the contextual learning model with the interaction between the personal, socio-cultural, and physical context. In developing the game, we wondered whether it could appropriately motivate and engage different age groups in the museum experience with its challenges of different difficulty levels; whether a mobile game could, through its challenges interacting with the museum environment, prevent “head-down” behavior; and whether museum exhibits could be better recalled by visitors participating in a tour with a mobile game than in two other traditional tours (i.e., guided tours, tours with museum brochures). The results of the study showed that a tour with a mobile serious game with challenges of different difficulty levels is suitable for visitors of two target groups (i.e., families and students). Since each challenge encourages interaction with the museum environment, it could largely prevent “head-down” behavior. The results also show that a tour with appropriately planned multisensory challenges motivates visitors to actively engage with the museum environment, resulting in slightly better recall of exhibits compared to other tour types. The results of this study can help bring museums and the history they represent closer to digital generations, 1 and popularize modern informal learning methods associated with incidental and experiential lifelong learning that can take place anytime, anywhere, and help achieve higher taxonomic knowledge levels.