Temporal collisions: On the use of narrative conventions from genre fiction for location-based cultural heritage games

For decades, digital technologies have been used to offer engaging experiences in cultural heritage sites, and these experiences have shown useful as a means to convey the histories associated with the sites. While some experiences are information-driven (e.g., tour guides), others are story-driven and therefore need a narrative justification for why the past and the present collide and in which way. This paper explores how narrative conventions from genre fiction – specifically, ghost stories, science fiction, historical fiction and fantasy – can frame narrative content in cultural heritage sites. We discuss these specific literary genres and their use in locative games to achieve the temporal collisions necessary for framing story-driven locative cultural heritage experiences. We identify the nature of the main temporal connections used by the different genres (including issues of narrative control) and offered a tentative mapping of the temporal connections onto an actual cultural heritage site.