Serious Games For History & Heritage: Learning From Triumphs & Disasters

Date: 10:00 -11.00, Monday 2 October 2016

Venue: Aula Magna Silvio Trentin,Ca’ Foscari University, Palazzo Ca’ Dolfin, Venice, Italy.

The Games Industry. In 2016, will reputedly become a 100 billion USD industry with mobile games overtaking PC and game consoles for the first time. While the year before, in 2015 Minecraft became the second highest selling game of all time, at $54 billion USD (GameCentral for Metro.co.uk, 2015; Mojang, 2016). And the year before that, in 2014, Microsoft bought Minecraft for 2.5 billion US dollars. So surely it would make sense to appropriate game design to the purposes of the humanities, especially to history and heritage? In this talk I will examine the promise  of serious games and the related global industry for communicating aspects of the past, but I will also outline key issues that have hindered the employment of games for education and dissemination, and provide examples of serious games and virtual heritage projects that I have worked on over the last fifteen years.

References

1. http://venturebeat.com/2016/04/21/video-games-will-become-a-99-6b-industry-this-year-as-mobile-overtakes-consoles-and-pcs/
2. GameCentral for Metro.co.uk. (2015). Minecraft is now second best selling video game ever. Metro. Retrieved from Metro website: http://metro.co.uk/2014/06/26/minecraft-is-now-second-best-selling-video-game-ever-4776265/
3. Mojang. (2016). MINECRAFT STATISTICS. Retrieved from https://minecraft.net/stats
4. Champion, E. (2015) Critical Gaming: Interactive History And Virtual Heritage. Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities UK: Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Critical-Gaming-Interactive-History-and-Virtual-Heritage/Champion/p/book/9781472422903