The advances of computer games have shown their potentials for developing edutainment content and services. Current cultural heritages often make use of games in order to complement existing presentations, to create a memorable exhibition. It offers opportunities to reorganize and conceptualize historical, cultural and technological information or knowledge about the exhibits. To demonstrate the benefits of serious games in terms of facilitating the learning activities, we designed a video game about the Heerlen Roman bathhouse heritage. This paper explains the design considerations of this Roman bathhouse game, with a particular focus on the link between game play and learning. In addition, we have carried out a user study to observe and measure the learning effects of this game. Both quantitative and qualitative data are collected to analyze the performance of the learners. The results have shown that this game indeed can help learners understand the important historical facts and the related knowledge of the heritage being studied. Further directions include converting the first-person game into a third-person or multiple players’ game.

Date Published: 4 March 2015
PDF: 5 pages
Proc. SPIE 9443, Sixth International Conference on Graphic and Image Processing (ICGIP 2014), 944336 (4 March 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2178838

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9443:
Sixth International Conference on Graphic and Image Processing (ICGIP 2014)
Yulin Wang; Xudong Jiang; David Zhang, Editor(s)