Roleplaying and Rituals For Cultural Heritage-Orientated Games

Champion, Erik

229712_163756_72_Champion_Roleplaying-and-Rituals-For-Cultural-Heritage-Oriented-Games.pdf (1.827Mb)

Access Status

Open access

Authors

Champion, Erik

Date

2015

Type

Conference Paper

Metadata

Show full item record

Citation

Champion, E. 2015. Roleplaying and Rituals For Cultural Heritage-Orientated Games, in Fuchs, M. (ed), DiGRA 2015: Diversity of play: Games – Cultures – Identities, May 14-17 2015, pp. 1-16. Lüneburg, Germany: Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA).

Source Title

DiGRA '15 - Proceedings of the 2015 DiGRA International Conference, Digital Games Research Association, May, 2015 Volume: 12

Source Conference

DiGRA 2015: Diversity of play: Games – Cultures – Identities

Additional URLs

http://www.digra.org/digital-library/publications/roleplaying-and-rituals-for-cultural-heritage-orientated-games/

ISSN

2342-9666

School

School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/33421

Collection

Curtin Research Publications

Abstract

Roles and rituals are essential for creating, situating and maintaining cultural practices. Computer Role-Playing games (CRPGs) and virtual online worlds that appear to simulate different cultures are well known and highly popular. So it might appear that the roles and rituals of traditional cultures are easily ported to computer games. However, I contend that the meaning behind worlds, rituals and roles are not fully explored in these digital games and virtual worlds and that more work needs to be done to create more moving rituals, role enrichment and worldfulness. I will provide examples from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda, 2006, 2011) to reveal some of the difficulties in creating digitally simulated social and cultural worlds, but I will also suggest some design ideas that could improve them in terms of cultural presence and social presence.