Abstract:

In recent years, the role of new technologies in museums has become more and more evident all over the world as a new way of enhancing the various forms of museum itinerary and exhibition. If this trend has had its greatest incentive with the pandemic crisis and the spread of remote museum use systems, at the same time, the digital revolution in the museum context has also acquired a central role in imagining new forms of access to information in the halls and in-presence visits, with a view to developing new interactive and personalized engagement systems.

A study by Biexzk-Stolorz et. al. (published in 2021 in volume 193 of Procedia Computer Science), in fact, states that the majority of visitors in a sample of 509 interviews would be encouraged to visit a museum if it had an interactive guide.

It is in this context that the Wordpress-based digital game presented in this paper was born. Developed from a participatory design process between the University of Pisa's Museum of Natural History and departments of Information Engineering and Computer Science, "Grosso guaio al Museo di Calci" is conceived as a digital support to the tour without guide visit to the museum itself. An engaging and stimulating digital adventure, based on gamification mechanisms and a fictional storytelling, designed to accompany the visitor to discover the museum's most hidden information, room after room, until the exit, coinciding with the end of the adventure.

A digital game system, directly usable by visitors via their smartphones, with prizes based on points, badges and rankings, inserted in a narrative system to accompany the interactions of the users, designed with narrative forks and surprise effects to transmit information that will remain with the visitor after the end of the visit, returning the museum's cardinal principles, its identity, values and elements of heritage education and active citizenship.

In this paper, we will describe the structure and process of the game development of “Grosso Guaio al museo di Calci”, highlighting its replicability in different museal contexts. With this in mind, we also wish to explore the visitor involvement mechanisms chosen and the lines of design and graphics that characterize the application, with a view to highlighting the centrality of its educational and involvement framework, heart of the entire project.

Keywords:

Gamification, digital museum, natural history, museums digital guide, educational digital games.