DISSEMINATION OF DIGITAL HERITAGE THROUGH GAME-BASED LEARNING

Abstract

Serious game is conceptualized as a digital medium to familiarize users with less popular cultural topics, and significantly increase their interest level and engagement. Our case study to present and discuss this conceptualization is based on the ancient city of Teos. This paper discusses and presents the Digital Teos Project, an interdisciplinary research investigating and digitally animating the archaeological excavation area, including a static public setup in the excavation site, and augmented immersive revisit through VR devices and a mobile game application. Within the scope of this paper, our focus is on the Teos of Dionysos game, a mobile platform puzzle game. The game adopts a mythological narrative where four distinctive archaeological settings are designed to tell the story of the God Dionysos and to convey archaeological knowledge into playable interactions. The familiar conventions of a mobile platform game are utilized to convey the archaeological impressions and inspirations, allowing users to build an empathic understanding of ancient architecture. Besides the game convention of fun and curiosity, this game has a multidimensional objective of raising awareness on the archaeological site, historical background, and mythological stories with educational and instructive aspects. This pedagogical challenge is also an opportunity for new methods of creating and distributing accumulated/novel knowledge. We believe that game-based learning (GBL) can significantly enhance learning for a multitude of users from different educational backgrounds, and do so in diverse application domains.