MuseumNext - Exhibition Gaming

Imagine you were a pawn in a game. Maybe you are a little dog made of tin, a wooden cap or a plastic figure standing on a flat 2D board. Your moving along is controlled by a greater power from outside, a kind of “god” that tells you what and how many steps to take. Your steps determine what you see, what you learn and what you get out of it all in the end. Imagine how it could be like, setting the idea of a simple board game into the possibilities of a modern museum exhibition. The flat 2D board grows into an open 3D space.

The pawns are now normal visitors, who move around in the exhibition. In cities this concept of real-world board-games is gaining more and more popularity. “Urban gaming” is the name for this kind of events and adventures, where classical board and computer games like pac-man are redesigned to fit in real city environments. In a museum the possibilities to create a game-environment and to “re-act” as a pawn are much bigger than in a city. There are some limitations to space as there is only a certain number of rooms, all with four walls and a ceiling, you can use. But there is also some freedom of space which cities can`t provide: before starting an exhibition the rooms are completely blank. The world that you create in these white boxes is completely up to you. You can use right, left, back, forward, down, below, high and above to create different steps, stations and challenges for your visitorpawns.

Also in-doors you are much more free in what technical devices you use to implement interactivity whereas urban games are often limited to GPS.

The new thing about that is: the players themselves move, they pass places, find hints, run from rivals and solve problems all in real time. Here physical movement is closely connected to processes of thinking and problem solving. The keyword to this is embodied cognition. That is to say, that all aspects of cognition (all sorts of knowledge, thoughts, ideas and concepts) are closely connected to aspects of the body (eg. position of the body, movement and perception in space). A learning environment where gaining and collecting cognitive information is closely connected to moving in a shaped environment, covering certain distances in real time, should therefore enhance the learning outcome for the visitor of an exhibition.

My questions are:

• The primary reason for establishing such a game in a museum should be, that the visitors can capture more information about what is shown to them than in a normal exhibition.
• What possibilities are there to make learning obvious in such a game?
• How should the interaction design look like? How can a dialogue between player and player, player and environment, player and exhibits/objects be established?
• What guiding technology is most useful for this kind of exhibition game (mobile, static, integrated in an electronic wayfinding-system on walls etc.)?
• How can the characteristics and aesthetics of a board-game be applied to exhibition halls, so that visitors can slip easily in their role as pawn and feel like entering a world with different rules and possibilities?
• How could the visitors role as pawn look like? Do they slip into a certain fictional role or do they get instructions about how to move, to collect information and so on?
• How can I implement my museum exhibits in the game-environment without them loosing their authentic meaning and aura?
• In its definition a museum is a place of “informal learning” where you can explore certain topics freely and without any pressure to capture certain knowledge.
• Does this concept of using museum-space for a 3D game-adventure contradict this basic function of a museum? How do you think visitors would react to a kind of “god” that constrains them in their freedom of choice?

Do you have any advice for Daniela? Have you tried to make a game within a Museum?