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.

The paper presents a conceptual framework and a metric instrument for assisting design and evaluating serious games for dementia family carers as the first step towards designing a game specifically designed to cater for their needs. The paper starts with a literature survey on dementia, dementia family carers and existing games for health issues. From this survey, three components of the carers’ needs (health, education and social), three platforms (social marketing, social media and games) and six game contents (game play, avatar portrayal, game world graphics, sound / music and storyline) were identified, and engagement as the metric of interaction was also identified. With these, a conceptual framework was constructed, identifying the relationship amongst these elements. Based on these, the metric instrument is devised using the Goal Question Metric (GQM) method. An exploratory experiment was conducted with six health-related games and five game professionals to assess the effectiveness of the instrument. It is found that the instrument can identify the successfulness of the games in terms of satisfying the three categories of needs of the carer, i.e., health, education and social, though it was suggested that a further experiment with more participants and focusing on one game would be needed to further verify the effectiveness of the instrument.