Search results

Engaging with digital heritage requires understanding not only to comprehend what is simulated but also the reasons leading to its creation and curation, and how to ensure both the digital media and the significance of the cultural heritage it portrays are passed on effectively, meaningfully, and appropriately. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization defines ‘digital heritage’ to comprise of computer-based materials of enduring value some of which require active preservation strategies to maintain them for years to come.

With the proliferation of digital technologies and digital media, computer games have increasingly been seen as not only depicters of cultural heritage and platforms for virtual heritage scholarship and dissemination but also as digital cultural artefacts worthy of preservation. In this chapter, we examine how games (both digital and non-digital) can communicate cultural heritage in a galleries, libraries, archives, and museums [GLAM] setting. We also consider how they can and have been used to explore, communicate, and preserve heritage and, in particular, Indigenous heritage. Despite their apparently transient and ephemeral nature, especially compared to conventional media such as books, we argue computer games can be incorporated into active preservation approaches to digital heritage. Indeed, they may be of value to cultural heritage that needs to be not only viewed but also viscerally experienced or otherwise performed.

As early as Johan Huzinga’s (2016, 89–188) landmark exploration of play, Homo Ludens (1949), death has been recognised as integral to play. Today’s digital games continue this close association. Whilst the past half-century has trended towards limiting the impact of player-death, permanent-death (permadeath) games provide a less-forgiving environment. As the first digital adaptation of Games Workshop’s cult-classic tabletop skirmish game, Mordheim: City of the Damned (Rogue Factor, 2015) utilises permadeath to emphasise death’s inevitability and harsh reality in the precarity of its gothic post-apocalyptic setting. Whilst the majority of apocalyptic videogames follow the comic frame, the player has no agency to overcome or change the events of Mordheim’s apocalypse, setting it firmly in the gothic frame. It is substantially less about overturning disaster or saving the city, and decidedly more about looting its shattered corpse. The close reading of Mordheim: City of the Damned’s theme of death for this chapter identified that death and injury are simply accepted realities; ubiquitous, yet normalised. Whilst every death is significant – through permanently lost warriors – there is always another willing replacement available. Viewed alongside the warband’s primary purpose – that is service to their patron – warriors’ deaths not only become expected and relatively meaningless, but also financially connected. Rather than encouraging association with their warbands, players are subtly shifted to aligning with their patron, viewing the warbands and their warriors as an expendable means towards gaining digital kudos points and bragging rights amongst the other digital noble.

The history of simulated warfare is nearly as old as warfare itself, dating back at least 5000 years to the Chinese war game known as Wei-Hai. Also the game we now know as chess evolved from a war game originally played in India as early as 500AD (see also Smith, 1998). Throughout military history, the art of warfare has been trained and practiced through the use of artificial tabletop landscapes, miniaturized soldiers, and tactical and strategic gaming rules designed to challenge the minds of military leaders.

Collaboration is often required for activities that are too complex or difficult to be dealt with by a single individual. Many situations requiring information-seeking activities also call for people to work together. Often the methods, systems, and tools that provide access to information assume that they are used only by individuals working on their tasks alone. This review points to the need to acknowledge the importance of collaboration in information-seeking processes, to study models, and to develop systems that are specifically designed to enable collaborative information seeking (CIS) tasks. This chapter reviews the literature from various domains including library and information science, human–computer interaction, collaborative systems, and information retrieval. Focus of the review is on the extent to which people work together on information seeking tasks and the systems and tools that are available for them to be successful. Since CIS occurs in the broader context of collaboration in general, a review of literature about collaborations is first undertaken to define it and place it into context with related terms such as cooperation and communication. A more focused review of research follows relating CIS to systems that have attempted to support such interactions. Included are identification and synthesis of a number of core issues in the field and how best to evaluate systems and collaborative tools. Key lessons learned from the review are summarized, and gaps in the literature identified to spur future research and study.

Although African markets have incorporated various selling practices originating from the West, there are still some selling practices that are indigenous to the African people and are widely practised by sellers across the continent. This chapter is an attempt at documenting those indigenous practices with the aim of providing managers, educators and policymakers of the continent with a reference document on what these indigenous selling practices are, how sellers invoke them in the course of transactions and the cultural values that guide these practices. Primary data were gathered from three countries representing western, eastern and southern Africa through observations, field surveys and in-depth and key informant interviews while literature was sourced for secondary data. The chapter identified street selling, haggling and credit-based selling as the major indigenous selling practices found among sellers in Africa. The cultural values that guide selling in the continent include respect, trustworthiness and kindness. The chapter displayed a framework to explain the subject matter and made some practical suggestions that are relevant for managers, educators and policymakers.