The Future of Playing with the Past: New Opportunities in Interpreting Cultural Heritage
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Keynote delivered in March 2018 in Reykjavik for the “Let’s Play With Heritage – Seminar & Think Tank on Gamification and Heritage”. It is part of the Connected Culture and Natural Heritage in a Northern Environment (CINE) project, an EU-funded collaborative digital heritage project between 9 partners and 10 associated partners from Norway, Iceland, Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland. CINE aims to transform people’s experiences of outdoor heritage sites through technology, building on the idea of “museums without walls”.
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The Future of Playing with the Past: New Opportunities in Interpreting Cultural Heritage
- 1. The Future of Playing with the Past: New Opportunities in Interpreting Cultural Heritage Ed Rodley Peabody Essex Museum Hnefatafl. By Craig Rodway CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
- 7. Web development Immersive environments Video production In-gallery interpretation Game development Me circa 2018
- 8. •Gamification •Games and play •Two game design concepts to consider •The challenges & opportunities of working together
- 9. What is gamification? badgesprogress barsleaderboards
- 10. Gabe Zicherman 2012 What is gamification? Gamification is “using some elements of game systems in the cause of a business objective. It's easiest to identify the trend with experiences (frequent flyer programs, Nike Running/Nike+, or Foursquare) that feel immediately game-like. The presence of key game mechanics, such as points, badges, levels, challenges, leaderboards, rewards, and onboarding, are signals that a game is taking place.”
- 11. Gabe Zicherman 2012 What is gamification? Gamification is “using some elements of game systems in the cause of a business objective. It's easiest to identify the trend with experiences (frequent flyer programs, Nike Running/Nike+, or Foursquare) that feel immediately game-like. The presence of key game mechanics, such as points, badges, levels, challenges, leaderboards, rewards, and onboarding, are signals that a game is taking place.”
- 12. Margaret Robertson, 2011 “Gamification is an inadvertent con. It tricks people into believing that there’s a simple way to imbue their thing… with the psychological, emotional and social power of a great game… Ian Bogost 2011 “‘Gamification’ is a misnomer. A better name for this practice is exploitationware.” Jaakko Stenros 2015 Gamification “usually refers to using game elements or game design to enhance or to make more attractive services and products that are not ludic.”
- 14. What is a game?
- 15. What is a game? …engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules …”not serious” …absorbing the player intensely and utterly. …no material interest Johan Huizinga Free (voluntary), separate [in time and space], uncertain, unproductive Roger Caillois Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman Jesper Juul
- 16. Juul’s Six Characteristics of Games 1. Rules: Games are rule-based 2. There are variable, quantifiable outcomes 3. There are values assigned to possible outcomes 4. Player effort is required 5. Player is attached to the outcome 6. There are negotiable consequences
- 17. The game itself is unimportant. It is the playing that matters.
- 19. Easy ≠ Fun
- 20. Fun is hard
- 22. Gaming has new tools to offer
- 23. The thing you’re designing Magic Circle
- 24. Our culture Their experience The thing you’re designing Their journey expectations reflection memoryexperience Johnanna Koljonen, Alibis for Interaction Koljonen’s participant journey
- 25. Interaction alibi Interaction Alibi: A rule, object, or change of state that allows a human to interact.This idea is central to designing for participation. An alibi might be a role, a rule, a narrative, a game, a mask, an instruction, an introduction. An interaction alibi helps you understand what you’re expected to do, feel safe trying something new, and trust that the outcome will be worth your time. Johanna Koljonen
- 26. Great Costume Burning Man 2013 . By Duncan Rawlinson CC BY-NC-2.0 Adults need excuses to play
- 29. Immersive theatre • Creates a story world • Tactile, sensual environments • Audience is free to explore • Players and audience interact • Both social and deeply intimate
- 30. Nordic larp
- 31. Nordic larp • Creates a story world • Tactile, sensual environments • Ambitious • Requires player commitment • Non-commercial • Minimal game mechanics • High production values
- 32. The challenges of collaboration Vera de Kok [CC BY-SA 4.0]
- 33. The challenges of collaboration • Differing perceptions of time • Transmediality of the cultural heritage experiences • Weakness of objective
- 34. Differing perceptions of time The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali
- 35. “A museum exhibition is ‘the medium of media’” Dan Spock by @danspock Transmediality
- 36. An exhibition can utilize: • • the written word, • • sound, • • image, • • moving image, • • performance, • • installation, and • most recently, • • digital media. Gallery One Cleveland Museum of Art
- 37. Weakness of objective ? Game Heritage experience
- 38. The opprtunities of collaboration Wine & Cheese by Jordan Johnson . Wikimedia Commons CC BY 2.0
- 39. The opprtunities of collaboration • Creating storyworlds • Designing communities • Dealing with transgression • Making gardens vs theatre
- 40. Kingdom Come: Deliverance Storyworld creation
- 41. National Museum of Finland VR
- 42. Storyworld creation Image courtesy of Ubisoft Assassin's Creed Origins Discovery Tour
- 43. Storyworld creation Image courtesy of Ubisoft Assassin's Creed Origins Discovery Tour
- 44. Storyworld creation Image courtesy of Ubisoft Assassin's Creed Origins Discovery Tour
- 46. Dealing with transgressive behavior Cheat! by Craig Sunter. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
- 47. t(p) Staffan Björk’s Mischief Metric Graffitti from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook, attributed to one of his apprentices
- 48. The amount of time until a penis appears in your user generated content t(p)
- 49. “We’re not here to ruin the game, just your game.” The Goonswarm
- 50. Gardening vs theatre Images from collection of Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
- 52. Collaborations have tremendous potential to generate new and valuable kinds of experiences
- 53. Thanks! Ed Rodley Peabody Essex Museum www.pem.org Tel: +1 978 542-1849 Email: ed_rodley@pem.org Social Media: @erodley
Editor's Notes
- [Gohan dayin weenir!]
- The Peabody Essex Museum is in Salem, MA in the northeastern corner of the US, the part referred to as “New England.” Salem is about 15 miles north of Boston, and 200 miles northeast of New York City.
- PEM is the oldest continuously-operating museum in the country, tracing its founding back to 1799. In the 19th century, Salem merchants and ship captains made enormous fortunes in trade with Asia, and brought back objects from their travels around the world. Fun fact: In 1800, Salem was the largest port in the United States, ahead of Boston, New York, or Philadelphia.
- In 1993, PEM became a museum of art and culture, and its collecting shifted to include a strong emphasis on contemporary art in addition to its historic collections. It’s an interesting mix of old and new with particularly strong collections of maritime history, Asian, South Asian, and Native American art, a major research library, and two dozen historic houses from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. So, that’s PEM.
- Additionally, PEM also owns and maintains 20-odd historic buidlings from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. It’s a fascinating mix…
- I’ve worked in museums my whole adult life. I started off as a registrar, looking at objects in dark rooms.
- Now at least I get to look up! I’m responsible for developing a variety of media projects at PEM, which include In-gallery interpretation, like this AR viewer that let you “look inside” a model of the Queen Mary Video production Immersive environments like this recreation of a 19th century Impressionist’s studio boat, where you could look out the stern at a tranquil river scene while the canvas next to it showed a timelapse of a painter capturing that scene. We also do website And now, I often work with game designers to create gameful experiences for visitors.
- So what I’d like to talk about this morning are potentials; the potential for game theory and design practices to inform how cultural heritage professionals do what they, and the potential for game designers and cutlural heritage practitioners to work together to make meaningful, satisfying heritage experiences. We’ll start with Gamification, Games and play, Two game design concepts to consider And then The challenges & opportunities of working together So lets begin, shall we?
- You’ve probably encountered gamification in the wild without even knowing that’s what it is. As a design technique, it’s gained wide currency on the web. Here’s just a few examples.
- One of the earliest boosters of gamification is Gbe Zicherman. His deifintiion of gamification is really telling and explains a lot of my complicated relationship with the term.
- You’re not playing, you just feel like you are. Or in other words, you’re getting played.
- This upset a lot of people, particularly game designers.
- What does it mean to be a game? It’s such a simple concept, until you try to define it, which lots of theorists have…
- “… a free activity standing quite consciously outside ”ordinary” life as being ”not serious”, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner.” Huizinga “… an activity which is essentially: Free (voluntary), separate [in time and space], uncertain, unproductive, governed by rules, make-believe.” Caillois “A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.” Salen and Zimmerman “A game is a rule-based formal system with a variable and quantifiable outcome, where different outcomes are assigned different values, the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome, the player feels attached to the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable.” Juul
- Play is an even bigger idea than game As Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman said, “The goal of successful game design is meaningful play, but play is something that emerges from the functioning of the rules. As a game designer, you can never directly design play. You can only design the rules that give rise to it. Game designers create experience, but only indirectly.” you can never directly design play. You can only design the rules that give rise to it.
- So what is play? As Mitch Resnick pointed out “…Too often, designers and educators try to make things “easy” for learners, thinking that people are attracted to things that are easy to do. But that is not the case. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihályi has found that people become most deeply engaged in activities that are challenging, but not overwhelming. ” Or, to put it another way, let’s try a game called Progress Wars.
- Seymour Papert calls this idea Hard Fun “…everyone likes hard challenging things to do. But they have to be the right things matched to the individual and to the culture of the times.
- Henry Jenkins Part of what makes play valuable as a mode of problem-solving and learning is that it lowers the emotional stakes of failing: players are encouraged to suspend some of the real world consequences of the represented actions, to take risks and learn through trial and error. The underlying logic is one of die and do over. “ Elaine Gurian In a world where one can increasingly customize one’s reality and can choose to voluntarily limit access only to those sources who reassure one’s already held opinions, the museum can become a “safe space for unsafe ideas”
- So, I’d argue that its not gamification, nor even games that we should be interested, but in the ways that those things let people play. And in that regard, gaming has some great tools to offer us. The two I’m going offer up are the concept of the magic circle, and the interaction alibi.
- It owes its current vogue though to Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, who wrote “To play a game means entering into a magic circle, or perhaps creating one as a game begins.” In their 2003 book, “Rules of Play: Fundamentals of Game Design”. Since then, it’s become a foundational concept of game design, and has its own sub-literature devoted to critiquing or defending the idea. What Salen and Zimmerman meant by “magic circle” was the idea that it is a boundary. On the outside is the world, and on the inside is the game. And when players cross that threshold, the rules change, norms change, and people’s roles and behaviors change. What is verboten or discouraged in the world can become acceptable inside the magic circle. The stereotypical quiet meek person who turns into a cutthroat poker player is just one example of how play redefines the rules, or at least establishes a different set while the play is occurring.
- Straight out of Huizinga via Salen and Zimmerman. I first encountered it through Johanna Koljonen’s great Alibis for Interaction in Mälmo, Sweden. “magic circle” is a boundary. On the outside is the world, and on the inside is the game. And when players cross that threshold, the rules change, norms change, and people’s roles and behaviors change. What is verboten or discouraged in the world can become acceptable inside the magic circle. The stereotypical quiet meek person who turns into a cutthroat poker player is just one example of how play redefines the rules, or at least establishes a different set while the play is occurring. To me, the act of becoming a visitor to a heritage site is the same thing. Whatever you were in the world, you become this new thing, and new norms apply. The Magic Circle also useful to heritage professionals because it is a way to see the visitor experience holistically. In the diagram, the visitor’s journey starts long before they get to the magic circle of the thing you’re designing for them. Their journey is rooted in the larger cultural context of wherever they are and their particular personal experience. Along the way, they’ve picked up expectations about what is going to happen when they enter that magic circle. It is very easy to spend all of one’s time deciding what to do with visitors when they arrive at the entrance to your thing, but by then, they are already a long way into their journey, and you’ve lost opportunities to influence them. And most importantly, the thing that happens inside the magic circle is well defined. Have you ever accidentally played a game? Me neither. Have you ever wandered from one part of a museum to another and realized belatedly that you’ve entered another exhibition? Me too.
- An alibi is an excuse to perform an act and an action of some kind without fear of the consequences. If you as a experience designer want somebody to try something new, or do something scary like interacting with people don't know, giving them an alibi is an explicit way of giving them permission to be someone else. Getting tangled up in knots with other people is usually frowned on, but if you’re playing Twister, then it’s expected and the transgression of invading someone else’s personal space is forgiven because it’s part of the game.
- Sebastian Deterding ‘“the most obvious motivation for play—autotelic enjoyment— also sits in most direct tension with adult identity. To account for their play, adults therefore regularly resort to alibis, motivational accounts that deflect negative inference from their play behavior to their character. Adults account for play as serving their adult responsibilities”. Did this person need to go to BM to dress up like a bike riding pteranodon? No. But the festival itself is an alibi to become a different person for a few hours or days.
- Alibis can be very simple.
- Alibis can be as simple as giving out identical masks to audiences at the the immersive theatre presentation Sleep No More. What alibi do you think the masks provide? Anonymity? Silence? There’s no mouth hole, only eye holes. How would you behave in a crowd of people all wearing the same mask? CLICK This brings us to immersive theatre, which is one of a couple of very difffernt forms of play that I want to add to the mix of experiences that have things to offer heritage preofessionals.
- As opposed to traditional theatre, with players on stage and an audience in their seats, immersive theater is a performance form that emphasizes the importance of a specific designed space that both the cast and audience inhabit. Stephen Eckert’s piece in Contemporary Performance is a great starting place to learn more about it. https://contemporaryperformance.com/2017/12/09/immersive-theater/. Immersive theatre creates lush, tactile sensual environments that become both the setting for group experience and diverse individual audience experiences. No longer confined to seat, the audience is free to explore the space of the performance, players and audience mingling and often interacting. Immersive theatre creates a story world where the performance of the actors, though central, is not the only means of conveying the narrative. Sets contain hints and clues, bits of backstory, and additional information that can profoundly influence a given audience member’s understanding of the performance. It is both social and deeply intimate.
- Vera de Kok [CC BY-SA 4.0]
- Vera de Kok [CC BY-SA 4.0]
- ← → Cultural heritage professionals tend to have a very long view of things. It comes with the territory when you deal with the past, and preservation stretching out into the foreseeable future. Projects germinate for a long time, take a long time to fundraise, and sometimes years to realize. This can lead to feeling a bit like one of Tolkien’s Ents when dealing with people who make software for a living, like computer game designers. The software industry moves at a pace that is completely alien to most of my colleagues’ experience. Instead of years, software people are focusing on design sprints, where two weeks out is a normal horizon. Products are conceived, built, tested, launched, and revised in a matter of months, or the amount of time it might take to make one major decision on a large exhibition project. And this anti-pattern is a tough one to overcome. Everything about modern software development in the Agile/Lean era is organized around privileging the production of code, making product, and fixing it after if needed. Though agile methodologies are starting to creep into museums, the norm is still a much more risk-averse, serial production methodology that emphasizes quality, “getting it right”, over all else. Minimum Viable Products can be a hard sell. Don’t underestimate the culture shock collaboration will create for both partners.
- Most game designers tend to specialize in a particular medium. Board game designers make board games, computer game designers work in computer code. The difficultly of matching up broad but shallow expertise and narrow but deep expertise can be significant. To the specialists, the transmedialists can look like well-meaning dilettantes, and to the transmedialists, the specialists look like embodiments of Maslow's Hammer, "I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."
- One kind of game that has become very popular in the past few years has been games that feature large, persistent worlds that are inhabited by thousands or millions of players. These games have large overarching narratives that propel the action, and serve as the background for individual players to have their own stories play out. Exploring a storyworld is also a deeply constructivist endeavor. You put together elements as you navigate the storyspace, and your edifice of knowledge will look different than anyone else’s. This was at least half the fun of Myst. I’d decide that everything we’d learned meant one thing, and my wife would often have constructed a completely different narrative. A big part of the fun of our playing the game was the dialogic interaction we’d have about what was going on while we were playing. Most of all, the new kinds of game storyworlds allow visitors to have both a social experience, and a personal experience, without the technological backflips we try to do to encourage them to “personalize” experiences.
- Bohemia – located in the heart of Europe, the region is rich in culture, silver, and sprawling castles. The death of its beloved ruler, Emperor Charles IV, has plunged the kingdom into dark times: war, corruption, and discord are tearing this jewel of the Holy Roman Empire apart. One of Charles' sons, Wenceslas, has inherited the crown. Unlike his father, Wenceslas is a naive, self-indulgent, unambitious monarch. His half-brother and King of Hungary, Sigismund the Red Fox, senses weakness in Wenceslas. Feigning good will, Sigismund travels to Bohemia and kidnaps his half-brother. With no king on the throne, Sigismund is now free to plunder Bohemia and seize its riches. In the midst of this chaos, you're Henry, the son of a blacksmith. Your peaceful life is shattered when a mercenary raid, ordered by King Sigismund himself, burns your village to the ground. By bittersweet fortune, you are one of the few survivors of this massacre. Without a home, family, or future you end up in the service of Lord Radzig Kobyla, who is forming a resistance against the invasion. Fate drags you into this bloody conflict and shoves you into a raging civil war, where you help fight for the future of Bohemia.
- After the new virtual reality (VR) opens to the public on 13 February, you can put on glasses and move back in time at the National Museum of Finland. The VR allows you to step into R. W. Ekman’s painting “The opening of the Diet 1863 by Alexander II” and speak with the emperor and representatives of the different social classes. You can also experience the Hall of Mirrors of the former Imperial Palace, or current Presidential Palace. The VR is displayed at the new exhibition section, which is built around the theme of 1860s Finland as an autonomous Grand Duchy of Russia. The room includes the emperor’s throne, a portrait and coat of Alexander II, portraits of Finnish notables and the first Finnish coins. The aim is to build a dialogue between authentic museum artefacts and a digitally produced world to provide visitors with a real sense of being transported into history. This builds a historic moment on the artefacts that further expands the visitor experience.
- The crux of what I want to say is that game designers have a better take on the nature of learning than curriculum designers. They have to. Their livelihoods depend on millions of people being prepared to undertake the serious amount of learning needed to master a complex game. If their public failed to learn, they would go out of business. - Papert June 1998 issue of Game Developer
- Johanna Koljonen We have to design the community of players as much as the games themselves…[W]hen you're not making active choices about about how the players should engage with with the game and with each other (just as with anything else you don’t design), the participants will bring it. It will emerge and it's going to emerge at the lowest common denominator.
- Ages ago, when I was a fresh young thing at my very first Museums and the Web conference in 1998 or ’99, I heard Craig Rosa, then of the Tech Museum in San Jose, talk about how working on the Web was a fundamentally different kind of work than exhibition development, requiring different outlooks and skills. The Web, he argued was like a garden. Gardens are never “done” in the way an exhibition or book is done. Gardens have only two states; actively tended, or abandoned. Gardeners are constantly monitoring the garden, checking on the plants, pulling up the dead ones, planting new ones, and tending the ones currently growing. And the tending never leads to a state of being “done”. Theatre folk tend to work like mad towards a deadline, and cram a ton of work into too little time, in order to finish by opening night. And once the show opens, it is largely “done” and performed until it’s time is deemed to be up. Which one sounds more like museum work. For me, it is certainly the latter. I long for more of the former, because this way of looking at the work we do has great potential to help us make different kinds of heritage experiences, and to escape the trap of the transactional museum visit.
- Total DMA Friends enrollment: 100,000 innovative reengineering of the traditional museum membership strategy. Available to anyone who wishes to join, DMA Friends focuses on activating engagement with the Museum and building long-term relationships with visitors. The Museum’s emphasis on creating meaningful arts experiences and an open and welcoming environment has expanded its audience base, with 97.1% of DMA Friends self-identifying as new members at the Museum.
- The exciting thing I see in gatherings like the CINE seminar in Reykjavik is their potential to create a community of interest around the topic of games and heritage. The domain expertise of the people in the room is so varied that it provides a great example of what the cognitive scientist Gerhard Fischer calls “symmetry of ignorance”. Unlike communities of practice, where all the stakeholders come from roughly the same field, communities of interest bring together stakeholders with different practices. The act of creating a shared understanding of a complex problem–like creating engaging heritage experiences–among all stakeholders can lead to new insights and the kinds of experiences that would be hard to envision in a community of practice.