Visiting Ancient Rome with a Serious Game

Abstract

The current rise of video games has made that different fields of research feel attracted to these new technologies in order to enhance their works and make their results more attractive. It is for this reason that so-called serious games have arisen, with different purposes than leisure. Related to this topic, this article presents a serious game that allows the user to build historical cities dated in the ancient Roman era. The game reproduces as accurately as possible the different buildings and constructions of the time, making it possible for the player to create Roman cities in a simple way. Once they are already built, the user can visit them, access to the buildings and be able to interact with the objects and characters that appear. This video game has been addressed to the education field and, to evaluate its quality and usability, several experiments have been carried out taking as sample high school students. Initially, the playability of this serious game has been evaluated and, subsequently, the motivation of the game in learning history. The results obtained support on the one hand the gameplay and attractiveness of the video game, and on the second hand, the increase of the interest of the students in the learning of the history, as well as the greater fixation of different concepts treated in this video game.