Cultural Mobile Games: Designing for ‘Many’

This paper explores the design of digitally mediated, gamified experiences in the environment of art exhibitions. We use the trajectories HCI framework for analysis and design, decomposing the overall experience in different levels. First, we develop a storytelling game that is meant to be experienced by ‘many’ visitors, leveraging a group gameplay that fosters social interactions between the group members. Second, the gamified experience unfolds in ‘many’ physical spaces, with multiple collections of artworks. We model alternative spatial layouts and discuss how these affect the evolving group experience. Finally, ‘many’ stands for repeat visits: inviting people in gamified cultural experiences over and over again, with potentially new groups and in different exhibitions, we examine the impact of prior game participation. Throughout the paper, we showcase how the use of trajectories enables us to clearly reflect and investigate all the aforementioned ‘manies’, in a combined, holistic way.