Dottorato in Patrimonio Culturale e produzione storico-artistica, audiovisiva e multimediale

Alessia Ianni-Palarchio is a Canadian game designer and developer, whose main focus is in the area of video games. She has a background in art and design with over a decade of experience with industry standard design tools. From 2015 to 2019, she studied at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada, and graduated with a Bachelor of Design. During this time, she collaborated with her peers to create the co-op puzzle game Fangs and Friends, which focused on solving environmental puzzles as a vampire and a mage. Fangs and Friends went on to win three awards (Best Art, Best Overall Game, and 2nd place People’s Choice) at the 2019 Level Up Showcase in Toronto, Canada, where student games are showcased from universities all across the province.

After her initial academic foray into game design and development during her undergraduate degree at OCAD University, Alessia went on to pursue further studies in game design at New York University. From 2020 to 2022, Alessia completed a Master of Fine Arts degree in Game Design at the NYU Game Center. Her thesis project sought to answer the question “how can we have a conversation without using dialogue?”. More specifically, this question looked at how conversations are held between the player character and non-player characters in video games. Her solo thesis project culminated in the creation of a game entitled With Flowers Comes Dance. This single-player rhythm game made minimal use of text, and instead centered on the core mechanic of using dance as the method of communication between characters. The visual cues, iconography, and music composition that accompanied the dance segment of gameplay encouraged players to experiment, and emphasized the fluidity of conversation between characters in a way that mirrored the give and take of conversations in our day to day lives.

Alongside her studies, Alessia has accumulated considerable work experience in a broad range of design fields. This experience includes her work at the company Sago Mini, where she worked as a technical artist intern on their app Sago Mini School. Prior to this, she worked for a number of years as an analytics consultant at Project X Ltd. Her work mainly centered on data visualization, and creating analytics  as well as teaching content around using those solutions, and best practices regarding data visualization and design. In addition to this, she has previously co-developed and taught a pilot curriculum on wearable electronics for middle school students. Most recently, she worked as a sessional instructor at OCAD University, where she taught a course on Game Engines to undergraduate students.

Game Design and Creative Companies for Culture - Using Video Games to Preserve Intangible Cultural Heritage

There are numerous artisanal crafts created throughout Italy, the creation of which comes from practices that have been refined over generations. We see the creation of tangible artifacts from these historical practices that have survived to the present day. These artifacts are pervasive in daily life in Italy, and we can see portions of history reflected both in public spaces, such as through the architecture that is carefully preserved throughout Italy, and in curated collections, such as museums like the Museo del Merletto in Burano, Italy. These physical artifacts can be maintained through varying conservation methods (dependent on the needs of the artifact), as well as through the creation of replicas and castings for display and educational purposes. Digital preservation techniques can accompany analog ones, and we can look to various methods such as photography, videography, and 3D scanning. These create digital records of artifacts and the context surrounding them, and augment prior preservation techniques.

While we have both physical and digital records of these tangible objects, it is necessary to continue to consider and refine preservation methods for the intangible culture, skills, and cultural traditions surrounding these works of craftsmanship. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has defined intangible cultural heritage as being inclusive of the knowledge and skills passed down through communities. UNESCO goes on to list oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe or the knowledge and skills to produce traditional crafts as all building to a larger culture (UNESCO - What Is Intangible Cultural Heritage?). These cultural practices pose different challenges to preservation methods than the preservation of tangible artifacts, and cannot solely be captured through the end products produced by them.

With this challenge in mind, this project seeks to review existing cultural preservation techniques and practices, and subsequently identify how video games can best serve as a tool for capturing and disseminating cultural heritage. Looking to the convergence of academic research and practical application in the creation of cultural heritage video games, this project will capture the various limitations encountered in alternative preservation practices, and determine how video games can best address those limitations. Rather than seek to replace current preservation methods, this project instead looks to how we can use video games to support current conservation efforts in the preservation of intangible heritage, and then disseminate that knowledge to wider audiences.

Through this project, a set of procedures and standards will be proposed to develop cultural heritage video games, keeping in mind the need to ensure accurate and respectful representation of cultural practices in a medium where some level of abstraction from reality is present in the final representation. With one case study proposed in collaboration with the partner company 34BigThings, these procedures will be refined alongside the creation of a game. This is to ensure the proposed procedures align with commercial game development pipelines, while considering the ethics in gathering information from individuals who still practice these crafts today and without compromising how that information is translated into gameplay.

UNESCO. (n.d.). Unesco - what is Intangible Cultural Heritage? Intangible Cultural Heritage. https://ich.unesco.org/en/what-is-intangible-heritage-00003

alessia.iannipalarch@edu.unito.it

alessiadorinananda.iannipalarchio@unito.it