Digital games have evolved over the past decade into a critically important cultural medium. In 2006, both video (console) and computer (PC) games were a $7.3 billion dollar industry in the U.S. alone. Digital games touch a wider demographic than ever before — the age of the average game player is 33, 24% of gamers are over the age of 50, and women 18 or older represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (31%) than boys age 17 or younger (20%).

Digital games can serve many functions beyond just entertainment, including (but certainly not limited to), social change, cultural heritage learning, language, education, and health promotion. Thinking of digital games purely for the purposes of entertainment significantly under-appreciates their potential. Well known scholar James Gee believes that games (commercial or otherwise) are enjoyable because of learning – they present just the right amount of challenge, support, and feedback, progressively rewarding mastery with new challenges. This experience parallels other known optimal states of happiness, such as Csikszentmihaly’s “flow” state. The structure of many games also mirror good pedagogy, offering progressive problem solving and scaffolded learning.

Using digital games for teaching and learning is also gaining momentum because of strong evidence of perceptual, cognitive, and social benefits gained from playing games. Some serious games are thought to provide “stealth learning” as players are focused not on learning but on playing.

Serious Games for Cultural Heritage Learning

A significant number of digital games either directly simulate historical events or use processes of social-cultural change as the basis for gameplay. Generally speaking, there are two types of commercial off the shelf (COTS) cultural heritage games: those that attempt to simulate a specific event or period in time with historic accuracy, and those that attempt to use scholarly principles of social evolution to simulate historical change over large periods of time. Games such as the Total War series, Sid Meier’s Gettysburg!, or Battlefield 1942 provide a play experience based in some kind of real historical simulation. The issue with these types of games is twofold. First, in many cases, the designers either miss the complexity or subtlety of the history or simply depict the historical events inaccurately. What we are left with is a game with a very high production value that (either explicitly or implicitly) wraps itself in supposed historical accuracy, but in fact depicts history inaccurately or unethically. Secondly, as James Gee has asserted, games are best when they allow players to examine process as opposed to fact-based learning. As a result, as tools for teaching history, games that place the player in an actual historical event and restrict the player to “playing” what is known about that event are failures. Other games, such as those in the Civilization series, base gameplay on a model of historical and social change over large periods of time. Unfortunately, while this gameplay model allows players to explore the process of historical change, the rule-based systems that these types of games use to simulate historical and cultural change are modeled on theories of social evolution from the 19th century that academic anthropologists have long since abandoned. The result are games that either explicitly and implicitly suggest a skewed, outdated, and, in some cases, ethnocentric view of cultural history. At base, designers of the vast majority of cultural heritage based commercial games have no real motivation to present history in an accurate or ethical manner. The point of historically based games is fun, not verisimilitude. As a result, while they are often attractive because of their very high production values, commercial games that have the trappings of "real" history are hardly useful tools for teaching or understanding either specific historical events or the cultural processes that drive history. COTS cultural heritage games are not learning tools, nor are they intended to be.

It is within this context that Matrix is dedicated to developing serious games for cultural heritage education and outreach whose content is not only ethical and accurate, but entertaining as well.