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Games Trends in Museums
- 2. games enable discovery
- 4. 59% of 6-65 year olds “consider themselves to be gamers”
- 5. “visitors need permission to look at art”
- 13. User testing
Editor's Notes
- 50 museum and gaming experts from across 14 countries.\nBrings to light...\nIn museums and galleries, games are being used as :\n- an audience development tool to entice new people to come through the doors or interact online\n- marketing assets and brand-building conversation starters\n- for education, learning and discovery, enabling better interpretation, understanding and engagement\n\n\n
- Good games are built around stories and there are millions of stories to tell within a collection. \n\nMost museums are built around objects whose relevance is in their history and human connections. You could say that “good stories are about people, not things”.\n\n\n
- This online game “Time Explorer” was developed by the British Museum in direct response to BBC research on the popularity of gaming - it showed that “100% of 6-10 year-olds” were using online games. \nSo they expanded their successful Young Explorers programme to include an online gaming element, using their in depth knowledge of the subject matter and expertise to build a picture of how objects were used, why they were made, and who used them. \n\n\n
- Many of the examples in the book highlighted how games and play are an integral part of learning and growing up for children, but research showed that games are also successfully being used to augment the museum experience for adults. \nThe same BBC study on gaming ---\nDifferent depths of interaction can attract new audiences and keep returning audiences engaged. For those seeking to reach new audiences, games can be used to encourage first-time visitors, people apprehensive of the gallery experience or those who simply think that museums are “not for them”.\nThe Museum of London in fact, developed online games with the hope of encouraging “[family] audiences who were thinking of visiting the Museum for the first time”.\n\n\n
- A surprising lesson often learnt for museums and galleries, is the process of needing permission to experience or have an opinion on museum exhibits, art in particular. \n\nOften games enable the audience to be in charge, gaining a closer relationship to the museum objects or stories. \n\n
- \nIn Art Heist, Coney worked with the Walker Art Gallery to create a game where participants where challenged participants to steal a work of art. The premise for this activity was to engage participants with ideas around conceptual art and questions of ownership and pose questions without lecturing or handing out crib sheets. In this way, play becomes open and allows for the audience to co-author the narrative.\n\n
- Tate Trumps looked at art exhibits in a different light by using a well-known game mechanic.It shifted perceptions of what type of interpretation can be used in a gallery. \nEXPLAIN MECHANIC\nOne of the main evaluation outputs of this popular game was the recommendation that future iterations would be playable anywhere in the world rather than just onsite in the gallery.\n
- Audience participation takes on a new level when users are asked to contribute to a collective outcome that could not be achieved solely as a single player.\nThe Smithsonian American Art Museum’s upcoming exhibition on video games was co-curated by gaming expert Chris Mellinos. The museum invited the public to select the final 80 included games from a selection of 240 showcased on a pre-exhibition website.\nContrary to some people’s fears, letting the audience gain more control over their experience does not remove the need for experts as there will always be value in the ability of a curator to inform and tell a story”\n
- Museum staff and academics are quick to flag up the benefit of external knowledge when designing games. Many museums have worked with design agencies to develop ideas, create prototypes and carry out user testing. \n\nNot only is collaboration happening between organisations, but also cross-departmentally within the museum. Museum staff bring a deep knowledge about the museum collections and exhibitions: “behind the scenes” information and less obvious connections between objects, which are perfect inspiration for game development.\n\n
- Game technology can be harnessed beyond its usual purpose to assist with research. Playground game archiving (clapping games, etc.) used Wii and Kinect and English Heritage lent PSPs (portable PlayStations) to young people, as a co-creative game-making tool, helping to unlock stories about a heritage site.\n\n
- Every game talked about in the book has learning objectives - but it’s key to recognise that some of these were calculated at the creation stage, and others became apparent after development. \nIt’s true to say that sometimes, the learning was as much about the creative process, negotiating relationships between audience, designers and museum experts.\n
- Allowing failure and experimenting ensures creativity and let’s inspiration shine through. Failure can be a key step in the invention process often it causes things to be examined critically and decide which elements to build upon and which to set aside. \n\nBoston Museum of Science brought in a team of students from a School for the Blind to develop an audio-only game, where users had to identify locations from background sounds. However, what they found in further testing was that the general public were baffled by the game, meaning it had to be simplified for sighted visitors!\n\n\n\n\n
- As a rule, user testing and prototyping make for better games. Some museums watched watched users play with the prototypes, leading to “mall changes to the interface that can have dramatic effects on the success of the game.\n\nSome museums worked with specific user groups for game testing such as local schools for kids games. The Lemelson Center in the US created a travelling low-tech, hands-on exhibition that needed to withstand use by millions of museum visitors. Rigorous evaluation was completed using evaluation questions such as “does it allow for trial and error?” and “is there possibility for success by people of different ages?”.\n\n\n\n\n
- We can summarise, that games allow the audience to look at objects in different ways, giving permission to question previous assumptions about the museum, its contents and its place in the users’ lives. \n\nThe recurring theme (in the book) is of the museum’s shift from a traditional “keeper of artefacts” to a “collection of stories”. Games allow the museum to become a social space and facilitate co-experience.\n\n