Status: In preparation
Expected publication: Winter 2026/2027
Author: Anthony Cassar, Marinos Ioannide & Aphrodite T. Andreou
This proposed entry introduces the Memory Twin as a holistic framework for documenting, interpreting, and activating contested cultural heritage through game design. It examines how interconnected layers of data, metadata, paradata, oral histories, community knowledge, uncertainty, and intangible values can inform site-specific historical games while balancing institutional responsibility with participant and designer agency. Particular attention is given to playfulness as a method for translating these layers into narratives, spatial exploration, player choices, puzzles, and meaningful mechanics. Drawing on practice-based examples developed within a cultural heritage institution, including a historically grounded escape-room experience, the entry explores how the Memory Twin can support collaborative and intergenerational interpretation through non-linear, indexical storytelling. It positions game design as a form of designing with care, capable of supporting multivocal, pluriversal, and decolonial approaches while questioning epistemic authority, silencing, and whose knowledge becomes credible, preserved, and documented.
Keywords: Memory Twin; historical game design; playfulness; paradata; multivocality; pluriversal and decolonial design
Anthony Cassar
is Head of the Technology and Experience Development Unit, which includes the IT Department and the Digitisation Department, where he oversees the preservation and digitisation of more than ninety national cultural heritage sites, including several UNESCO sites, entrusted to Heritage Malta. With more than thirty years of experience in IT and multimedia, Anthony leads digital-transformation initiatives designed to make Malta’s cultural heritage accessible and engaging worldwide. Anthony is currently pursuing a PhD at the Cyprus University of Technology (CUT), under the supervision of Marinos Ioannides, UNESCO Chair of Digital Cultural Heritage and Director of the Digital Heritage Research Lab at the Cyprus University of Technology in Limassol. Together they are working on establishing the significance of the evolving concept of the “Memory Twin,” which introduces a holistic framework for integrating both the tangible and intangible dimensions of cultural heritage.
Marinos Ioannides
is Professor at the Cyprus University of Technology, founder of the Digital Heritage Research Lab, and Director of the UNESCO Chair on Digital Cultural Heritage. He is an internationally recognised researcher in digital cultural heritage, with extensive experience in 3D digitisation, documentation, preservation, semantic knowledge representation, metadata and paradata, and the development of standards and methodologies for the long-term safeguarding of cultural heritage. He has coordinated and contributed to numerous European and international research initiatives and has played a significant role in advancing interdisciplinary approaches that connect emerging technologies with heritage research, interpretation, and preservation. More recently, together with Anthony S. Cassar, he co-initiated and developed the Memory Twin framework, extending conventional digital twin approaches toward a more holistic representation of cultural heritage that incorporates context, provenance, intangible values, lived experience, community knowledge, and the evolving processes through which heritage is understood and documented. See more: https://digitalheritagelab.eu/team/marinos-ioannides/
Aphrodite T. Andreou
is a visual artist, game designer, and cultural heritage researcher at Heritage Malta, where she coordinates Cultural Assets and EU Projects within the Technology and Experience Development Unit. She holds an MSc in Digital Games, and her practice brings together Research through Design, participatory and socially engaged methods, HCI and Animal–Computer Interaction (ACI), playfulness, and game-based approaches to cultural heritage interpretation. Her research explores game design as a critical and activist practice, particularly its potential to question anthropocentric hierarchies and create interspecies forms of dialogue, participation, and care. She has designed playful artefacts for bottlenose dolphins and works across digital games, board games, and site-specific interactive experiences for museums and heritage spaces. She approaches game design as an in-situ, participatory installation practice through which audiences can actively negotiate, reinterpret, and play with cultural and more-than-human narratives.