An Alternative Reality Museum Tour Game Integrating Realistic Historical Storyline and Role-Playing for Learning Cultural Heritage

Abstract

Although museums converted from cultural heritage are of high historical value, they may not be able to retain the old historical elements due to changes in business strategies and lose the historical value of the original scene. Museum tour guides can still take visitors back to the past through oral tours, there is still limited understanding due to insufficient information retained on site. Therefore, this study attempts to design an alternative reality museum tour game that combines simulated historical storylines and role-playing for a marine museum transformed from a thermal power station. Players can use their mobile phones to open the game and read the storylines to match the real historical scene in the museum park. Using first-person role-playing, players can walk around the existing museum park and explore the events of each historical site, interact with the virtual characters and solve the unexpected events that happened at the thermal power station at the time to immerse themselves in the simulated historical situation. Seventeen participants engaged in this study. The result revealed that the players had a high level of flow, and moderate anxiety. About cognitive loads, a certain degree of intrinsic cognitive load was generated by the long storytelling, the low level of extraneous cognitive load and the high level of germane cognitive load reported indicated that this game can increase the player's commitment to the game and advance the player to think about the content of the game simultaneously.

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Author Information
Shen-Yang Ni, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taiwan
Chih-Chen Kuo, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taiwan
Hung-Yu Chan, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taiwan
Huei-Tse Hou, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taiwan