Rediscovering the Past: Serious Games for Archaeology

In recent years, serious games have emerged as powerful tools for communicating archaeological knowledge, offering engaging and interactive experiences that support education, tourism, and heritage dissemination. Despite their growing popularity, little systematic work has been done to understand how archaeology—both as a practice and as an interpretive discipline—is represented across this medium. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of 63 serious games for archaeology, combining a classification based on taxonomies of instructional content, capabilities, gaming goals, and mechanisms with a qualitative user study involving players with and without competence in archaeology. Our findings reveal a clear predominance of games focused on the valorization of tangible heritage and historical content, while the processes of archaeological investigation are often oversimplified or marginal. Widely adopted engagement strategies, such as linear storytelling and collectible-based exploration, are rarely paired with more interpretive or methodological depth. Our conclusions are that serious games risk flattening the complexity of archaeology if they exclusively build on didactic narration or treasure-hunting dynamics. Drawing on insights from archaeogaming and narrative design, we propose future directions that can support richer and more accurate representations of the discipline—bridging the gap between archaeological storytelling and archaeological thinking.