Establishing a Theoretical Background for a Museum-centric Entertainment System

The use of gaming to provide additional value to cultural experiences, like museums visits, is not novel. The increased possibilities to access the game market opened by online platforms make the communicative and emotional characteristics of digital games an opportunity for promotion. In this paper, we discuss the theoretical foundations of an approach aimed at producing digital games meant to be part of a continuing emotional experience. We draw from psychological and museological research to motivate our view on the relationships between game designers and museum experts. By concentrating on archaeological and art museums, we advocate for the need of a methodological approach to the design of games for museums aimed at promoting the value of cultural experience as it is, thus countering the plethora of technological instalments that often risk averting the attention from the collection.