In recent years, increasing academic attention has been focused on the educational potential of video games. Serious games for heritage applications have received much interest, and many examples are well documented in the literature. Many frameworks and methodologies have been proposed for how to design serious games, yet there is a lack of guidance for how to embed heritage information in the mechanics and content of these games. There are also many examples of commercial (non-serious) games that contain heritage content, and there is interest in how these games can be used in educational contexts. However, these games are designed primarily for entertainment purposes, without pedagogical foundations and with limited historical accuracy. There is currently a lack of a rigorous, scientific approach to support the critical analysis of the content of these games and to inform their use within learning settings. In this paper, we propose that the above issues are related by a lack of definitions of heritage content in the video game medium. We describe a model that defines how historical information can be presented in a video game at a content level and demonstrate how it can be applied to the analysis of the content in a commercial historical game. Finally, we propose a novel methodology based on activity theory to guide the design of serious games, based on pre-defined heritage instructional content. The findings are relevant both to educators who wish to use heritage video games, and to designers of serious games for heritage.

A novel collaborative artefact reconstruction environment design is presented that is informed by experimental task observation and participatory design. The motivation for the design was to enable collaborative human and computer effort in the reconstruction of fragmented cuneiform tablets: millennia-old clay tablets used for written communication in early human civilisation. Thousands of joining cuneiform tablet fragments are distributed within and between worldwide collections. The reconstruction of the tablets poses a complex 3D jigsaw puzzle with no physically tractable solution.In reconstruction experiments, participants collaborated synchronously and asynchronously on virtual and physical reconstruction tasks. Results are presented that demonstrate the difficulties experienced by human reconstructors in virtual tasks compared to physical tasks. Unlike computer counterparts, humans have difficulty identifying joins in virtual environments but, unlike computers, humans are averse to making incorrect joins. A successful reconstruction environment would marry the opposing strengths and weaknesses of humans and computers, and provide tools to support the communications and interactions of successful physical performance, in the virtual setting.The paper presents a taxonomy of the communications and interactions observed in successful physical and synchronous collaborative reconstruction tasks. Tools for the support of these communications and interactions were successfully incorporated in the "i3D" virtual environment design presented.

The interaction authors are collaborators of The Virtual Cuneiform Tablet Reconstruction (VCTR) Project-an international collaboration inspired by the ambition to support virtual access to cuneiform artefacts and to reconstruct cuneiform tablets by joining virtual fragments together. The project aims to support and resource low-cost and easy-to-use 3D acquisition systems, advance automated virtual reconstruction algorithms, evolve a collaborative reconstruction environment and facilitate interactive on-line 3D archiving. The author disciplines include Computer Science, Electronic Engineering and Assyriology.

No abstract

Virtual environments are an important aspect of serious games for heritage. However navigable three-dimensional (3D) environments can be costly and resource-intensive to create and for users to run. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach using “constrained virtual environments”, which present an environment through a series of reduced fidelity two-dimensional (2D) scenes without exhaustive detail. We describe the development of a constrained virtual environment to replicate a 3D environment from a serious game concerning ancient Mesopotamian history. An exploratory experiment discovered that participants experienced a similar sense of presence in the constrained environment to that of the 3D environment and rated the two games to be of similar quality. Participants were equally likely to pursue further information on the subject matter afterwards and collected more information tokens from within the constrained environment. A subsequent interview with a museum expert explored opportunities for such games to be implemented in museum displays, and based on the experiences and issues encountered, a preliminary set of guidelines was compiled for implementing future constrained virtual environments within serious games for heritage.