Raising Awareness of Climate Heritage Resilience and Vulnerability by Playing Serious Video Games

Abstract

Contemporary climate change affects not only human beings and natural ecosystems but tangible cultural heritage, too. Understanding and appreciating climate change’s influence on built cultural heritage involves raising awareness of vulnerability and resilience issues. Hence, educators need to develop integrated approaches to teaching the protection and preservation of architectural heritage from climate change, including the creation of educational resources, including serious video games, to teach climate resilience and vulnerability. In this context, the authors developed two 3D maze video games—“Let Us Save Venice” and the Vulnerability game—focused on engaging students and raising awareness of climate heritage issues. The article discusses the results from the experimental validation of the Vulnerability game and tries to answer how game design enhanced by using the revised Bloom taxonomy and active collaboration with domain specialists can improve learning outcomes, learnability factors, and game experience. The findings suggest that the maze games can effectively supplement traditional teaching approaches in raising awareness and teaching climate resilience in cultural heritage contexts.