Abstract
The use of world-simulation videogames for cultural heritage (CH) communication presents one of the greatest opportunities for engaging people with the safeguarding of cultural resources. However, not all simulation videogames have the capacity to transmit heritage values efficiently. This article reviews the use of serious and commercial videogames in CH to frame and properly identify characteristics for the selection and assessment of videogames in the context of cultural communication. Based on the analysis of the capacities of videogames to motivate, immerse and represent reality, the videogame Minecraft is identified as one of the optimal solutions to represent and promote engagement with the cultural built environment. As such, the authors assessed the capacity of the videogame Minecraft to be used as an efficient tool to communicate built heritage environments, considering identified criteria on immersion, motivation, and fidelity on simulation.
Highlights
The preservation of our cultural resources is a cornerstone in the safeguard of values that identify us as individuals and as social groups, while fostering a sense of belonging [1,2]
We explored the state-of-the-art of commercial simulation videogames in terms of their capacity for use in cultural heritage
Digital Technologies in cultural heritage (CH) have opened the door for new types of interactions, promoting an horizontal communication based on a dialogical model, and shortening the distance between the public and heritage assets, while lowering associated costs [14], reconfiguring the ways transmission and reception of information about heritage is achieved
Summary
The preservation of our cultural resources is a cornerstone in the safeguard of values that identify us as individuals and as social groups, while fostering a sense of belonging [1,2]. In practice, simulation videogames do not always fit our requests in terms of cultural heritage communication—often they do not accurately represent the built environment geometrically or semantically, they do not promote interaction and learning between the virtual world and gamers, they do not include cooperation mechanics between users (interplayer cooperation) towards a preservation goal, or they use the heritage sites merely as a stage. Without such capacities, we are left with inadequate knowledge that limits the scope and efficiency of heritage communication for the preservation of our cultural resources, namely built heritage. Based on these defined elements, to consider in the use of videogames in heritage communication, it is further examined the feasibility of Minecraft as an efficient simulation videogame for public communication purposes
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