Introduction to special issue on serious games for cultural heritage

Information and communication technologies provide powerful tools to build cultural heritage applications that facilitate a better understanding and appreciation of our present and past both by specialists and the general public and support the preservation, reproduction, representation, and fruition of artifacts, sites, and intangible goods in the form of virtual heritage. While multimedia archives and the digitization of artifacts and sites offer easy access to cultural content with no space or time constraints, game mechanics have the potential to engage the public in the fruition of such valuable resources. As a matter of fact, games with educational purposes, namely, Serious Games (SG), are becoming ever more popular. The main feature of a SG is an accurate combination of fun and instruction. The fun aspects favor engagement and can be determined by several factors such as storyboards, graphics, usability, interaction modalities, etc. The instructional aspects are the result of a proper pedagogical design, addressing in particular the organization of the learning content, the adaptation to the player’s profile and abilities, and the implementation of virtual tutor characters, or similar guidance/support systems. The goal of SGs in the cultural heritage domain is to actually spread cultural content to its maximum extent by exploiting the intrinsic features of this medium. SGs are suited to represent both the tangible and intangible heritage, as they can faithfully represent characters, environments, behaviors, and events. In this context, we called for papers reporting on case studies and perspective applications for tangible and intangible heritage, as well as providing insights about technological and methodological design and implementation issues. The overall goal is to sketch the landscape of the state-of-the-art in the field, investigating the actual benefits of SGs for the cultural heritage stakeholders and highlighting the challenges that need to be faced in order to really meet the requirements of the field. We have selected four articles that present a variety of contexts and solutions, addressing topics in areas such as artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, pedagogy, etc. J. Froschauer, D. Merkl, M. Arends, and D. Goldfarb describe ThIATRO, an art history SG, where the player acts as a museum curator who has to arrange an exhibition on several topics, collecting paintings from different museums. The article also suggests an inspiring methodology for evaluating the player learning gain, which is a key potential advantage of educational SGs. T. Coehen, L. Mostmans, and K. Naessens et al. report the case study of MuseUs, a pervasive mobile game, designed to enhance museum visits. The article describes requirements and provides new design solutions using common mobile devices to stimulate visitors to gain familiarity with the artworks on exhibit. C.-H. Huang and Y.-T. Huang describe Papaqwaka, which realistically simulates the life of the Atayal minority in Taiwan. Intangible cultural assets like tribal beliefs, customs, and ceremonies (e.g., the harvesting festival) are well integrated within the game objectives and mission levels. Finally, D. Mori, R. Berta, A. De Gloria, V. Fiore, and L. Magnani present an ad-hoc dialogue management system designed to support natural language interaction within SGs. The goal is to support