Designing The Space Archivists:
Social VR Game for Children to eXplore Archival Media
Over the past years, digital technologies have transformed how cultural heritage is preserved and studied, but also how it is communicated and experienced. One emerging approach involves the use of Virtual Reality (VR) to create immersive, interactive environments for learning about cultural heritage in a fun way.
Through three workshops with cultural heritage professionals and five workshops with children, we asked the following: how may we design a VR experience for children that allows them to meaningfully interact with cultural heritage media and metadata? While our eventual goal was to build the game, the primary focus of the paper was to understand how to help children connect to cultural heritage archival data. Our research helped us recognise that children can understand metadata concepts and that they enjoy engaging with metadata through categorisation tasks folded into high-level narratives.
These insights helped us understand the different roles that metadata can have in a game experience and that it needs to be concretely represented to be meaningful to children. Further, we found that collaborative rather than solo experiences motivate children to categorise metadata and learned that children categorise using different criteria than adults and want to use metadata to solve larger puzzles and narratives. While these specific design insights informed our game concept, this research demonstrates the value of working with both professionals and children during the design process; had we only worked with professionals, we may have abandoned the goal of creating a metadata-driven game altogether.
Based on this research, my team and I designed the The Space Archivists, a game that allows children to interact with cultural heritage media and metadata. Our work was informed by several workshops with cultural heritage professionals and children over the past two years. The game allows up to four visitors to play together, creating a shared and educational immersive experience that moves beyond the standard virtual museum tour.
Testing The gaMe
The setting: In a futuristic sci-fi scenario, an archive filled with media items (which can be changed by museum curators over and over) has been sent to space to preserve the memories of humanity. But the items got all mixed up in a meteorite storm! In order to fix the archive, players must match memory cards containing media items with their correct server categories. In order to save the archive, children must collaborate, and learn about history and cultural heritage by interacting with the media items. After the game was built, we set out to test it.
The Impact of Social VRThe Space Archivists was tested with 20 pairs of children and (grand)parents at the Media Museum of the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision. The main goal was to assess game usability and immersion and to understand the social dynamics of the gameplay. Through observations and interviews we gained a better understanding of the impact of Social VR on children within cultural heritage settings. The findings can be categorized into two distinct categories: Overall Gameplay: evaluating how much fun and/or challenging the game is to play, and whether The Space Archivists is an enjoyable and educational immersive experience. Social Dynamics: evaluating the social aspects of the shared experience, like physical or vocal interaction among players.