Hakka Kitchen: Engagement with Culinary Cultural Heritage Through Immersive Game Play

Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) experiences are difficult to share with the public because they are essentially processes that rely on physical interactions with embodied, tacit, and situated phenomena in specific cultural contexts. We consume non-interactive media such as videos and books to learn about culinary ICH experiences, but they do not allow us to grasp actual interactive procedures that embody the cultural knowledge. To engage people in a traditional cooking experience, we created a gamified VR experience Hakka Kitchen, where players are guided by a chef of Hakka cuisine through a modeled physical process of making the traditional dish of stuffed bitter melon. Compared against watching a video in VR providing the same information in a between-subjects study (N=40), Hakka Kitchen led to increased sensory, imaginative engagement, positive affect, and willingness to transmit awareness for the culinary ICH. Heritage recognition is mode-dependent: the cognitive load of enactment suppressed players’ uptake of concurrent cultural narration; however, it generated somatic and memory anchors that fostered a deeper, implicit kinesthetic form of empathy for the artisan’s labor and cultural background. Our work shows how representing interactive procedures instead of static content may empower cultural awareness in a virtual form of ICH practice.