Description
This project was built on our discoveries and experience with a micro-incubator with arts and cultural organisations called ‘Time Perspectives’. Particularly during the pandemic, performance based /cultural tours organisations/museums needed to experiment with online and digital audience engagement. Most of the times they did not have not sufficient skills and often not sufficient resources to engage a specialist. At the same time the gaming industry and XR businesses work with artistic skills and/or with the cultural (heritage) sector. Yet, the dialogue among them is limited and collaborations are rare. That is how this research and collaboration project was born. Humans at Play combines mixed public events with a national scale study of three groups: 1. general public – game aficionados and audiences for cultural offers; 2. specialists from the video game sector; 3. creative practitioners from various fields who may develop professionally in the video game sector, or who may engage with gamification in their field of activity; None had yet researched the Bulgarian games (or European games) ecosystem as the intersection of 3 viewpoints to our surprise. What is the way, the young public consider arts, games, or education in this emerging cross-ovder terrain was not known. ICC also wanted to stimulate new partnerships and provoke arts/cultural organisations and more businesses to think of cross-innovation when faced by challenges.
Challenge they identifed
Video games, as an intersection between technology and arts are the young generations preferred zone for cultural /leisure and learning experience. This is where arts and new technologies meet too and a range of sectors evolve in the X reality (AR, VR, meta etc). Games bear enormous power for shaping dispositions of the general public as well as the arts public and the future creative professionals too. The vital importance of the ecosystem around games was what we explored and enriched with 19 partners.
How they assess the results?
We have used 3 surveys with predetermined quantitative baselines; for example, 1000 responses from the general public. In addition, we had foreseen to gather in-depth qualitative feedback from two focus groups: general public and professionals from the games industry. We used a good deal of new partner engagement effort within the project to stimulate more business support, nationally and internationally. Thus we engaged 20 or more ‘old’ ICC partners and at least 5 new initiatives to spread the news and get more funding and support. The project has been supported financially by the National Culture Fund of Bulgaria and by the Municipality of Veliko Turnovo. For instance, to obtain the 2d local funding, we involvied in total 3 municipalities to reach to participants in the event held in the medieval capital of Bulgaria, which is also a university town. We faced some unforeseen challenges. Even with special efforts, young target groups were very hard to reach. This is how a new partnership with the Youth Centre NGO in Vratza was established. This quick change of approach from creating our programme with cultural hosts to ‘embedding’ within a youth event was what brought a great success in both attendance and also feedaback assessment. The media reach to larger audiences has been also growing over the course of the project, with support from old and new partners reaching national TV and several local radio / news stations.
Tools
The widening of partnerships is bringing more sustainability for Intercultura in terms of profiling our work. Over the last decades research and capacity-building with CCIs was valued by the academic sector, the policy makers and we have strong international partners too. However, in Bulgaria, we had not partnered extensively to promote cross-innovation and working with businesses. Of course, the survey results and the fact we partnered together is of high value for international partnerships for all Bulgarian partners involved . There are some neighbouring country partners from Ukraine and Turkey as well as Serbia, Romania, Greece and North Macedonia that are to unfold as a consequence. We use multiple dedicated events, platforms and channels to expand the value of the unique results we obtained.
Links
https://inter-cultura.eu/humans-at-play/
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