Communicating Cultural Heritage: A Literature Review on Game Edutainment and Archiving Strategies Exploration

Abstract

The preservation of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) is challenging because of its participatory and dynamic nature, which requires more than passive documentation. A systematic review examined comparative research on the effectiveness of game-based edutainment and traditional archiving in the preservation and transmission of ICH. Articles to be included in this review were discovered with Elicit AI, an automated literature review assistant that queries the Semantic Scholar corpus and ranks articles using relevance to the semantic query to the research question. Ten studies were included in the analysis. A large language model (LLM) was used to extract data to ensure consistency, and all results were heavily validated by humans. The results demonstrate that game edutainment formats and related programs, such as digital games, virtual reality (VR), and interactive storytelling, are especially efficient in promoting a high level of user engagement, experiential learning, and cultural regeneration, particularly among younger age groups. By contrast, conventional archival practices are more effective for high-fidelity reporting and the orderly maintenance of multifaceted cultural information, thus guaranteeing the long-term integrity of scholarly information. Neither approach is universally better, as each has its own merits that can be applied to particular preservation objectives. The hybrid solution, which combines the dynamic flexibility that comes with game edutainment with the detailed preservation provisions of conventional archival practices, is deemed the most promising gateway for the long-term sustainability of ICH.