Locative Games for Cultural Heritage

Locative Games are in the process of entering the mainstream, in cultural heritage they can improve access by offering alternative experiences and widening audiences, they can aid in preservation by managing footfall and focusing digital assets, and they can increase engagement and allow visitors to see their heritage in new ways.

However, existing design approaches and infrastructures for locative heritage are bespoke and poorly integrated with existing visitor structures.

There is also a lack of guidelines on what is ethically desirable in these digitally mediated spaces, and how designers might mitigate against unintended consequences or abuses.

This is a barrier to the widespread adoption of locative heritage applications and means that more complex experiences are currently not sustainable in the wider sector.

LoGaCulture will change this by bringing together the leaders in digital locative games, in collaboration with some of Europe’s most significant cultural institutions, to enable a new generation of locative cultural heritage games through proposals for design guidance, validated ethical frameworks, and an open, extensible, and reusable set of technologies.

Through a set of five interlinked case studies across four countries the project will: gather evidence from the heritage design space for interactivity, narratives, and play; look at how augmented reality and soundscapes can affect visitors’ immersion; explore the place of locative heritage in the wider visitor journey through transmedia and social visiting; and explore how the barrier to authoring and deploying such systems might be lowered.

The goal is to create a step change in knowledge in how to design, deploy, and maintain locative heritage games, and lay the groundwork for their mass adoption by cultural institutions by allowing them to treat locative experiences that offer new forms of access and engagement as an integrated part of their existing cultural heritage work.