Gaming Approach for Cultural Heritage Knowledge and Dissemination

Dear Colleagues,

Serious games are games with a purpose beyond entertainment and are widely acknowledged as fruitful tools for learning and developing skills across multiple domains, including educational enhancement. In the last few years, the world of serious games has widely increased. The use of these types of games can aid in classrooms to not only help the students learn concepts but also to improve their motivation to do so. However, designing games necessitates very specialized personnel and the process can often be costly and slow. The adaptions of the design to the implantation phase is also difficult and the process needs more focus. The challenge of this Special Issue is to collect the most recently researches aimed at the optimization of the serious games within the confines of Cultural Heritage and its preservation, that can be made available on any platform with a friendly user interface and free to download from the web. Thanks to the photo collection archives, it could be possible to reconstruct contexts of cultural heritage that no longer exist. To achieve this great goal, it is necessary to overcome the limits and problems due to the virtual cultural heritage environment starting from 3D acquisition and finishing with image stability. Historical validation of sources and content is also considered, as well as the used of Virtual and Augmented Reality to increase the interest in possible players.

 (1) a. the focus of the special issue is the overcome the problems linked to the serious game to become popular and not boring game especially for the serious games within cultural heritage enivronment used by the institutions; b. the scope is the computer graphic and computer vision applied to the serious video games; c. the purpose of the special issue is to define a pipeline to overcome the limits of the serious games (when the environment is based on the virtual reconstruction of the CH) that can be useful to the video games developer.

(2) Nowadays, there are many serious games. Amongst them, some have changed the world fighting for humanity, politics, environmental causes and more [1]. Serious games (SG) are consistently featured in the news. Computer games are an effective way to retaining interest of players (learners) by attracting their attention for much more time than traditional approaches [2]. Videogames creating both tangible and intangible cultural artefacts and Cultural Heritage in highly interactive and dynamic ways should provide a powerful and increasing appeal and engagement for all users by possessing an integrated form of fun and play. Nevertheless, sometimes, in games this doesn’t happen. The games addressed to the training/educational have more an application/app aspect and feel than an adventure game making them less appealing to users. This means that these games are not widely used among younger people and this represents a challenge for the developer [3]. Moreover, after Covid -19, the pandemic themed has been introduced inside the video games. Interactivity, multi-player enviroments, Virtual and Augmented reality are some of the technical tools that can be used to increase the players involvement. They however should be supported by appropriate story-telling, psychological engagement, and audio-visual quality of the virtual Cultural Heritage 3Dmodel. Moreover, the border between sources fidelity and gamification needs to be further investigated.

References

1. Janarthanan, V. (2012). Serious video games: games for education and health. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Information Technology, ITNG, pp. 875–878.
2. Laamarti, F., Mohamad, E., & El Saddik A. (2014). An Overview of Serious Games. In International Journal of Computer Games Technology, ID 358152, pp. 15
3. https://www.limelight.com/resources/white-paper/state-of-online-gaming-2020/

Prof. Laura Inzerillo
Prof. Marco Gribaudo
Prof. Francesco Di Paola
Guest Editors

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• Video Games
• Cultural Heritage
• Virtual Reality
• 3D Survey
• 3D Modeling
• Computer Science
• Computer Graphics
• Computer Vision