Classification of Gameplay Interaction in Digital Cultural Heritage

Key insights

7 takeaways

01
The paper argues digital cultural heritage games should offer performative agency in intangible heritage such as rituals and skills, rather than only visual reconstructions of sites.
02
Its core contribution is a three-part classification of gameplay interaction with the historical record: documented, speculative, and repurposed, letting designers and curators deliberately weigh authenticity against engagement.
03
In a workshop of 18 participants aged 13 to 35 (only two had visited the site), four of six location-based game designs cloned Escape the Room and one reskinned Ingress and Pokémon Go, showing a strong pull toward familiar genre mechanics over historically grounded ones.
04
The authors interpret this tendency as an "etic" perspective, where outsiders impose familiar frameworks on an unfamiliar culture, which they argue weakens the cultural presence of the site.
05
The Neolithic Hal-Saflieni Hypogeum in Malta illustrates the classification: its undocumented rituals invite speculative player-driven play, while physical evidence such as pock-marks, bone and stone tools, and a 1990s geological study supports a fact-based re-enactment of its excavation.
06
Repurposing cultural spaces risks breaking immersion for visitors who already know them well, and heritage games like Assassin's Creed and the lost-rules Senet board game illustrate the problem of liberties taken with historical behaviour.
07
The core conclusion is that designers should choose mechanics suited to a specific cultural space rather than reskinning popular formats, and should collaborate more closely with the digital heritage community.

Summary

Virtual reality and location-based games offer a promising route for digital cultural heritage, but this document argues that such experiences should move beyond visual reconstruction of sites and instead offer players performative agency in intangible heritage such as rituals and skills. Its central contribution is a classification of gameplay interaction into three categories: documented, speculative, and repurposed. Each category reflects a different relationship between the game and the historical record, allowing designers and curators to weigh authenticity against engagement in a deliberate way.

The analysis centres on the Neolithic Hal-Saflieni Hypogeum in Malta, a site whose undocumented rituals give designers room for speculative, player-driven play, while its physical evidence, including pock-marks, bone and stone tools, and a 1990s geological study, supports a re-enactment of its excavation grounded in fact. A workshop of 18 participants aged 13 to 35, only two of whom had visited the site, produced six location-based game designs. Four were clones of Escape the Room and one reskinned Ingress and Pokémon Go, revealing a strong pull toward familiar genre mechanics over historically grounded ones.

The authors interpret this tendency as an "etic" rather than "emic" perspective, in which outsiders impose familiar frameworks on an unfamiliar culture instead of engaging with its own practices, and they argue that this weakens the cultural presence of the site. Repurposing cultural spaces also risks breaking immersion for visitors who already know them well. Parallel concerns arise in existing heritage games such as Assassin's Creed, which often take liberties with historical behaviour, and in the Senet board game, whose lost rules leave only a "ludic corpse."

The document's core conclusion is that designers should select mechanics suited to a specific cultural space rather than simply reskinning popular game formats. It calls for closer collaboration between game designers and the digital heritage community so that the tension between curatorial preservation and the impermanent, playful nature of games can be resolved in favour of meaningful cultural engagement.