ARTé: Mecenas, the Renaissance Strategy Game for Art History

ARTé: Mecenas is the first game in the ARTé collection by Triseum, a company in Bryan, Texas that grew out of the LIVE Lab at Texas A&M University. The collection supports a traditional college-level art history survey course, and Mecenas supplements the instruction. It teaches how local and international economies were connected in Renaissance Italy and how those economies shaped art and art patronage.

Students take the role of a member of the Medici, the merchant and banking family. They balance relationships with powerful city-states, merchant factions and the Catholic Church to build and keep a financial empire, and they level up to the status of Mecenas, an influential patron of the arts. The game includes more than 130 pieces of art by more than 70 artists from the 15th and 16th centuries. Instructors can create custom classes in an integrated portal that tracks students' progress and engagement.

Triseum published a study from Fall 2016 on the learning effect of the game. Of 184 art history students who consented, 173 completed the study and earned extra credit. After about two hours of play, the experimental group showed a knowledge gain of 24.7 percent from pre-test to post-test, with an effect size of 1.14 (Cohen's d), which Triseum calls large. These are the company's figures from a single study of one unit of complementary instruction, and Triseum said in 2017 that it was seeking independent researchers to replicate it. Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi put the game into its curriculum again for the Spring 2017 term.

ARTé: Mecenas won the Innovation Award in the 2017 Serious Games Showcase & Challenge, as the contest's 2017 results page lists. The contest page for the game spells the title Arte: Mecenas and records the Innovation Award as available from 2016. The 2017 winners are covered in the article on the 2017 contest.

The original game address, arte.triseum.com, now forwards to the page triseum.com/arte-mecenas/. Browsers have shown a security warning on the old address since August 14, 2021. The new page was online in November 2026. The page describes the game as available to institutions, classes and individuals and asks interested buyers to make contact for classroom and institutional pricing; it gives no price. It repeats the finding of a knowledge gain of nearly 25 percent after about two hours of play.

The Triseum home page lists further games under the same collection, ARTé: Lumière and ARTé: Hemut, and the calculus game Variant: Limits. No page checked announces that ARTé: Mecenas is retired.