CFP: Virtual Reality Games, International Journal of Computer Games Technology

3D and game editors, augmented reality, Conference, game, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality

We are currently accepting submissions for our upcoming Special Issue titled “Virtual Reality Games,” which will be published in International Journal of Computer Games Technology in April 2017. The Special Issue is open to both original research articles and review articles, and the deadline for submission is November 25, 2016. You can find the Call for Papers at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijcgt/si/787829/cfp/.

International Journal of Computer Games Technology has been accepted for coverage in the Emerging Sources Citation Index, which is a new edition of the Web of Science that was launched in November 2015. This means that any article published in the journal will be indexed in the Web of Science at the time of publication. The journal is a peer-reviewed, open-access publication, which means that all published articles are made freely available online at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijcgt/ without a subscription and authors retain the copyright of their work.

Please read over the journal’s author guidelines at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijcgt/guidelines/ for more information on the journal’s policies and the submission process. Manuscripts should be submitted online to the Special Issue at http://mts.hindawi.com/submit/journals/ijcgt/vrga/.

Part 3 – Sources and Paradata

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3D Reconstruction in Archaeology

Before going into the bulk of how to model an archaeological site and why do it, I would like to spend a moment discussing the research that should be at the basis of the model itself. The fact that 3D Reconstruction is in its infancy brings many advantages and disadvantages to the table. On the one part, it is exciting to think there is so much we do not know as it means endless applications are there just waiting to be discovered. On the other hand however, there is a distinct lack of consistent methodology between projects and while some publication are clearly founded on extensive research (Dawson et al. 2011 amongst many others), others seem to be more loosely interpreted.

Fig.1 – The first steps in modelling, based on a plan of the site to scale.

This is one of the reasons behind ‘paradata’, a term that has recently…

View original post 978 more words

3D models: Advanced challenges, UCLA

3D and game editors, archaeology, Architecture, augmented reality, Conference, digital heritage, heritage, infrastructure, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality, visualisation, ,

Daisy-O’lice I. Williams, University of Oregon, presents to the insitute on day 1, 20 June 2016, UCLA.

I was very fortunate to be invited to the NEH-funded Advanced Challenges in Theory and Practice in 3D Modeling of Cultural Heritage Sites Institute, hosted at University of Massachusetts in 2015 and University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) 20-23 June 2016.
Some points I noticed reoccurring over the four days (and which I also added to the #neh3D twitter stream) were:

  1. People are still inventing the wheel when it comes to interaction in virtual environments. But you all knew that anyway.
  2. There is still a gap between educators and libraries who just want to get projects made, students engaged, and assets saved and those who talk about the big metadata / ontology questions. Nobody apart from Piotr used CIDOC-CRM for example and as he and I agreed, there needs to be more useful examples for archaeologists and architects.
  3. We still need an open source augmented reality platform: Content providers will try to lock you in to their own devices (http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/602484/google-building-its-own-smartphone-report-says/) and AR software is commercial, risky and when the AR company disappears so does your augmented reality project! To add insult to injury many AR software apps store you models offline or in a secure cloud so you cannot directly access them even though you made them.[I have just heard of ARGON, will have to investigate].
  4. There is no suitable 3D model+scholarly journal, the editor in chief of Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage, Bernard Frischer, admitted their 3D solution was not yet a fully usable solution plus Elsevier say they own the model. Actually, I think the ownership of the scholarly content is as much an issue as the lack of a suitable 3D viewer. Other journals that may offer similar issues but 3D model potential are http://intarch.ac.uk/ (“All our content is open access”) and ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH). However at the workshop one of the founders of SCALAR expressed interest in exploring 3D for SCALAR so hopefully something eventuates with this working party.

Many thanks to Alyson Gill (UMass) and Lisa Snyder (UCLA) for the opportunity to hear about US developments and the really cool CULTURAL HERITAGE MARKUP LANGUAGE CIDOC_CRM project that Piotr Kuroczyński (Herder Institute Germany) presented.

3D popups and scholarly books

archaeology, augmented reality, digital heritage, Presentation, publication, visualisation

Scholarly publishers want to produce quality longterm-durable books. I get that. But some of us young digital guerilla turks want to combine 3D and augmented technologies so 3D models can be shared and experimented (played) with.
And 3D models should be able to change over time, to link to different scholarly resources and models and links and linked resources should be able to be maintained and modified.

So how do we have stable print materials and changing, dynamic 3D models?

Easy peasy.
Consider the magic book. You put on these special see through glasses. Open a book. The camera recognises the augmented reality tracker (marker) on an open page and on your see-through glasses is projected a virtual 3D object. It can move, it can have animations. But typically the AR 3D object relates to a point on the page. Now I believe the original marker and related augmented 3D shape was stored on the magic book glasses/goggles.
But this won’t do for scholarly preservation.
Say you open a book, You hold your camera phone over a mark (tag, tracker) on the page of the book. On your phone lens appears a 3D playable object. But the phone does not natively hold the 3D virtual object.
Instead, the tracker/marker on the book induces the phone to search through an online library and retrieve the current 3D virtual object that links to that augmented reality tracker.marker/barcode on the book.
And downloads the most recent virtual model.
Why is this useful? The scholarly publisher only has to produce a normal book but with augmented reality markers (as an image).
The library or academic organisation supplies the links (perhaps the 3D virtual object has its own URI). The phone retrieves the most recent 3D AR object from a database (online) maintained by a library or scholarly community.
And as you open/read the book, augmented reality models dance/float/appear on your book (or iPad or Android tablet).
Perhaps the way you move the tablet/eReader changes the appearance or animation of the AR object (for example: lift it up and the model changes forwards in time,lower the tablet and earlier versions of the model appear)..
And theoretically the book will still be useful even 10 years from now if someone maintains the digital assets available at the URI that the book markers point to.

Still don’t understand? Perhaps I need a diagram!

NB below photos are not mine but from http://masters.donntu.org/2012/iii/akchurin/library/article9.htm in “Collaborative Augmented Reality” written by Mark Billinghurst, Hirokazu Kato, Communications of the ACM – How the virtual inspires the real, Volume 45 Issue 7, ACM New York, NY, USA – July 2002, p. 64–70.

CFPS for June 2016

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START*DUE*CONFERENCETHEMELOCATION
05-Dec-1610-Jul-16SG2016Games & Learning Alliance conference-GALA 2016Utrecht Netherlands
02-Nov-1615-Jul-16TEEMTechnological Ecosystems for Enhancing MulticulturalitySalamanca, Spain
14-Mar-1726-Aug-16CAA2017Digital Archaeologies Material Worlds (call for sessions)Atlanta Georgia
28-Aug-1701-Feb-17CIPA 2017Digital Workflows for Heritage ConservationCarleton Canada
06-Oct-16?Museum IdeasThe Future of Museums in the Era of Participatory CultureLondon UK
19-Dec-16?TAGTheoretical Archaeology Group – “Visualisation”Southampton UK
15-Feb-17?MuseumNextMelbourne Austtralia
03-Apr-17?www2017World Wide Web 2017Perth Australia
01-Aug-17?ISEA2017International Symposium on Electronic ArtManizales, Columbia
08-Aug-17?DH2017Digital Humanities 2017: AccessMontreal Canada
24-Jun-18?DH2018Digital Humanities 2018Mexico
02-Nov-17HASTAC17The Possible Worlds of Digital HumanitiesOrlando Florida

Inside a review of another’s book is the $64 question about digital history/virtual heritage

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Ingoglia, R. T. (2014). Playing with the past: Digital games and the simulation of history. Choice, 51(8), 1463. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/docview/1534099023?accountid=10382

Missing, however, is solid evidence that people who play these games have a deeper understanding of, or even a desire to probe deeper into, the imagined past (besides purchasing another video game).

Part 2 – 3D Reconstruction Literature

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Thanks for article and round up!

3D Reconstruction in Archaeology

In this section I would like to go through some projects I have been reading about that I think are very useful for understanding 3D Reconstruction in Archaeology. Before delving into the practicalities of the technology it is important to assess where the field is at right now.

An image from Champion et al. (2012) showing the reconstructed city of Palenque.

If you look through the literature, 3D Reconstruction is often scarcely documented and results are limited. The three major critique points I have encountered are to do with accuracy, lack of human element and on use. Here is a brief overview:

  • Accuracy: studies lack background information on how the model was achieved, and create the false idea that the reconstruction is absolutely certain, while often it is simply one of many interpretations.
  • Lack of human element: based on Thomas (2004a; 2004b) and Tilley (2004), 3D Reconstruction is seen as…

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upcoming overseas presentations for 2016

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Three conference presentations or panels arriving in next three months, Los Angeles, Beijing and Singapore:

  • Champion, E. (2016). Attending as panellist and critic, NEH Humanities Heritage 3D Visualization: Theory and Practice Summer Institute. 3-day symposium, 6-9 June 2016, University of California Los Angeles USA. National Endowment of the Humanities Grant. URL: http://advancedchallenges.com/
  • Champion, E. (2016). Invited speaker for The 4th International Symposium on Cultural Heritage Conservation and Digitization (CHCD 2016), 7-9 August 2016, Beijing, China. URL: http://www.chcd2016.org/eng/.
  • Champion, E. (2016). Invited/funded speaker for Presenting Cultural Specificity in Digital Collections, Workshop at the National University of Singapore 12-14 August 2016, Singapore.

New Digital Humanities series ARCHumanities Press

Announcements, Book, Conference, Digital Humanities, Open Access, publication, , ,

Dymphna Evans, new editor at www.arc-humanities.org (THE APPLIED RESEARCH CENTRE IN THE HUMANITIES AND PRESS LTD) informed me they are developing a digital humanities list on digital humanities.
I don’t know the press but I vouch for Dymphna as editor (she was the editor for Critical Gaming: Interactive History and Virtual Heritage, when she was at Ashgate before it became Routledge).
As well as publishing monographs and collections they are launching a series of short books (20-40,000 words).

Refer https://mip-archumanitiespress.org/series/impact/
The Arc Impact book offers a new route to publication at Arc Humanities Press connecting and looking beyond medieval studies to contemporary humanities research issues. The Arc Impact book offers a route to publish for scholars who have undertaken a specific research project, which does not lend itself to publishing as a traditional journal article or a long-form academic monograph. A more generous word count and faster turnaround time than a journal article allows for rapid publication of results, more scope for case study material and a more immediate impact on the field. The books are typically 20-40,000 words long and priced at an affordable level with open access options.

Philosophy of Place

Digital Humanities, , ,

Last week at the East-West Centre University of Hawaii was the Philosophers’ Place conference

I have not been to a Philosophy conference for around 25 years but it was a warm and inviting conference in a magnificient I. M. Pei designed venue with its own Japanese garden.

To be honest, a big reason to go was to hear Edward Casey speak. I learnt a great deal about Confucius and to lesser extent Laozi or Lao Tsu (not so much about place) but one question from CHENG Chung-ying (University of Hawai’i) really got me thinking: what exactly is virtuality?

Another big question or two lying in wait is what is philosophy? Do traditional non-western cultures have philosophy. Obviously to the Eastern philosophers there the answer is yes but how each saw as fundamental elements of philosophy was left unsaid.

A third issue, especially for ‘rationalist’ and western-trained philosophers was whether they should spend any time examining mythical beliefs, that was an interesting question at one panel I attended.

As to place and the design of place? I met a few designers and one architect interested in the question, but the majority of attendees seemed happy to just talk about it as if place was a given. Oh well.

Anyway, I recall a visualisation professor telling me he hated humanities conferences because they read full papers! Remembering this, I had a sudden dreadful suspicion I had to also write and read from a full paper when the panel chair emailed and suggested we share our papers first. Now I, being the idiot that I am, thought I had to write and read from a paper as well as deliver slides. I won’t bore you with the slides, but I wrote and sent a 6000 word paper, trying to explain why I was there. And that was to get feedback on hermeneutic environments and phenomenology for the evaluation of virtual places.

So that is what the draft paper circles around. I believe there will be proceedings so I may be asked to complete the paper. But someone may be interested in the draft paper and give me feedback in the meantime! Oh and the other speakers did not write or speak from or distribute written speeches. So I just talked to my slides.. 🙂

So here is the draft paper

 

 

 

 

3DH talk: notes from Geoffrey Rockwell

Digital Humanities, Virtual Reality, visualisation, , ,

After a wonderful conference in April at Leiden: Interactive Pasts   (and if you get the chance I recommend going to the next one), the very next day I gave a short presentation at the University of Hamburg for the first lecture of their new research group, 3DH:

3DH is a 3-year pilot project for the preparation of a larger research co-operation in a second phase. 3DH focuses on the dynamic visualization and exploration of Humanities data from a DH perspective, and with particular emphasis on 3D-visualizations. The major goals for the pilot phase are (a) to establish a methodological and theoretical orientation as well as to develop prototypes of visualization tools as demonstrators, and to (b) prepare and submit a funding appliaction for phase 2.

You can see notes of my talk, as recorded by Geoffrey Rockwell on their threedh blog here.
Mark Grimshaw gave a talk on Rethinking Sound, a few weeks later, notes for his talk are here. (Mark Grimshaw was editor of The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality, for which i wrote a History and Cultuarl Heritage in VE chapter).

NB Johanna Drucker, like Geoffrey, is another in-residence scholar for the project.

 

Remote Education and indigenous games

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I co-supervised an honours student, Susannah Emery, who was funded by the NINTI One project. She used the Sims as machinima to show how local indigenous communities could develop their own cultural heritage-influenced games. She received a first class honours and was a Winnovation finalist.

I am very proud to announce that I have received the award of First Class Honours from Curtin University for my honours thesis entitled ‘We are Stronger Together/Nganana Tjungurringkula Nintirrintjakunana: a collaborative approach to telling Anangu stories through video games.’

Well done Susannah! As part of her research helped form an article on indigenous cultural heritage games. The article, for playwright, is called

You’re never alone in Never Alone: game mechanics as cultural metaphor

Then about a month ago i was invited to the final report/findings of the Remote Education Systems/NINTI ONE Project.

The Remote Education Systems project aims to find out how remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities can get the best benefit from the teaching and learning happening in and out of schools. It is doing this by engaging with members of communities, schools, government agencies and other end users who want to find ways of improving outcomes for students in remote Australia.

My takeaway on the most important element for children’s’ learning to be successful was parental buy in- not surprising but good to see it researched. Also, local staff are an important factor, class attendance is related to income, qualifications do not necessarily reveal the best teacher, successful projects incorporate the assets of students, families and communities, and the presenter said “ownership will be a priority.”

I am looking forward to the report going on the website.

Proceedings of the Digital Humanities Congress 2014 NOW online

3D and game editors, digital heritage, Digital Humanities, Proceedings, virtual heritage, visualisation, , , , , ,

The Proceedings of 2014 are now live!! Finally!!

http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/openbook/book/dhc2014

My article:Ludic Literature: Evaluating Skyrim for Humanities Modding
Related slides of presentation are on slideshare.net

This article evaluates the practical limitations and dramatic possibilities of modding (which means modifying) the commercial role-playing game Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for the visualization and exploration of literature. The latest version of a 20 year-old game franchise, Skyrim has inspired various writings and musings on its relation to Digital Humanities. Digital Humanities has moved to a more immersive, participative, tool-making medium, a recent report on digital archives has proposed digital tools integrate with history curricula (Sampo, 2014) and that “digital history may narrow the gap between academic and popular history”. Can games also be used to promote traditional literary mediums as well as experiential and immersive archives?

EDIT: They have the wrong version uploaded on the Sheffield website. I will add the correct version here:

This is an open access publication with a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. As such, PDF versions can be deposited in institutional repositories. Our specific copyright statement is as follows:
“Copyright of all content is retained by the individual authors who are permitted to re-publish their work elsewhere. Likewise, other sites and media are permitted to re-use the works of authors on condition that they include a citation that references the content’s original publication by HRI OpenBook and an accurate attribution of the author’s IP and copyright.”
Finally, there is a new Call for Papers out for DHC2016, available here: http://hridigital.shef.ac.uk/dhc2016

Cultural Presence (a dangerous answer to an unclear question)

archaeology, virtual heritage, ,

Yes I know I wrote about this topic (although not in my latest book in any great detail) but it the term isn’t my ultimatum to archaeology and heritage studies: use and measure cultural presence or else!

To start with, I said in my PhD thesis and in the related book Playing With The Past (pp12-14), that it was distinct from Social Presence:

“Cultural Presence versus Social Presence..The first problem is what elements of a cultural place are missing from virtual environments. Merely creating a reconstruction of a cultural site does not mean that one is creating a platform for understanding and transmitting locally specific cultural knowledge. We need to understand what distinguishes a cultural site from another site; we need to understand the features of place as a site of cultural learning.”

I also wrote:

“The intended audience that could most benefit from the theoretical part of this research are those who either communicate historical perceptions via digital media, or those who wish for more prescriptive (rather than descriptive) notions of ‘place’ and ‘cultural presence’. The case study of Palenque that I will mention may also interest those designers interested in improving engagement via interactive elements”

Chapters 2 and 3 then try to explain space versus place in a virtual heritage project and cultural presence as being distinct from social presence.

Now, 5-10 years later, I think I will have to retrace and bury some of the assertions and answer some of the questions that refuse to die because of this concept.

In a nutshell,

  • My term cultural presence was to attempt to wrestle away from social presence key terms and meanings that could be evaluated for historians and social scientists.
  • The term cultural presence was an umbrella concept (and my evaluations suggested it was most effective to be evaluated via a series of questions and tasks, there was no one evaluation method for it).
  • Cultural presence is of particular interest and use where we have clear ideas (and cultural traces and signs etc) of a culture that passed away. It is much more suitable for recent cultures with historic material and intangible heritage than it is for situations where we only have traces of settlement but without a rich cultural tapestry for interpretation. The Mayan temple-city of Palenque, Mexico has left us plenty of interesting if sometimes conflicting cultural clues, Neolithic cities, not so much.
  • In the last year (and even last week) I still meet archaeologists and curators who have not seen a need to distinguish between culture and society. I gave some arguments for why I do this in the article Defining Cultural Agents for Virtual Heritage Environments but I need to revisit this issue and deal with once and for all.

Increasing the Life & Usage of Virtual Heritage Models

Conference, digital heritage, virtual heritage, , , ,

Following on rather nicely from my last blog, the below abstract was accepted yesterday so hopefully will be in Beijing at Tsinghua University 7-10 August (then invited to NUS, Singapore 12-14 August).

Initial abstract for the 4th International Symposium on Cultural Heritage Conservation and Digitization (CHCD 2016), entitled “Re-vive: Heritage Coming Back to Life”.

TITLE: Increasing the Life and Usage of Virtual Heritage Models

KEY WORDS: Virtual heritage, infrastructure, models, mechanics, interaction, preservation, evaluation, simulations, digital scholarly ecosystem.

ABSTRACT:

For many years academics have argued that a major issue in the development of high quality and effective virtual heritage projects has been a corresponding lack of evaluation methods (Economou and Pujol, 2008, Champion, 2006, Tost and Economou, 2009, Karoulis et al., 2006, Tan and Rahaman, 2009). Despite two decades of research and advancing technological sophistication, and the widespread proliferation of virtual heritage conferences, the same problems are still evident.

While the issue of meaningful evaluation is no doubt a serious problem, this paper proposes that a more fundamental issue has been with the design and circulation of the digital models themselves. The problem is at least sixfold. Firstly, digital heritage models are typically frozen products, they do not easily scale, they aren’t typically component-based, they are difficult to add to and otherwise edit. There is a problem of standards (of authenticity, software and hardware standards, operating guidelines, and adherence to charters that dictate best practice in virtual heritage). Digital heritage model formats are not standardised nor created specifically for preservation (let alone separate their archival function from presentation purposes). Digital heritage models are typically models rather than simulations, they are not predicative tools, they don’t create, convey or question hypothetical. The interaction design patterns (and mechanics) are not standardised, and not preserved, let alone separated from the 2D and 3D media assets. Finally, these projects typically do not link to digital scholarly resources (publications, image databases, online maps and so forth).

I propose that virtual heritage community needs to debate and adopt a scholarly ecology, an overall system and community that provide feedback, management and impact for virtual heritage research. This requires political coordination and social organisation beyond the scope of this paper but I will also review some more technical proposals that may help address the above problems.

For theme C: Cultural heritage exhibition and interpretation of digital technology: virtual reality, augmented reality, digital museum

References

CHAMPION, E. M. 2006. Evaluating Cultural Learning in Virtual Environments. PhD, University of Melbourne.

ECONOMOU, M. & PUJOL, L. 2008. Educational tool or expensive toy? Evaluating VR evaluation and its relevance for virtual heritage. New Heritage: New Media and Cultural Heritage, London, Routledge, 242-260.

KAROULIS, A., SYLAIOU, S. & WHITE, M. 2006. Usability evaluation of a virtual museum interface. Informatica, 17, 363-380.

TAN, B.-K. & RAHAMAN, H. 2009. Virtual heritage: Reality and criticism. Tidafi, T. et Dorta, T., éditeurs: Joining Languages, Cultures and Visions: CAAD Futures, 130.

TOST, L. P. & ECONOMOU, M. 2009. Worth a thousand words? The usefulness of immersive virtual reality for learning in cultural heritage settings. International Journal of Architectural Computing, 7, 157-176.

Who is this 3D heritage all for?

3D and game editors, Digital Humanities, virtual heritage,

Lorna Richardson on twitter linked to the sketchfab blog with this provocative header.

For the life of me I don’t recall this discussion at Digital Heritage, VSMM, VAST or any of the other virtual heritage conferences I have attended and it reminds me of other problems that someone needs to summarise and dispel:

  • Preservation friendly tools and archives of 3D models: where are they, what are they, and how are they effectively used?
  • Clear and preferably verifiable reasons why 3D visualisations help the spread, democratization and understanding of the heritage objects, the intangible value and the research contribution that led to the 3D digitization
  • Non-jargon explanation of the use of 3D models to 2D humanities types (yes there is an issue).

Not likely to become a book, but perhaps a book chapter somewhere?

CFP Gala 2016, 5-7 December Utrecht

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http://conf.seriousgamessociety.org/2016/

Games and Learning Alliance conference

Papers (10 pages) submission deadline: July 10, 2016
Notification date for Papers: September 11, 2016
Camera Ready Papers and Registration Due: October 16th 2016
Conference: 5-7 December, 2016, Utrecht, the Netherlands

The Games and Learning Alliance conference (GALA 2016) is an international conference dedicated to the science and application of serious games.

The conference aims at bringing together researchers, developers, practitioners and stakeholders. The goal is to share the state of the art of research and market, analysing the most significant trends and discussing visions on the future of serious games.

The conference also includes an exhibition, where developers can showcase their latest products.

The GALA Conference 2016 Proceedings will be published on Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) and the best papers in a special issue of the Int.l Journal of Serious Games, as per the previous years.

Two new full papers added

Academic, publication, virtual heritage, , , , ,

I have been given permission to upload these two journal articles to my website. Click the paper title to go to the PDF in question:

Champion, E. (2015). Defining Cultural Agents for Virtual Heritage Environments. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments-Special Issue on “Immersive and Living Virtual Heritage: Agents and Enhanced Environments,” Summer 2015, Vol. 24, No. 3: pp. 179–186. MIT Press. URL: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/pres/24/3

Champion, E. (2015). Entertaining The Similarities And Distinctions Between Serious Games and Virtual Heritage Projects. Special Issue in the Journal of Entertainment Computing on the theme of Entertainment in Serious Games. Volume 14, May 2016, Pages 67–74. Elsevier. Online.

 

A Good Publisher For A Virtual Heritage +3D Open Access Journal

3D and game editors, publication, virtual heritage, , , ,

If I gathered academic colleagues and other partners to produce an Open Access Virtual Heritage/Digital Place Journal with dynamically linked 3D models viewable online or as downloads for computers or Head Mounted Display formats like WebVR perhaps) who would be a good open access publisher?

issues about history and heritage games

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Right now it really seems to me self-evident that our field is missing focused dialogue.
It would have saved me quite some time as a PhD student and designer (and evaluator) to find an edited book where authors discuss a single problem in creating history and heritage inside a game or game-like experience.

On reading https://memetechnology.org/2016/02/12/the-problems-with-game-based-history/ it seems to me a major problem is agency. Matthew Tyler-Jones is I think correct to say that a magical component of games is that it is really about us (the player). I think I am also right in saying this is a problem with history-based games (the historical world is not just about you, an individual). And it is also a problem with virtual worlds that also wish to be experienced as games.

So agency is one chapter issue.
Another is mechanics.
A third might be aesthetics: designers always want reconstructions to be immersive, artistically impressive etc. A fourth might be about missing or uncertain knowledge.
A fifth might be about extensibility and preservation.
A sixth might be about personalisation.
A seventh might revolve around: what are we really learning here…