Welcome to the MEMENTOES newsletter!

Welcome to the MEMENTOES newsletter, a guide to our latest work and news.

MEMENTOES is an EU-funded project based on collaboration between museum professionals, video game developers, and research centres which aims to combine the educational and empathy-building impacts of historical museums with the global reach and entertaining format of video games. Together, we’ll produce three digital games based on instances of historical injustice, designed to teach players about the past and think critically about its parallels with the present. We’ll also codify best practices, develop new technological services, and publish an accessibility toolkit to encourage future partnerships between the tech and cultural heritage sectors and promote inclusive interaction with cultural heritage.

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What we've been up to

Things are busy with the MEMENTOES project—we recently closed our fourth plenary meeting, hosted in Prague by our partners Charles Games and Gulag.cz, where we discussed our progress with regards to game development, testing, ethics, and AI services. But that’s not all we’ve been up to—read on for our recent highlights, including publications, presentations, studies, and cluster work.

New Publication: "Museum-inspired Video Games as a Symbolic Transitional Justice Policy: New Concepts and Research Directions."

Our partner FORTH recently published an article in the journal Games: Research and Practice. The paper argues that games should be taken seriously as a mechanism for transitional justice and used to promote education, reconciliation, and healing. The authors examine the role of games in promoting empathy between groups, arguing that certain games mimic the same affective techniques as museums. Finally, the authors highlight the lack of a framework to guide collaborations between game developers, museum professionals, and experts in memory and heritage studies—a gap MEMENTOES seeks to fill by validating such a framework of our own.

Read the paper here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3651279

FORTH also presented the paper at the Ethical Games Conference in January 2024. You can read a blog about their presentation, which includes an overview of the paper's main arguments, below.

Small-scale Studies to Measure the Impact of Educational Games

One of the core goals of the MEMENTOES project is to produce games that change players’ attitudes about the victims of historical injustices by triggering empathetic responses. To achieve this goal, we need to measure the impact of games on players’ attitudes and identify which game elements can achieve these changes. Recently, we’ve been conducting small-scale studies comparing responses to different games in order to test our game evaluation methodology. Once this methodology is validated, we’ll organise broader testing sessions to measure the efficacy of the MEMENTOES games as tools for education, empathy-building, and transitional justice.

We recently wrote a blog about the goals of these small-scale studies. Check it out at the link below.

Introducing the Games for Culture Cluster

We’ve teamed up with our sister projects (other EC-funded projects with similar focus areas) to form the Games for Culture Cluster. Together, we’re investigating the potential impact of games on society, conducting research at the intersection of culture, technology, and play to identify what makes games effective societal tools. Our focus areas include: tangible cultural heritage (such as monuments, artefacts, and books); intangible cultural heritage (such as oral tradition, dance, and festivals); natural heritage landscapes, biodiversity, and environmental challenges; and cultural values such as social justice.

And good news: We’re still accepting new members. If you’re interested in joining the Games for Culture Cluster, email tsita@iti.gr and check out the cluster’s website.

Read more about the cluster at the blog below.

In case you missed it

In our last newsletter, we highlighted the game development partnership between our partners FORTH and Gulag.cz. You can read our interview with both partners at the link below. Stay tuned for our next newsletter, which will highlight another partnership between game developers and museums underpinning the MEMENTOES project.

Interested in learning more about the MEMENTOES games? Check out these one-pagers outlining each of the three games in development.

Those From Below by Causa Creations and Le Bois du Cazier

Toys by Charles Games and the War Childhood Museum

Gulag Diaries by ICS-FORTH and Gulag.cz

MEMENTOES partners

The MEMENTOES consortium includes three research institutions, two game development organisations, and three museums. The Centre for Research & Technology Hellas (CERTH) is the project coordinator and leads tasks on software development and image processing techniques. The Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH) is the technical manager of the project and develops one of the three video games. Trilateral Research contributes to dissemination, exploitation, and ethics. The game developers involved in the project are Charles Games and Causa Creations Interactive Media. The museum partners are Le Bois Du Cazier, the War Childhood Museum, and Gulag.cz.

This project has received funding from the European Research Executive Agency under grant agreement No 101061496.

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union of the European Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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