I’m speaking at the Attingham 2016 Conference, organised by the University of Nottingham. It clashes with the recently announced referendum, so its a postal ballot for me!

Anyway, I thought I might share my abstract:

Is there a place in heritage spaces for the gamification of adult learning?

 

Today’s fifty year olds were at school in 1980’s, when the ZX80, then the ZX81, the Spectrum, the BBC micro, and host of other cheap and accessible computing devices popularised digital gaming. How do the expectations of this first “Gamer Generation” differ from the adult learners that cultural heritage sites have welcomed in the past?

Gamification (Hamari et al., 2014, Kapp, 2012, Marczewski), the application of game mechanics in non-game contexts, has been a feature of learning since before the word was coined in 2002. Non-digital games have been used in the classroom and in less formal environments, for many years, to encourage people to learn about their world. Generally though, such games have been aimed at non-adult audiences. The term gamification has come to prominence in recent years mostly in reference to digital games, and an adult audience.

Heritage organisations have been using digital game technology to interpret cultural heritage since at least 1996, but it’s only since the creation of mobile digital devices that museums and other heritage sites have tried to harness game technology on-site to help interpret their stories (Fosh et al., 2015, Ioannidis et al., 2014, Roussou et al., 2013, Salomonsson, 2015, Treharne et al., 2013).

Digital games, especially immersive story-games, and cultural heritage sites share a multimodality (Champion, 2015, Roppola, 2013) that suggests games may work very well for adult learning in heritage spaces. However, heritage sites that have invested in projects involving gamification have often been disappointed in the numbers of visitors participating in such efforts.

This paper will chart the brief history of digital games in heritage learning, and share research into gamers’ attitudes to play in cultural heritage spaces. Exploring the opportunities and challenges that game mechanics offer heritage spaces, I will argue that some elements could be used to make cultural heritage sites more responsive environments, without turning adult learning into a game.

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So, that’s the abstract, I better get on with the paper. I might need to find some more up-to-date texts as well, as some of these come from when I first started my studies. If anybody has published anything recently that touches on the above, give me a shout.

 

Hmm, given I’ve left citations in the text above I better do the decent thing and include the references:

CHAMPION, E. 2015. Critical Gaming: Interactive History and Virtual Heritage, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

FOSH, L., LORENZ, K., BENFORD, S. & KOLEVA, B. 2015. Personal and social? Designing personalised experiences for groups in museums. 19th Annual Museums and the Web Conference (MW2015). Chicago, IL.

HAMARI, J., KOIVISTO, J. & SARSA, H. Does Gamification Work? — A Literature Review of Empirical Studies on Gamification.  System Sciences (HICSS), 2014 47th Hawaii International Conference on, 6-9 Jan. 2014 2014. 3025-3034.

IOANNIDIS, Y., BALET, O. & PANDERMALIS, D. 2014. Tell me a story: augmented reality technology in museums. The Guardian, April 4.

KAPP, K. M. 2012. The gamification of learning and instruction: game-based methods and strategies for training and education, John Wiley & Sons.

MARCZEWSKI, A. Gamification: A Simple Introduction and a Bit More, (self-published on Amazon Digital Services, 2013). Kindle edition, Loc, 1405.

ROPPOLA, T. 2013. Designing for the museum visitor experience, Routledge.

ROUSSOU, M., VAUANOU, M., KATIFORI, A., RENNICK-EGGLESTONE, S. & PUJOL, L. 2013. A Life of Their Own: Museum Visitor Personas Penetrating the Design Lifecycle of a Mobile Experience. CHI 2013 Extended Abstracts. Paris: ACM.

SALOMONSSON, L. 2015. Leveling-Up With Cultural Heritage: Aspects from Gamification and Alternate Reality Games.

TREHARNE, H. E., TROMANS, N., SCARLES, C., SCOTT, M., CASEY, M. C. & CULNANE, C. 2013. Transforming the Visitor Experience with Augmented Reality.