Designing virtual reality games as playable archives for documenting Mosuo domestic space

This paper examines how virtual reality games can be designed as playable archives for documenting intangible cultural heritage through situated and repeatable interaction. Existing Virtual heritage projects increasingly adopt photogrammetry and immersive visualization, yet many remain structured around navigation, clickable interfaces, and informational overlays, which limit how players encounter cultural practices that are enacted through bodily routines. Using a Mosuo matrilineal household in southwest China as a case study, this research focuses on how everyday domestic culture around the traditional kitchen ( huotang ) within local dwellings can be translated into a VR game prototype. In Mosuo culture, kinship and ritual hierarchy are enacted through spatial routines and repeated bodily practices that are difficult to convey through textual or visual documentation. Methodologically, the study develops a prototype-based design and a lightweight workflow that combines fieldwork, documentary analysis, interviews, ethnographic observation, photogrammetric capture, and digital modelling to reconstruct a lived domestic interior as a VR game environment. From these materials, culturally grounded ritual actions are translated into player tasks so that everyday routines, ritual practice, care labour are encountered through embodied participation. The resulting prototype links three design operations: selecting culturally shareable practices, anchoring them to architectural elements, and reorganizing them as task sequences that can be repeated in VR. The paper contributes an action selection and translation logic for converting culturally grounded domestic practice into VR gameplay. It positions ritualized everyday action as the operative unit of the playable archive and shows how cultural meaning can be connected to specific relations among body, object, action, and place. The study also recognizes that the socially situated and tacit dimensions of household culture cannot be fully reduced to repeatable tasks for a single player. It therefore presents the playable archive as a culturally bounded approach to VR gameplay that considers what can be made playable while addressing the tension between cultural responsibility and entertainment mechanics.