Gamifying Cultural Heritage. Education, Tourism Development, and Territory Promotion

In recent years, communication and digital technologies have widely affected the cultural heritage sector, offering incredible opportunities to enhance the experiential value of heritage assets and improve cultural activities. Furthermore, another trend has gained significant attention: increasing users’ engagement through gamification. Several studies have shown the efficacy of gamification for learning achievements, and gaming is also emerging as a useful tool for touristic objectives such as marketing, dynamic engagement with users, and audience development. This chapter aims at presenting two Italian game projects for mobile devices, created to enhance and promote the cultural offer of two peculiar territories. Game design choices, objectives, and outcomes will be discussed to highlight the benefits and limits of these tools and point out the changing practices of cultural institutions and local administrations, which are showing an increasing interest in the exploitation of video games, considering them as strategic marketing tools to promote cultural heritage and tourism.