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A case study on a serious game about the Irish famine developed by PreviewLabs was published by IEEE for their 2018 Games, Entertainment, Media Conference (GEM).
For this project, PreviewLabs collaborated with the Game Design & Development Program at Quinnipiac University, involving both students and faculty. You can find more details about Famine Ties here. The project targeted children aged 10 to 13 and was designed as a single-player, turn-based game. Design priorities included accessibility, short play sessions, and suitability for a public exhibition setting.
- Key points from the case study:
- The paper documents the full development process from early ideation to final deployment.
- The game was created for Coming Home: Art and the Great Hunger, a traveling exhibition by Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum.
- The exhibition toured Ireland in 2018, with stops at Dublin Castle, West Cork Arts Centre, and Cultúrlann Uí Chanáin.
- The case study highlights challenges specific to museum games, including onboarding first-time players and ensuring technical robustness in public spaces.
Curious about the project? We talk about it more extensively in this blog post, or take a look at the full IEEE publication, which provides formal academic documentation of the work and its approach to exhibition-focused game development.