Serious Games Classification for Digital Heritage

Gamification mechanics have been introduced in the philosophy of many modern user experience (UE) systems, including those used in museums, cultural sites and various other kinds of digital heritage (DH) applications. Gamified user experiences include on-site navigation, playful interaction with museum artefacts, virtual tours in ancient or modern times using virtual reality (VR) applications and more. Although the gamification principles have been well adopted in the DH domain, a common language used to describe and classify serious games (SG) and gamified applications in DH is still under development. The current work aims to discuss first the complementarity of existing classification approaches along their possible limitations and finally to propose a classification schema for SGs and game-like environments used in museum, galleries and other organizations of cultural and touristic interest. The proposed classification system is being presented with respect to the entertaining, informational and educational characteristics of the SGs under study.