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Levelling Up: Towards Best Practice in Evaluating Museum Games
Danny Birchall and Martha Henson Wellcome Trust; Alexandra Burch and Daniel Evans, Science Museum, UK; Kate Haley Goldman, National Center for Interactive Learning at the Space Science Center, USA
Abstract
Museums make games because games can provide compelling educational engagement with museum themes and content, and the market for games is enormous. Truly understanding whether games are achieving your goals requires evaluation. In this paper, we identify the kind of games that museums make and use case studies of our own casual games to look at the benefits and means of evaluation. Beginning by identifying different kinds of evaluation within the broad framework of formative and summative practices, we suggest ways to plan an evaluation strategy and set objectives for your game. We then look in detail at evaluation methods: paper and wireframe testing, play-testing, soft launching, Google Analytics, surveys, and analysing responses “in the wild.” While we draw on our own experience for examples of best practice, we recognize that this is an area in which everyone has a lot to learn, and we conclude by suggesting some tactics for sharing knowledge across the museums’ sector.
SFMOMA’s Art Game Laboratory: Real-Life Mad Science Experiments in Visitor Engagement
Erica Gangsei, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, USA
Agile Games for Productive Teams
Dana Mitroff Silvers, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, USA and David Hendee, Carbon Five, USA
Squeezicks - A Museum of Science & MIT Collaboration on STEM-based games
The Museum of Science, Boston and GAMBIT lab at MIT worked over the summer of 2011 to develop a STEM-based soft-bodied physics game named "Squeezicks", available for online play but also being developed as an exhibit-floor interactive experience. The purpose of the game is to educate and inspire visitors about the video game industry, and mainly to show the vast amount of STEM-based skill
A Study of Digital Media, Tools, and Technology Use
If we build a mobile app, how many visitors will be able to access it on a smartphone? What platforms should we build it on? How does our audience behave in online and social networks, and how can we use that to engage specific user groups? What other digital media do youth and adults spend time with, and how should that inform the design of our digital initiatives?
Rules of Play: Design Elements of Addictive Online Learning Games
Over the past decade, games have grown as both a commercial industry, as a field for scholarly research, and as a practical medium for teaching and learning. Inspired by a broad array of research emphasizing the effectiveness of problem-based, anchored instruction, developers have been creating games about subjects ranging from childhood obesity to electoral politics to personal finance.
SFMOMA’s Art Game Laboratory: Real-Life Mad Science Experiments in Visitor Engagement
At Museums and the Web 2011, I proposed and led an unconference session called “Setting Ourselves Up to Fail: Low Cost, Low Stakes Strategies for Visitor Engagement.” About 40 MW attendees participated, and we had a lively discussion and brainstorm on the topic.
Levelling up: Towards best practice in evaluating museum games
Games, and game-like experiences, are becoming increasingly important to museums seeking to engage new audiences and to provide deeper engagement with existing audiences. Demonstrating the value of commissioning and producing games as a core activity of museums is imperative.
Gaming the museum
Martha Henson and Danny Birchall, Wellcome Collection, United Kingdom
http://www.wellcomecollection.org/
Abstract
What makes a good museum game? Credible learning outcomes, compelling gameplay, or sympathy between the two? During 2010 and 2011, Wellcome Collection have been developing a series of games. In this paper and the workshop, we present four games of very different types as examples of our work so far and attempt to outline some of the underlying principles that have guided it. In the workshop itself, we will brainstorm the ways in which a variety of game platforms and formats might, or might not, work with the themes and content of museums and archives.
Keywords: games, strategy, education, archives, history, syndication
Playing with Difficult Objects – Game Designs to Improve Museum Collections
Mia Ridge, Science Museum, United Kingdom
Abstract
Crowdsourcing the creation, correction or enhancement of data about objects through games is an attractive proposition for museums looking to maximize use of their collections online without committing intensive curatorial resources to enhancing catalogue records. This paper investigates the optimum game designs to encourage participation and the generation of useful data through a case study of the project Museum Metadata Games that successfully designed games that created improved metadata for 'difficult' objects from two science and history museum collections.
Keywords: collections, games, crowdsourcing, objects, metadata, tagging
Games
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Archives & Museum Informatics EIN: 77-0708617; GST / BN 887978914
Description
Engaging visitors, in person and online, through games is an increasingly alluring way to capture concerted attention. How can we design these experiences to be compelling, to leave a trace of what we hoped to convey and to scale or persist?
Mini-Workshop on Games: I
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Archives & Museum Informatics EIN: 77-0708617; GST / BN 887978914
Description
Why, with the vast resources, and fundamental human subjects at our disposal, have museums failed to make more than a handful of really compelling games?
Opening Plenary
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Archives & Museum Informatics EIN: 77-0708617; GST / BN 887978914
Description
We'll kick off MW2011 together with a plenary speaker highlighting current questions.
We're delighted to welcome Kristin Purcell of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.
Designing Games
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Archives & Museum Informatics EIN: 77-0708617; GST / BN 887978914
Description
This workshop focuses on a handful of game mechanics that help us move from the kinds of "game-like" interactives commonly found on museum Web sites into the realm of true games. With a firm understanding of these mechanics, we can design online games that incorporate our content and create compelling, even addicting learning experiences for our audiences.
From Knowledge to Narrative – to Systems? At the junction of game design and museum education
Laura Robert's landmark book "From Knowledge to Narrative" (Roberts, 1997) analyzed a paradigm shift in museum exhibition in the late 20th century as educators moved museums from traditional methods of knowledge transmission to constructivist interpretive methods such as narrative.