Design and Development of a Virtual Reality Game for Cultural Heritage Education of Qiqiao Festival

Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) education faces challenges such as declining awareness among youth and the endangerment of traditional skills. This study presents an immersive virtual reality (VR) educational game as an innovative method for integrating digital technology with cultural heritage education. The project is grounded in the Qiqiao Festival of Zhucun, Guangzhou, and draws on both fieldwork and literature analysis to reconstruct the cultural significance of traditional crafts. Using Unreal Engine 5 and virtual technology, the research creates a multisensory game world based on a Lingnan folk setting and designs seven game quests where core folkloric elements of the Qiqiao Festival become gamified learning units. The integration of gamification and VR enhances cultural immersion and engagement, while gamified tasks and feedback mechanisms promote cultural knowledge acquisition. The study demonstrates that goal-driven and feedback-informed gamified systems can improve youth participation in cultural heritage education, offering a natural integration of cultural knowledge with engaging game play.