Learning cultural heritage by serious games

Immersive technologies such as virtual environments and augmented reality have a clear potential to support the experiencing of cultural heritage by the large public, complementing the current tools and practices based on tangible goods such as museums, exhibitions, books and visual content. Serious games - videogames designed for educational objectives - appear as a new tool to learn cultural content in an engaging way. In this paper, we will provide an extensive portrait of the current proposition of serious games in the cultural sector, highlighting the educational objectives of games in this domain and analysing the complex relations between genre, context of use, technological solutions and learning effectiveness. We finally identify and discuss the most significant challenges in the design and adoption of educational games in cultural heritage. (C) 2013 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.