Gaming and the Future of Museums
The Center for the Future of Museums (CFM) webcast a lecture by Dr. Jane McGonigal, researcher and games designer with the Institute for the Future, on “Gaming the Future of Museums.” The Video is now available on YouTube (and right here on this blog).
If you are going to watch the talk, the video only shows the presenter, you may also want to bring up the slides in a separate window and view them together. Slides are online here.
I am really excited by the work the American Association of Museums and the Institute for the Future of Museums are doing, the recent-ish pamphlet “Museums and Society 2034: Trends and Potential Futures.” being a case in point of their analysis of current trends, and imagining desirable potential futures, is the sort of “predicting” that can help all who work within the museum field.
Gaming in the Museum seems to be a topic current in vogue, the recent-ish posting on Museum 2.0 Blog, about the
“Ghosts of a Chance” alternate reality game (ARG) which ran from July 18 until October 25, 2008 and was a collaboration between the Smithsonian American Art Museum and CityMystery, is also worth reading about.
“A people who conceive life to be the pursuit of happiness must be chronically unhappy.” (Marshall Sahlins)
Early in the talk the following phrase was used: “Brain grenades… that we will pull the pin together”.. OMG bizarre “management” speak!! Aagghhh… help…. I almost ran screaming from my laptop, but I decided to persevere, and I am glad I did.
Jane McGonigal’s fascinating lecture about ‘gaming and the future of museums’ was very insightful, and through providing examples of games in action in the real world, in fact, referring to games at one point as “mass participatory systems” I think was highly informed as it was suggestive not only of actions that we might incorporate within the realm of a game (whether or not we use that term) but also many other systems that are becoming a part of the so-called recreational or “free” time for many people (mostly of course in the industrialised wealthy North Atlantic Region).
Jane’s entirely unbiased (lol) opinion, as a game designer, was that games will become an increasingly important part of the worlds future – I believe she made an incredibly convincing argument, and I agree with the concept.
The opening gambit of the lecture was concerned with “sustainable happiness” or “positive psychology” and she suggested that there are four indices that indicate a persons happiness (these she suggested are almost – but not quite – universal).
She suggested that museums could employ “happiness engineers” to create happy places, as museums are already good at the second two points but not the first two, it would be their role to create activity within the museum.
One of her main arguments was that gamers occupy a large amount of their time both gaming, but also working collaboratively with other gamers to find out information, discuss the game, and improve the game, using a large amount of mental activity or “cognitive surplus” to use
Clay Shirky’s phrase. I use his phrase as she cited his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations as a significant book to read (I’d agree) and cited his account that it took 100 million hours of mental activity to create the wikipedia that existed (at the time of writing his book) and that she therefore calculated if all the World of Warcraft gamers were stop spending time on the game and instead focus on Wikipedia it would take five days to get to the same stage!
Within game playing she suggested there were 10 things she referred to as “collaboration superpowers”, that is to say ten things that made you a better game player… and thus would be worth writing into any idea of games in the future of museums.
What these mean in plainer English is:
1. Mobbability: The ability to work wit lots of people.
2. co-operation radar: A sense of who would be the best at any given task.
3. ping quotient: The ability to response to other requests quickly.
4. influency: The knowledge that different communities require different things.
5. multi-capitalism: The ability to trade in different capitals, economic, social, environment, happiness, etc.
6. protovation: The ability to rapidly prototype in low risk setting.
7. open authorship: A level of comfort with other people editing and changing your work.
8. signal noise filter: The ability to filter the important parts for you.
9.long broading: The ability to look at bigger systems – geography, time, etc.
10. emergensight: The ability to spot strange patterns and use them usefully.
The key aspects of the lecture that stood out for me was the idea that games could be used to create a feeling of “participation” and “global community”, she used the term ’superstructure’ as being suggestive of a means by which institutions could work beyond the institutional organisational level and more towards Clay Shirkys network model. She presented numerous examples of online games and their positive effects in offline real world situations. I liked the idea that we don’t have to use the phrase games, but, that they were in fact “mass participatory systems”.
One question was raised that I really liked the idea of, and that was whether games as a medium have been used within museums as a means of collaborative research… I thought this idea was brilliant, and well worth further exploration.
Before the question time, she ended by asking the audience to participate in a game, in went like this:
1. Imagine what brand new museum or program would will the world need in 2019?
2. Share, and declare yourself director of this strange new museum in 2019.
Now whilst I really liked the lecture, and was excited by the many potentialities of gaming in museums. I love the idea of anything that involveds a online/offline cross over. My one real bugbear about the whole happiness thing is that there is a question as to whether museums should be creating ‘artificial’ happiness?
I am completely convinced by her argument that Museums could create happiness, as i guess fair enough, why not. But, my question is that in the world we live in; ravaged by war, famine, genocide, environmental destruction, politics, greed, patriarchy, economic meltdown, and an almost endless list of calamities, and thats just to list a few current world situations without looking at either the personal or the historic record, what roles are there for misery, disgust, pain and suffering? All of which are realities, and given the world we live in, completely sane reactions to life. Without solving these issues, are we in danger of creating a mono-cultured world of false happiness… a Prozac nation? I guess what I am saying is that whilst it would be fun to incorporate games into the museum, and it really would, space should also be left for unhappy places in museums – the creation of sadness, the creation of anger, and all the other aspects of human emotion, because as Marshall Sahlins suggests a people who crave only happiness must be chronically unhappy.
Related Links:
Center for the Future of Museums: http://www.futureofmuseums.org/events/lecture/index.cfm
The Institute for the Future: http://www.iftf.org/
The American Association of Museums and the Institute for the Future of Museums: “Museums and Society 2034: Trends and Potential Futures.”
Jane McGonigal’s Blog: http://blog.avantgame.com/
Games:
A World Without Oil: http://www.worldwithoutoil.org/
Superstruct: http://www.superstructgame.org/
Lecture Reviews:
New Curator: http://newcurator.com/2009/01/endgame-notes-gaming-the-future-of-museums/
Museum 2.0: http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2009/01/should-museums-be-happiness-engines.html
While I agree that museum’s must be open to the full range of human emotions, I worry that the gaming experience which seems to reward rapid rather than deliberate actions would not provide the adequate time and contemplation to create a rich and complete experience.
I am currently working on a museum technology project and the feedback I am getting is that while technology and gaming may expand the current audience there is a fear that it will alienate the traditional museum audience.
Hi Gavin,
That’s a good point, and one I think needs to be taken probably far more seriously than it is. I think we MUST open up museums to wider audiences, and this MUST mean retaining current audience… otherwise all we’d be doing is switching audiences, which is hardly the point. Surely our aim must be to create an environment that is conducive to a multiplicity of experiences. Some will want time to dwell on particular things, to have the potential for further contemplation or exploration, others will want rapid fire rewards.. our job is to try and create a space that can be both. Difficult I’ll grant you, but, surely more exciting for that.
Also… I want to comment on the gaming idea being solely rapid fire, because that was also my understanding when i came across is, but, then I came to realise the game is whatever you make it. So there is no real reason there couldn’t be a game that was designed in such a way that it helped (even necessitated) long periods of contemplation and a deeper engage with the material culture – if we and players so wished such a game to exist. In this regard I come back to the idea that research is essentially a game, but, could not be considered to lack contemplation or to be rapid fire… so in this respect I think we need to remember that gaming is a wider concept than perhaps we are used to using it in the non-gaming world.
In many respects gaming to my mind is synonymous with fun and inquiry.
That’s my couple of thoughts for now… anyway thanks for the feedback on the post, its always great to hear about how these ideas are being used in the real world.
Cheers,
Dan.