Museum Burglary Game
Posted in Technology on 07. Jan, 2010
Dundee based games developer Gentlemen of Fortune are working on a game called Quick as Thieves, a “Physics based Action-stealth game”, which means you play a comedy-style burglar with a swagbag robbing a museum blind. As you can see, everything and anything can go into the swagbag. The bag gets bigger and can be used for other things.
Yeah, okay, it actually sounds like an innovative idea for a game and looks quite fun as well. But it goes to prove that museums are never a setting for anything else apart from crime (stealing stuff), supernatural/superstition (magic/cursed objects) or both (stealing magic/cursed objects).
Hi Newcurator,
Thanks for posting this – the game looks interesting (awful graphics though – although that may be the compression talking).
On your point about the perception of museums – I think that one of the most interesting developments in marketing is the process by which organisations learn to ‘go with’ consumers who choose to create their own alternate idiom about the product.
There are, to me, two ways of thinking about the mental model of museums which appears to reside in the popular/consumer psyche. One is to think that they don’t ‘get it’, and that we need to educate them better in the wonderful museum-ness of it all. The other is to think that they get it perfectly well, and not only do they get it, but they have it so clearly and perfectly internalised that they can be playful, muck about with it, make it their own.
That this playful take on what can sometime be quite a po-faced self-perception by museums is often transgressive is, I think, really interesting. It is precisely because museums are seen as part of the established authority structure that people are so drawn to ‘being naughty’ in them. It’s the same thing – that idea of peeking under the Duchess’s skirts – that draws people to behind-the-scenes tours. It’s why Banksy’s ‘guerilla installations’ in the Natural History Museum were so interesting – people love nothing more than pricking pomposity – and the more pompous the giddier the thrill when it gets pricked.
I believe that the fact that people often think of museum objects as imbued with magical properties is a really powerful bit of collective psychology. Museum objects are, let’s face it, inanimate – other than the intrinsic reaction to their aesthetic value, breathing life into them is intellectually taxing.
In ‘animating’ objects imbuing them with a power of their own or even, in Night at the Museum, literally bringing them to life, I think that the public is screaming at us to make the whole experience more thrilling and vital. ‘The stuff you’re showing me is dead and doesn’t move. As a human, I like moving, living stuff which entertains me. Therefore I am going to imagine your dead stuff moving and dancing and escaping.’
That’s a lot of cod psychology for a game demo, but you get the point. There’s a vital lesson to be learned here. Culture is as susceptible to ‘adapt or die’ as any other realm of life. I think we should do what all forms of popular culture have done in the past, and embrace the dumbed-down, cheeky, transgressive elements of the public reaction to what we do, internalise it and make it a core part of our offer. Want to take something from our museum home with you? Fine. Want to put your own stuff up? Bring it on. Want to worship at it? Groovy. Think about theatre – ever since it was invented, it’s oscillated from high culture to low and back again. Should museums be any different?
Occasionally, museums are the setting of a strange romance between a curator and a parking attendant.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067433/
I think the team behind it are students who entered it into a competition, for I’m not surprised its a little rough.
And thanks for writing my next column for Museum ID for me