Gaming and Museum (original) (raw)
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The Participatory Museum: How Games can be used in the Museum's hunt for the Active Audience
This paper examines how the evolution of the Museums place in society has defined how it engages with it's audience, and observes that this relationship has become increasingly interactive. The paper goes on to criticise this focus on "interactivity" being wrong for the productive engagement that would suit the Museums' goals far better. To further this idea, the highly productive culture of play and games in general are analysed, focusing on contemporary computer games, and the atmosphere of irreverence present in Modding communities. In conclusion, the paper asserts that this culture of irreverence could be the key to audiences productively bouncing off voices of cultural authority such as museums.
Establishing a Theoretical Background for a Museum-centric Entertainment System
2017
The use of gaming to provide additional value to cultural experiences, like museums visits, is not novel. The increased possibilities to access the game market opened by online platforms make the communicative and emotional characteristics of digital games an opportunity for promotion. In this paper, we discuss the theoretical foundations of an approach aimed at producing digital games meant to be part of a continuing emotional experience. We draw from psychological and museological research to motivate our view on the relationships between game designers and museum experts. By concentrating on archaeological and art museums, we advocate for the need of a methodological approach to the design of games for museums aimed at promoting the value of cultural experience as it is, thus countering the plethora of technological instalments that often risk averting the attention from the collection.
The Museum of Gamers: Unmediated Cultural Heritage Through Gaming
Cultural Heritage in a Changing World
In the 1990s when Nicholas Negroponte published his infamous com-parison between bits and atoms for Wired magazine, it was no longer strange to talk about a new concept for galleries, libraries, archieves and museums (GLAMs). Pointing to a new future for libraries, Negro-ponte was already aware that being digital had its own reality, which was to create ambiguity in relation to the value of physicality or pure materiality, a reality that the world had been accustomed to since the Industrial Age. The Museum of Gamers, as a conceptual proposal we argue for here, sits at the convergence of these contrasting realities. On the one hand, there is a cultural artefact that has a concrete value at-tached to its authenticity. On the other, its digital interpretation has its own systems of values about being. And the visitor cares about a GLAM’s auxillary services as much as the objects. As information is now available everywhere, people expect a new normal from muse-ums besides mere objects and explanatory texts next to them. As the emblematic medium of contemporary societies games offer engage-ment methods. Recent marketing strategies such as loyalty games and gamification prove that use of technology is moving ever closer to video games and game-design methods. The Museum of Gamers is a creation not only for the dissemination of cultural heritage information but also for its production through contemporary media technologies.
2016
In 2014 Videogames in the Museum [1] engaged with creative practitioners, games designers, curators and museums professionals to debate and explore the challenges of collecting and exhibiting videogames and games design. Discussions around authorship in games and games development, the transformative effect of the gallery on the cultural reception and significance of videogames led to the exploration of participatory modes and playful experiences that might more effectively expose the designer's intent and enhance the nature of our experience as visitors and players. In proposing a participatory mode for the exhibition of videogames this article suggests an approach to exhibition and event design that attempts to resolve tensions between traditions of passive consumption of curated collections and active participation in meaning making using theoretical models from games analysis and criticism and the conceit of game and museum spaces as analogous rules based environments.
'More like an arcade' -The limitations of playable games in museum exhibitions
Museum & Society,, 2019
This study investigates the relationship between playable, interactive games on original hardware and the representation of game culture using the case of the exhibition GameOn 2.0, often considered to be the largest exhibition of digital games in the West so far. Qualitative interviews with museum staff were used in order to elicit their perspective on the relationship between playability and contextualization. Our results suggest that play as a way of engaging with games as museum objects has limitations which make it necessary to add other means of contextualization in order to afford critical engagement with digital games as cultural heritage. Play excludes visitors who lack necessary gaming skills as well as many genres of games which need longer or different kinds of interaction than a museum can allow for in the context of an exhibition. Moreover, we show that not all games can be exhibited in the same way and that we need to adapt exhibition strategies to individual games and their properties and contexts.
Playful museum: mobile audiences and exhibitions as game experiences
Digital media constitute challenges not only to institutions communicating art, history, cultural heritage, but to all types of institutions, organizations and businesses. And especially with the emergence and vast (and fast) spread of so-called social or participatory media and Web 2.0 technologies these challenges are but increasingly inviting us to rethink communication all together. The open-endedness and the playfulness of these media and media technologies, the radical possibilities for dialogic processes, for collaboration and co-creation when it comes to game-like, user-centered experiences and content vouch for methodologically (re)thinking communication as dynamic processes whichinstead of processes transporting information/media contentis regarded as something whichappropriating the idea of the perpetual betais continuously developing and constantly at play and changing as a result of a communication format characterized by collaboration, participation and co-creation. This paper focuses on how this way of applying digital media in museum communication has been put to use in an augmented reality 'game' telling the Renaissance story of Danish city Kolding, using smartphones and the city as a ubiquitous game universe. The paper demonstrates how the interplay between mobile media technology and physical places is a potent tool when it comes to meeting the challenges and potentials put forward by digital, mobile media to museums when it comes to creating new and engaging experiences which are based on playful collaboration, participation and co-creation.
Enhancing Museums' Experiences Through Games And Stories For Young Audiences
International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, 2017
Museums promote cultural experiences through the exhibits and the stories behind them. Nevertheless, museums are not always designed to engage and interest young audiences, particularly teenagers. This Ph.D. proposal in Digital Media explores how digital technologies can facilitate Natural History and Science Museums in fostering and creating immersive museum experiences for teenagers. Especially by using digital storytelling along with location-based gaming. The overall objectives of the work are to establish guidelines, design, develop and study interactive storytelling and gamification experiences in those type of museums focusing in particular on delivering pleasurable and engaging experiences for teens of 15-17 years old.
Lessons Learned on Engaging Teenage Visitors in Museums with Story-Based and Game-Based Strategies
Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage
While museums are designed to engage and interest various audiences, teenagers are often a neglected segment. Without digital interactivity, it is challenging for a museum to remain exciting and relevant to a young, tech-savvy audience. Games can benefit museums by fostering positive attitudes towards museum spaces and creating more joyful destinations to promote meaningful informal learning combined with entertainment. We developed a dual-gamified mobile experience targeted at teenagers, for the Natural History Museum of Funchal, Portugal: a story-based strategy ( Memories of Carvalhal's Palace — Turning Point) and a game-based strategy ( Memories of Carvalhal's Palace — Haunted Encounters ). These strategies were studied in depth with 159 teenagers (15–19 years old) to understand how gamified strategies might enhance their user experience in a museum. On one hand, game-based strategies, in which game mechanics predominate, can catch a visitor's attention by displaying ...
Museums, digital media and a perpetual beta way of communicating
Digital media technology and especially various types of Web 2.0 applications facilitate communication as user-centered, and new media technologies like smart phones make use of these applications and combine them into mashups enabling this type of communication. Thus communication here implies collaboration, participation and co-creation as primary communication mode and feeds on the interplay between a variety of different media and media technologies (cross-media communication). This paper demonstrates how this mode of communication invites museums to think in the lines of computer games and augmented reality on the one hand and constructivist approaches to learning on the other, both of which are related to the experience economy. In doing so, the paper will present a case study of a museum project communicating the history of the Danish city Vejle through an augmented reality game using mobile phones, Web 2.0 mashups, a playable conspiracy plot, and the city as game universe.