Playable Heritage: ludic representations in Turin museums

Abstract

The paper examines gaming practices adopted by museums in the Turin context, moving beyond an interpretation of play as a mere tool for engagement or educational support. It aims to understand how making heritage “playable” reshapes the conditions of access to knowledge, since the experience is organised through rules, goals, interactions, and pathways. The study investigates how game mechanics redesign the relationship between content, space, and audiences. Using a qualitative approach, it compares five institutions, Museo Egizio (ME), Musei Reali (MRT), Museo d’Arte Orientale (MAO), Museo dell’Automobile (MAUTO), and Museo Nazionale del Cinema (MNC), through an analytical matrix based on purpose, target audience, modes of interaction, and the nature of digital spatiality.

The findings highlight different representational regimes along a progression that moves from micro-games and guided 2D tours, to in-visit missions supported by augmented reality, to treasure hunts in 3D environments, and finally to performative simulations and virtual environments with avatars in virtual reality.

The representational value of these experiences depends on three conditions: coherence between ludic logics and museographic logics, interface legibility, and the breadth of meaningful choices actually offered to visitors, together with the clarity with which the experience distinguishes between museum information and ludic-narrative construction. Two cross-cutting critical issues emerge: cognitive reduction, in which progression and task completion replace interpretation, and epistemic opacity, in which data and storytelling merge without recognisable cues.

Overall, the paper proposes criteria to analyse how ludic practices produce different regimes of heritage representation.