Virtual Booth

Indigenous heritage is increasingly overlooked in mainstream education, particularly for children in urban and semi-urban settings who have little direct exposure to communities such as the Bajau Laut of Semporna, Sabah, a group known for their free-diving skills, traditional fishing practices, and deep-rooted relationship with the sea. Existing cultural education materials remain largely text-based and passive, relying on written descriptions rather than lived experience and offering young learners few opportunities to engage meaningfully with Indigenous ways of life. "Penghuni Lautan" was developed specifically for this purpose to represent the Bajau Laut as a distinct ethnic community rather than to generalise indigenous culture broadly through an exploration-based digital game that introduces their traditions via interactive visual storytelling rather than conventional text.

The design team's grounding in an interactive multimedia course at a public university informed this direction. A questionnaire administered across consecutive sessions of the course showed ratings for the Teaching and Learning Activities dimension rising consistently, indicating growing student receptiveness to activity-based, interactive instructional approaches over passive, text-based delivery. This trend shaped the decision to apply the same activity-driven, exploratory design logic to cultural education for children, translating Bajau Laut cultural knowledge traditionally passed down orally and through practice into an interactive digital format rather than conventional text.

Designed for children aged 5 to 12, the game places players within a "day in the life" of a Bajau Laut community member. Explore their surroundings, discover traditional fishing tools and cultural facts, and complete a fishing activity modelled on daily practice. This experiential structure lets players build understanding through action rather than memorisation, addressing not just what the community does but why their relationship with the sea matters culturally, socially, and historically. Recent analysis of heritage-based video games identifies identity-driven content and people-centred perspectives as engagement features that remain comparatively underused, both of which "Penghuni Lautan" incorporates directly through its ethnic-specific, narrative-led exploration centred on the Bajau Laut. By translating oral and practice-based cultural knowledge into an interactive format built around one specific ethnic minority, the game offers a scalable, engaging, and culturally grounded alternative to text-based heritage education, contributing meaningfully to safeguarding traditions that are gradually fading from everyday practice.