A Metric Instrument for the Games with Cultural Heritage

Abstract

This paper reviews existing research within  two fields; game studies and cultural heritage, discovering inadequacies in current digital means of cultural heritage preservation. It is not unheard of that commercial games have been utilized to showcase them, but they tend to get glossed over in favor of serious games. Therefore, this study details two new tools that can further identify and assess the level of cultural heritage content in commercial games which will benefit not just their digital preservation, but also game developers and game design researchers. A unique conceptual framework was developed for analysing video game content specifically on four elements of cultural heritage and five elements of game components in both tangible and intangible forms. Exploratory tables of metrics were also created to quantify said content with the help of the existing Goal Question and Metric (GQM) table. They were then put to the test in two trials; Experiment I analysing 6 game franchises and Experiment II testing 28 games. Both demonstrated the presence of significant amounts of cultural heritage, much more than past works credited. Further research into this area, including adapting said tools for other game studies and commercial games usage will be possible and fruitful.