Cultural Heritage Meets Mobile Media - and New Games Emerge

The paper describes and evaluates a recent project in Aalborg, Denmark, dealing with the communication of cultural heritage and industrial culture to young people via their own preferred media platform: mobile phones. The communication was based on the new cultural genre: Alternative Reality Games or Augmented Reality Games (ARGs), i.e. games that take place in real life and in real physical settings. The paper concludes that ARGs can be seen as an entirely new way or method of communication cultural heritage. A method that supports a participating, involving, and experience-oriented communication, a method that - so to speak - writes the player into the story and history, and a method that because of the narrative form is especially well-suited to support coherences and coherent stories.