In June 2025, pilot partners of the i-Game project conducted four co-creation workshops across Estonia, Greece, Italy, and Denmark, involving participants from diverse backgrounds—many of whom were not gamers nor game designers. These collaborative sessions used a structured methodology to empower participants to shape meaningful gaming experiences rooted in cultural heritage and design.
The co-creation workshops have fallen under 💫 Brainstorm Your Game Idea💫 theme, allowing the participants to explore the i-Game platform, experiment digital tools, experience the interaction among the members of the i-Game community, and eventually exchange ideas and translate them into tangible solutions.
4 project partners running the piloting cases in four participating countries managed to engage more than 60 participants by delivering 2 online – Textile Museum in Prato (Italy) and KEPA (Greece) – and 2 onsite – Estonian National Museum (Estonia) and Museospace Foundation (Netherlands) – co-creation sessions with the aim of developing concepts for game-based experiences and validating context-specific solutions related to the i-Game platform 💡
More precisely, the sessions held by the Estonian National Museum, the Textile Museum in Prato, and the Museospace Foundation in co-operation with Das Relevante Museum of NORDMETALL-Stiftung, focused on game-based museum experiences. Whereas the session held by KEPA was set up by fashion designers, textile professionals and game developers, focusing on game-based experiential learning approaches.
🧩 All sessions had some things in common: Excitement; Active participation; Curiosity about next steps; an overwhelmingly positive impact; a trusted process from setting objectives and identifying audiences to game mechanics, storytelling, and aesthetics; committed facilitation; the valuable contribution of our project partners: Cookie Box unfolding gamification and introducing the workshop process, Uni Systems setting the platform in motion, and Raising The Floor highlighting inclusion.
A rich set of visual assets, gamified rituals, and partners’ resources reinforced coherence across local implementations. At the core of these experiences, each workshop resulted to an Experience Design Document (EDD), a strategic blueprint that integrates narrative, technology, art, and gameplay—the Game Tetrad—to translate participants’ (users’) insights into applied game prototypes.
The outcomes of this interactive process were shared to the participants, with the aim of guiding future game development and transforming their initial game ideas into something tangible ✨
Ultimately, i-Game demonstrates a replicable model for how game-based innovation in Cultural and Creative Industries can emerge through collaborative design, deeply engaged communities, and purposeful facilitation.