Robert Cawston. Generating engagement: creating playful experiences with museum collections
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MCG’s Museums+Tech 2016 presentation Parallel sessions B #3 Robert Cawston, National Museums Scotland, Generating engagement: creating playful experiences with museum collections
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Robert Cawston. Generating engagement: creating playful experiences with museum collections
- 1. Generating engagement: Creating playful experiences with museum collections
- 2. Rob Cawston National Museums Scotland @cawston @ntlmuseumsscot
- 3. Hello! This is Gen…
- 4. A sickly, frail creature…
- 5. A blank sheet of paper • WellcomeTrust funding • Part of large redevelopment project at National Museum of Scotland • Focussed on biomedical collections in new Science andTech galleries • A “mobile app” ...? “We will produce innovative new content which may be based around a game, challenge or other means to build a story and promote interaction and engagement with our biomedical collections.”
- 7. Who – or, what – is Gen?
- 12. High scores Collect objects + Earn achievements
- 18. Audience Research Range of responses and behaviour: • Different visitor motivations and group dynamics • Different journeys and touch points in the museum Common themes: • Open to a deeper relationship with the museum • Expect high-quality, reliable tech • Value learning by doing, experience and experimentation over consuming information • More interested in how they learn = Play, exploration, serendipity.
- 19. #3 Create an open brief
- 20. Product Manifesto The product will: • Be a self-contained experience that delivers a of achievement each time it’s used • Deliver learning through surprise and delight • Reframe the users views of an object or idea • Be playful and experimental • Increase the feeling that the museum is a place them • Work on a single device • Be an offer that is simple to understand • Be aimed at adults (not for under 12 years old) • Be durable and work every time • Provide visitors with at least 1 new object to to/idea to understand • Create data that is open and visible to other users • Be marketed effectively The product won’t: • Be cutting edge for it’s own sake • Be marketed only through object labels or in gallery
- 21. Responses
- 29. Where are the audience?
- 31. Engagement
- 32. What’s Next…? • Further promotion • Game codes • Learning activity • Seeding • 3D printing?
- 33. Go play at nms.ac.uk/gen Thank you…
Editor's Notes
- Hello!
- This is me. Thanks for having me. I didn’t think I would ever be talking about a digital blob but…
- Say hello to Gen! I am going to briefly introduce the background to this project, run you through the basics of the Gen game, and then pull out 5 things we learnt through the process. I appreciate that some of you might be feeling like this…
- So I’ll do my best to stick to time…
- This talk was entitled Generating Engagement and I think that sums up the challenge we were given about two years ago – how to create interest in a specific set of objects – in this case, our biomedical collections? The project was part of a much wider project at the National Museum of Scotland involving ten new galleries. As part of their funding of the new science and technology galleries, the Wellcome Trust had provided £40,000 to create a digital product focussed on the Biomedical-themed objects within the galleries. This was to cover the build of the digital project, with some additional for marketing and audience research, testing and evaluation. In many ways it was a blank sheet of paper – as you can see from the description in an early funding bid here there’s not too much flesh on the bones! We knew it had to be a digital product of some kind - And… it was often referred to it as a “mobile app” in internal documents. There was also an expectation that it would be a “heads up” experience connecting, visitors to the objects within the museum space.
- A little bit of background to the collections themselves. These objects ranged from early wooden stethoscopes and X-ray tubes to modern day retina scanners, wheelchairs and prosthetic limbs, as well as curious items like the silicon testicle (something proving so popular in the museum that it keeps being stolen!). We also had a brilliant Assistant Curator in Sophie Goggins and a superb science communicator in Ali Floyd >>> Those are their heads up there. This was a project with a healthy budget, an interested but hands-off funder, an open brief, an interesting collection and some brilliant colleagues – something that doesn’t come round all that often. So… where did we end up. Who – or what – is Gen?
- It’s quite hard to describe a game as the best way to understand it is to play but… in short… Gen is an online game allowing players to care for a blobby digital creature (called a Gen) using objects from the museum. It was created in partnership with the digital team at Aardman and it is not an app, but built in HTML5 meaning that it’s available to play across mobiles, tablets and desktops (“device agnostic”).
- This is the main game screen: The Gen has three systems, each with a health rating (Respiratory / Neurological / Cardiovascular) If your health hits zero on any system, then that’s game over These are the cards in your hand and you can play x2 cards per turn If you survive a certain number of turn you regenerate and reach the next level! We really wanted to keep the focus on the blobby creature – to create empathy, warmth, charm, a simple story and an instant connection with users. You can poke him to move and make a noise and his expression and colour changes according to his health. [reaction at start]
- Each turn you Gen can be affected by an illness on one of its systems. Using a blob also avoided some awkwardness with the basic concept of a human getting sick ALL THE TIME. As well as providing us with some licence around how different illnesses or medicines affected the Gen… … it suffers from things like Discombobulation or blobular fever.
- You have to play a Diagnosis card to find out what the illness is
- You can then play a treatment card to counter the amount of damage it will do each round. Both diagnosis and treatment cards are real objects from the museum and clicking on them reveals more information about the objects. We worked really hard as a team to come up with appropriate diseases, diagnosis and treatments for our real objects. There’s a lot of complex data behind the game! Things are staged to become more difficult the longer you play, more damaging illnesses, but also more interesting and affective cards.
- There’s also standard game features like scoreboards, and sometimes the game will serve up special cards to help you out. Players can unlocking achievements and their encouraged to collect all the objects in the game. >>> Basically it’s a better Pokemon Go. Or, a very poor Tamagotchi.
- Sadly, this is always the end point! >>>>>>>>> So… how did we get to this point? And, what did we learn along the way??
- Number 1: Recognise your restrictions. Even though the brief looked like a blank page we soon discovered that certain routes were off the table.
- These are the Science and Tech Galleries. Very busy and the collection is scattered across 6 galleries. It proved very hard to gain access to the space during the development So… something like a trail based on iBeacons was ruled out. ALSO We were also restricted in the amount of changes we could make to the museum – either handing out devices or adding in promotional materials which menat no banners, or stickers on cases. (something we’ve found very limiting with our in-gallery mobile experience for the fashion galleries).
- [I’m sure some of you have seen this from cartoonist Brady Bonus]. What often kills a project is your idea of it at the start. We dream of something at kick off without pausing to think what the user really needs. So, we went directly to the audience, running a series of intensive one-to-one interviews with museum visitors with Frankly Green and Webb.
- Here’s some of the key findings… Visitors all experienced the museum in different ways They confirmed they didn’t simply want more information (they knew where to find this stuff – they googled things!) Instead they indicated they liked learning by doing – these were the words which came up again and again: experimentation, play, exploration, discovery. So, whilst this didn’t give us one answer to what to make, it steered us in a certain direction….
- .. and led us to resist detailing too much about the final product in our brief.
- From the research FG&W created a very simple Product Manifesto saying what the product should and shouldn’t do or be. This essentially was the brief that went out leaving room for companies to respond in really creative ways … and we got some fantastic and very different responses.
- I don’t have time to go over these now but ideas ranged from digital organisms fed by interaction on social media to group games led in the museum itself. There was lots of argument about the route to take but… …we picked Aardman as it was a brilliant pitch we loved their early, fleshy concept drawings. Also, working with them in an agile way was really helpful for this type of project where we weren’t too clear about what the final product might look like. In essence it allowed us to experiment, test out ideas and…
- Embrace failure!
- Here’s some very early concept drawings – trying to work out how to cram information onto a small screen.
- Here we are in our weekly Skype meetings, kicking off each new development sprint with a specific focus on a new element of the build (character, IA, tutorial, game balancing)
- There was lots of back and forth on the design of the Gen itself. The noses were rejected early on – a little too creepy and ambiguous. It’s also amazing what the addition of eyebrows can do to convey a range of emotions.
- Here’s where we were mid-way through the project – and this was a bit of a crisis point! At this stage we had three measures for each of the three systems: pain, well-being, and another one = way too complex and people when Ali Floyd tested it on the museum floor people were very confused! So, we scaled it back to one universal measure of health. >>> This flexibility was vital… we weren’t stuck with work completed! === Not so much embracing failure as building in flexibility to test things out an re-engineer
- (possibly skip) We also built in a second phase of development after the game had gone live to look at the stats and find the key blockers to people accessing or understanding the game. One of these was alerting players from the off that their mobile experience would be far better if they saved the game on their home-screen. Another was recognising that people played the game a long time once they understood it. The in-game Tutorial was simplified and streamlined to get people into the game quicker.
- And finally… This is perhaps the most important point to make. Without the ability or appropriate budget to promote things like games, they will not find an audience.
- We knew that creating an App would have created a much richer experience, aiding animation and allowing players to dip in and out of the game over time. BUT An app also puts up an immediate barrier to people engaging with the game and – from experience with our own apps and advice from Aardman we knew that our marketing budget wasn’t big enough to compensate for this. PLUS We already had a host of games on our Explore site which Elaine was talking about at the start of the day. Some of these were driving a lot of traffic to the site, despite being flash based or a little bit ropey! We wanted more people to engage and perhaps sacrificed a more polished product, although I think we’ve pushed the tech a long way!
- So, here’s where we are with stats – pretty happy with over 22,000 plays in the first quarter of the year. Boosted by online advertising – Aardman created some really nice assets to use as adds across these x3 platforms. You can see the uplift in traffic – 300 per day. We were also picked up on a web games subreddit which drove this big spike and we were commenting in that thread. Very savvy audience, even fixing some of the code for us!! There’s also an interesting split between devices – it’s good to see a fairly even split.
- People are playing the game for a long(ish time). 7 minutes on average. We’re also really pleased that the most common action is clicking on the object cards so we know that the objects themselves are forming the heart of the game.
- We’ve also staged promotion across the year, to avoid getting lost in the initial noise of the galleries opening and to try out new things These include – more online promotion Making game codes available – e.g. a Golden Gen or immunity from certain diseases The Learning team are also keen to use the game in their science programming and we’re talking to Aardman about seeding the game to certain html5 game sites – we’re Also trying to work out how to 3D print a Gen and let others do so. We own rights to the creature in case it gets very popular.
- So, that’s me. Do ask me anything or grab me afterwards. I hope you get a chance to play. Don’t let Gen die!