CREAMARE Joins the Games for Culture Cluster

News

CREAMARE has joined the Games for Culture Cluster (GCC) as the first Creative Europe-funded project in the network.

How can games connect cultural heritage, scientific knowledge and environmental awareness? CREAMARE brings its experience in underwater cultural heritage and cross-sector collaboration to a European network exploring how games can benefit society.
CREAMARE is the first project funded by the Creative Europe Programme to join, broadening the Cluster’s connections across European funding programmes and adding a perspective rooted in cultural heritage: how games can support cultural communication, environmental awareness and public engagement.

Beyond entertainment: why the Games for Culture Cluster matters

The Cluster brings together sixteen EU-funded projects, both ongoing and completed, exploring how games can generate value beyond entertainment: learning, creativity, social cohesion, skills development and innovation. It encourages the co-design and co-creation of socially beneficial games, the exchange of knowledge and research, and cooperation between researchers, cultural organisations, creative professionals, industry stakeholders and other communities, with the broader ambition of strengthening games as meaningful tools for addressing societal challenges.

It also acts as a bridge to policy: together with the European Research Executive Agency (REA) and the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, it helps EU-funded projects share results and explore how research can inform future European policies, including the EU Gaming Strategy.

For CREAMARE, joining the Cluster means contributing a perspective shaped by the encounter between underwater archaeology, scientific research, cultural heritage and digital creativity, and exchanging practical experience with projects that use games to engage people with culture and society.

Bringing Creative Europe experience into the Cluster

CREAMARE’s contribution goes beyond a single digital product. Developed under the Creative Europe Programme, the project created a transnational, cross-sector framework connecting cultural institutions, scientific and research organisations, creative professionals and technology experts, so that they could co-produce digital experiences that communicate maritime and underwater cultural heritage while raising awareness of pollution and other threats to the oceans.

The framework took shape through a digital platform linking cultural organisations with creative teams, open calls, a residency for six creative professionals, and training and capacity-building activities. As a completed project, CREAMARE offers the Cluster tested results and lessons learned: cultural heritage is not simply content to be presented through a game, but the starting point for collaboration between cultural institutions, scientists, creative professionals and technology experts.

Nine underwater sites. One mission: protect our shared heritage.

The seabed holds stories that most people will never have the chance to discover firsthand. Ancient harbours, shipwrecks and submerged archaeological sites are part of our shared heritage, yet they remain largely out of sight, and often out of mind.

CREAMARE: The Game, the project’s central demonstration, brings them into view. In this first-person 3D adventure, players become divers and explore nine real underwater cultural heritage sites in eight countries, from the Pharos of Alexandria to Algeciras Bay. They uncover archaeological remains, solve puzzles rooted in the history of each site and tackle ecological challenges to defeat a monster from the future. The aim is not simply to reproduce archaeological sites in 3D, but to connect two issues that are closely related yet rarely considered together: the preservation of underwater cultural heritage and the health of the ocean.

Free to play on Steam and the Epic Games Store, the game has reached approximately 80,000 players and has been recognised by UNESCO as an Ocean Decade Activity under the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021–2030).

A new perspective for European collaboration

The challenge is not only to make games about culture, but to understand how interactive experiences can help people discover places they might never visit, engage with histories they might never encounter and recognise why their preservation matters.

CREAMARE joins the Games for Culture Cluster with a clear contribution: making underwater cultural heritage more accessible and showing how games can connect cultural discovery with responsibility for the ocean.