How Can Video Game Technology Play a Greater Role in Visualising our Cultural Heritage?
By Sam Owen
Thesis, University of Salford, 2010
Introduction: Are video games the best way to examine history? Can a video game be the time machine that allows us to visit our past? The question of whether video games are or can be more than entertainment is being answered every day as new “serious games” are developed. Video games are now used to train people to deal in emergency situations, to teach math and to teach people how to drive. The focus of this paper is to discuss whether video games are an ideal technology to preserve and display our cultural heritage, our history for future generations.
A modern video game consist of many different art forms such as video, music, narrative and 2d/3d art that are blended together with the games mechanics to create a game. These art forms are used to teach and document our history, while video games are not. We are taught Roman History sourced from Cassius Dio’s Roman History, and shown Egyptian Hieroglyphs to see what they lived like. Yet each of these forms is static unmoving, we cannot take a detour from Dio’s account of the rise of Rome to visit a small house to see what it looks like, and we cannot interact with the hieroglyphs of Egypt. Only video game technology would allow us to do these things, technology is at a point now where we have a real time city environment that the player can explore. Also by its very nature video games consist of many different art forms so they can be placed in game, an example of this would be an in game museum.
Click here to read/download this article from Sam-Owen.co.uk
