# Design of a Cultural Heritage Gesture-Based Puzzle Game and Evaluation of User Experience
## 1 Introduction  
Museums are very important, as they are excellent places for displaying and studying selected tangible and intangible assets of society and culture while they bring people together. The term \"museum\" comes from the Greek word \"mouseion\", i.e., the temple of muses, who were the daughters of [PERSON] and Mnemosyne (i.e., memory). Museums, as defined by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) organization, are dedicated to the protection and dissemination of the world's cultural heritage, as \"a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment\". According to the ICOM's definition [1], the mission of a museum is to provide education and enjoyment services to visitors, including elements that correspond to the properties of serious games (SGs), as SGs are games that have an educational purpose while they are not intended to be played primarily for enjoyment. Within this prism, it is evident that SGs are particularly suitable for enhancing the mission of museums, as they can unify learning and enjoyment aspects [2].  
The study presented in this paper explores the HapticSOUND serious game (Haptic Puzzle) depicted in Figure 1, a digital three-dimensional (3D) puzzle that visitors assembled to create the traditional Cretan lute.  
The HapticSOUND system is an innovative interactive virtual reality system for delivering personalized experiences and knowledge in an active, pleasant, and creative way. HapticSOUND was established at the Cretan Ethnology Museum (CEM) in Heraklion, on the Greek island of Crete. The design of the Haptic Puzzle was based on the conceptual model for the design of puzzle-based games proposed in [3], which specifies themain elements that must be taken into consideration when designing different types of educational puzzle games and the relationship between these elements. Such elements include the game's objectives, the puzzle's pieces and their relationship, and the levels of difficulty. Details on the objectives, the design and implementation, and the operation of HapticOUND subsystems, including the Haptic Puzzle subsystem, are published on HapticOUND's official website ([[https://hapticsound.uom.gr/](https://hapticsound.uom.gr/)]([https://hapticsound.uom.gr/](https://hapticsound.uom.gr/)), accessed on 23 April 2023). The primary aim of the Haptic Puzzle was to foster a positive attitude of the users towards CEM and museums in general, by engaging them in a creative and pleasant activity. For this reason, the presented study focuses on the user experience (UX) of the Haptic Puzzle and its aspects (e.g., user satisfaction, understandability or perspicuity), as they are very important for the quality of such approaches [4]. Although there are many studies on interactive tangible activities for cultural heritage (e.g., refs. [5; 6; 7] on tangible interaction, ref. [8] on the development of a physical puzzle, ref. [9] on fracturing artefacts for 3D printable puzzles, ref. [10] on evaluating 3D printed museum artefacts), there is a lack of research regarding intangible cultural heritage, especially 3D digital puzzles, user interfaces of 3D puzzles [11], and the user experience perceived in such games. In this context, this paper aimed to present insight into how a 3D puzzle serious game for a museum was designed and developed, including the perceived UX of the game. The research question of this study focused on the efficiency of the perceived UX of the Haptic Puzzle, which was evaluated using a user experience questionnaire (UEQ) [12] with a group of 92 participants aged 10 to 15 years.