Echoes of the Past: A Gamified Initiative for Audience Development of Cultural Heritage

In the last decade cultural institutions started to accept and recognize the increasingly important role of digital games in the media system, with many initiatives aimed at using the potential of games and playfulness for cultural heritage. Recent studies have been investigating the potential of gamification for civic engagement and raising awareness about cultural heritage, especially in relation to museums. Most of them, however, have been focusing on forms of cognitive engagement (i.e. learning or education). Few have reflected on the potential of gamification for affective connection toward the cultural heritage, for emotional engagement and new forms of audience development. The present study will examine the gamification initiatives developed by the collective TuoMuseo for the National Archaeologic Museum of Naples (MANN). Through a gamified initiative for cultural innovation, TuoMuseo and the MANN developed a digital game for mobile platforms, focusing on affective storytelling for audience development. The study will discuss the gamification design choices at the beginning of the project and how they affected the design of the game, focusing on theories and systems of interactive narratives for affective engagement. It will also analyze the final products in relation to the game metrics (downloads, ratings, nations covered, visitor conversion) collected since the launch of the initiative.