The last in NPR’s series of Museums in the 21st Century looks at using games, specifically alternate reality games, in the museum “to turn visitors into players”.
I highly recommend listening. This is a whole new world of potential curatorial activity.
January 13th, 2009 at 1:43 am
I love museums (both digital and analog) and I love games (both digital and analog) but perhaps it’s time to ask whether the emperor is wearing any clothes?Many of these participatory museum “games” seem like flashier digital versions of the classic paper-and-pencil scavenger hunts given to school groups to complete on field trips. In either case, participants madly dash around trying to finish their tasks, but I’m not sure whether they could have “learned” just as much inside of a mall or a dance club as they did by playing the games inside of a museum.I’m all for exploring ways to integrate new media techniques that advance ways of discovering the stories and objects inside museums, but at this point any “social media” experiment, no matter how tangential or trivial, is instantly seen as a valid “solution” to integrating museums with their communities. While I admire the thoughtful and pioneering work of combining social media tools with traditional museum techniques of staff members from institutions like The Brooklyn Museum and The Mattress Factory, it’s a bit hard for me to take seriously an “expert” whose latest “social media experiment” seems to involve dancing around with a cat mask on.
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