About MEMENTOES

MEMENTOES is a collaboration between museum professionals, video game developers, and research institutes that aims to combine the educational and empathy-building impacts of historical museums with the global reach and widely engaging format of video games. Starting in September 2022, the project will last three years, and result in three digital games designed to teach players about historical injustices, while facilitating critical thinking and encouraging them to see the parallels between the past and the present. As a part of this endeavor, project partners will codify best practices, develop new technological services, and publish an accessibility toolkit to encourage future partnerships between the tech and cultural heritage sectors.

Check out the MEMENTOES website for more details – if you want to receive ongoing updates about our research, game development, and other outputs, consider signing up for the project newsletter.

WCM and Charles Games

The War Childhood Museum is one of the partners in this project, paired up with an award-winning Prague-based indie game studio Charles Games. The game, tentatively titled Toys, relies on historical storytelling and the testimonials in the War Childhood Museum’s archive – this narrative adventure game will place players in scenes inspired by the memories of people who grew up during conflicts in Sarajevo, Aleppo, and Kharkiv. 

The other games being developed are Those from Below, by Causa Creations and Bois du Cazier, and Gulag Diaries by FORTH studio and Gulag.cz. Those from Below is an immersive virtual reality experience that will bring players into the tunnels of the Marcinelle mine and the lives of the Italian migrant workers prior to and around the 1956 mining disaster. Meanwhile, a first-person environmental narrative game Gulag Diaries will allow the players to explore the ruins of gulag camp and confront the experiences of victims of the Soviet regime.

Impact of Video Games

A growing body of scholarship is building evidence that video games use similar storytelling techniques as museums, pointing to their efficacy as a tool to support cultural heritage initiatives. The study led by our partner Charles Games found that playing historical video games can lead to long-term changes in players’ implicit attitudes about history. “Our results confirm that video games can affect historical awareness,” the authors write, and “have an important role in our understanding of historical and social realities.”

Partners

The MEMENTOES project includes three research institutions, two game development organizations, and three museums. Ethniko Kentro Erevnas Kai Technologikis Anaptyxis (CERTH) is the project coordinator and leads tasks on software development and image processing techniques. The Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH) is the technical manager of the project and will develop one of the three video games. Trilateral Research contributes to dissemination, exploitation, and ethics. The game developers involved in the project are Charles Games and Causa Creations Interactive Media. The museum partners are Le Bois Du Cazier, the War Childhood Museum, and Gulag.cz.

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.