Students Attitude to Serious Games for Cultural Heritage

Serious games are video games designed for purposes other than entertainment and applied mainly for education or training. In the context of cultural heritage, serious games leverage technology to engage users in educational and immersive experiences related to historical sites, artifacts, and cultural traditions. The paper explores how K12 and university students assess serious games for cultural heritage concerning game experience and learnability. The research focuses on appreciating students learning tangible and intangible heritage by playing two serious video maze games - "The Heritage of Valchan Voivoda" concerning intangible heritage and the "Let Us Save Venice" game about heritage resilience and sustainability. The paper describes the game design process based on an automatic generation of the maze using a formal description, the maze topology, and the methodology for evaluating game learnability and game experience. The analysis compares results obtained by an experimental validation of the two games. The findings prove that serious maze video games, as a part of digital culture, are an appropriate tool for learning the cultural heritage of students of different ages. Copyright (C) 2024 The Authors.