CINE Talks & Think tank

Let’s play with heritage: CINE – Seminar & Think tank

Let’s play with heritage was the title of a seminar and Think tank on gamification and heritage in Reykjavik on March 16th 2018. It was part of the CINE-project and combined with a partners meeting in Iceland. It was organised in collaboration with universities, museums, institutions, companies and the gaming industry. More then 100 people from different sectors showed up and participated in the program which was devided into 4 sessions: presentations, workshops & demonstrations, workgroups & discussions and panel discussion & results. The keynote speaker was Ed Rodley, associate director of intergrated media at Peaboy Essex Museum.

The exciting thing I see in gatherings like the CINE seminar in Reykjavik is their potential to create a community of interest around the topic of games and heritage. The domain expertise of the people in the room is so varied that it provides a great example of what the cognitive scientist Gerhard Fischer calls “symmetry of ignorance”. Unlike communities of practice, where all the stakeholders come from roughly the same field, communities of interest bring together stakeholders with different practices. The act of creating a shared understanding of a complex problem – like creating engaging heritage experiences – among all stakeholders can lead to new insights and the kinds of experiences that would be hard to envision in a community of practice.

Ed Rodley, 2018.

Think tank outcomes

Challenges:

  • New generations have new expectations.
  • The tourists of 21st century want to experience and be engaged.
  • The children of today have less attention span and are used to the new technology.
  • The museums are often 10 years behind in technology terms.

Obstacles:

  • There is little financial support for innovation in cultural heritage.
  • The cultural sector and the gaming sector do not speak the “same language”.
  • The target groups for museums are so many and variant which makes it difficult to fulfill their expectations.

Opportunities:

  • Open access to archives and collections makes it possible to work with material in advance of a visit to museums.
  • Gamification and interactive storytelling should be a part of the work in renewal process of old exhibitions.
  • More and more free software and platforms are available for building and sharing cultural heritage.

Next steps:

  • Establish more interdisciplinary collaboration between the cultural heritage sector, schools and the gaming industry.
  • Ask for offical support for innovation in the cultural heritage sector.
  • Encourage museums to collaborate in projects in this field and apply for available funding by tech-funds.

CINE Talks – Storytelling & Gamification

Storytelling and gamification are powerful tools, and, twinned with digital technologies, offer exciting possibilities for heritage engagement.

In the autumn 2020 the CINE project organised a series of online events under the title CINE Talks. The first one took place on 15th October and was hosted by Skúli Björn Gunnarsson, the author of this handbook. A creative panel discussions follow the inspiring presentations from the speakers, who were:

Ed Rodley – museum experience designer: Games, gamification and museums in the present moment: What’s changed since 2018.

Maria Economou – professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Glasgow: Emotion and Storytelling in Museums: Reflections on the learning from the EMOTIVE project.

Steinunn Anna Gunnlaugsdóttir & Leifur Björnsson, owners of Locatify software company: Storytelling & gamification with precise location technology (UWB): Reflections on the opportunities from heritage offered by new location technology.