Heritage hunt: Developing a role-playing game for heritage museums

Abstract

Artefacts in museums are fundamentally de-contextualized in the way that they are displayed. This papers describes the development of Heritage Hunt, a mobile game prototype developed for the National Museum of Archaeology in Malta, that looks at roleplaying and the portrayal of history at a small-scale level to promote a better understanding of the every-day cultural context of displayed artefacts. We conducted a small, explorative study across different development stages to assess this approach. The final prototype was tested in the museum space, with results indicating that roleplaying can be beneficial to direct the attention of visitors towards less prominent artefacts, as well as encourage visitors to consider different perspectives in history.