Using Serious Games for Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) Education: A Journey into the Canto a Tenore Singing Style

Serious games are being increasingly adopted to sustain teaching and learning in a variety of educational fields (school education, etc.); the cultural heritage field does not make an exception, especially as far as tangible heritage is concerned. More recently, even in the field of ICH, games have started to be used to allow learning of intangible cultural expressions or traditions (Yilmaz et al. 2015). In the frame of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), ITD-CNR has developed the "Canto a Tenore game", a mixed 2D/3D adventure game, aimed at supporting learning of the basics of this rare singing style, which originated and is still practised in Sardinia (Italy). The idea behind the game is to involve the player in an engaging journey, where s/he has to help the main character, who is currently living abroad, to find his roots in Sardinia. The comprehensive integration of contents in the gameplay, as well as the immersive nature of the 3D environments, allow the user to learn the basics of the Canto in an engaging way. In this paper the authors discuss the main strong points, challenges and criticalities of adopting such technologies.