Playing with the cultural pilgrimage to stimulate tourism: the xFORMAL project on cultural heritage and informal learning.

Abstract

The focus on culture as an engine of sustainable development has favoured its gradual acquisition by institutions engaged in the protection and promotion of heritage as an enabling and systemic factor capable of connecting innovation, education, research, and citizen engagement in a single chain. Knowledge of the landscape that combines works of nature and humankind and its bio-cultural diversity makes it possible to identify innovative informal education and new tourist itineraries where the real experience is presented as a cultural pilgrimage. The European project of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Programme RISE project, xFORMAL, in which the authors collaborate, was born to create an informal way of accessing the cultural heritage of one's territory, revealing its past, history, and the civilisations that preceded us. After two years of closure due to the pandemic, this project reintroduced an authentic experience through gamification, a contact with landscapes, museums, and archaeological sites with physical, social, and cultural dimensions of their environments across space and over time. On this basis, the article presents the case study and experimental plan behind the construction of the game xFORMAL as an informal learning case.