CFP: Serious Games for Cultural Heritage - Special Issue of the ACM Journal of Computing and Cultural Heritage

While multimedia archives offer easy access of cultural content, it is through game mechanics that a much larger public could be motivated to explore such impressive resources. For this reason, games with educational purposes are becoming more and more popular. The goal of this special Issue is to collect papers on case studies, perspective applications, technological and methodological issues related to serious games for Cultural Heritage to define the best practices and highlight both the challenges and benefits of serious games in the Cultural Heritage sector.

Due June 15, 2012.

http://jocch.acm.org/seriousgames

ICTs provide powerful tools to build Cultural Heritage applications enabling a better understanding and appreciation of our present and past both by specialists and the general public, supporting the preservation, reproduction, representation and fruition of artifacts, sites and intangible goods in the form of Virtual Heritage.

While multimedia archives and the digitization of artefacts and sites offer easy access of cultural content to people regardless of space and time constraints, it is through game mechanics that a much larger public could be motivated to explore such impressive resources. For this reason, games with educational purposes, namely Serious Games (SG), are becoming more and more popular. The target of SGs in the Cultural Heritage domain is to actually spread cultural content at its maximum extent by exploiting this medium’s intrinsic features.

The goal of this Special Issue is to collect papers on case studies, perspective applications, technological and methodological issues related to SGs for Cultural Heritage to define the best practices and highlight both the challenges and benefits of SGs in the Cultural Heritage sector.

Authors are invited to submit papers on original and unpublished research and practical applications concerning SGs for a range of educational objectives related to tangible and intangible heritage, including history, archaeology, art, cultural awareness, natural/environmental heritage.

In particular, we call for contributions on topics including but not limited to:

• Challenges and trends in Serious Games for Cultural Heritage
• User engagement and motivation
• Assessment of the learning impact
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Game mechanics suited for CH education
• Personalization, adaptivity and Artificial Intelligence
• Game architectures
• Psychology and pedagogy
• Best practices in the development and adoption of SGs for CH
• Generation and representation of cultural content in games
• Culturally relevant Non-Player Characters
• Applications and case studies

Accepted papers will be published in the ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage - http://www.acm.org/pubs/jocch