Dr. Oscar García Pañella – Cookie Box – iGame – 2024
Wouldn’t it be great to enjoy a gamified quest when visiting a museum? And doing so by solving flowing challenges, unlocking hints, getting achievements and learning while in the process. This is how Gamification can be applied to theme and location-based entertainment to build a total guest experience. In fact, any gameful experience such as a visit needs a series of goals and challenges that ensure a good balance of skill/luck while also guaranteeing competency and behavioral activity for everyone to enjoy and learn.
Therefore, what is a game? according to the Wikipedia, a game is a structured activity, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool, which is our current context. And applying gamification to any sector improves engagement, helps educating thanks to the fixation of knowledge and promotes a positive behavioral change.
If we seek a shorter and pretty accurate definition, we can come across an assertion by Game Designer Jesse Schell. According to him, a game is an activity related to problem-solving through an approach based on a distinctly playful attitude. He illustrates this by stating that our minds can be entertained thanks to certain abilities such as:
– Our ability to model.
– The possibility of focusing or concentrating our efforts on a specific task.
– The fact that we can express empathy for someone or something, and…
– …the imagination we possess.
All of these are strong attributes to be used and expanded while in our museums. We need experiences in them to be fed with fundamental ingredients for making our learning effective while feeling fully immersed and, therefore, having real and recurrent fun. And if we get that, we will return to the venue. As in a theme park and without any rigor loss because we are managing the continent and not the content which we maintain but adapt.
Any experience, and then the ones happening in museums, need to be enjoyed voluntarily by our users. The players of it we might say. Within it, they will find a set of adapted in difficulty goals to solve through the presentation of a specific conflict (historical, learning-based, skill-based, social, etc.), and always applying the set of predefined rules. Any memorable experience needs them to put some order and respect equity. These goals may or may not be achieved (winning versus losing which is a balancing factor), always interactively (communication is a cyclical and bidirectional process in which two entities repeatedly talk-think-listen). A museum that “talks” to the different audiences in many ways through adapted content and great-to-solve challenges that engage and promote measurement concurrently.
Undoubtedly, our design will revolve around the four pillars of Gamification at minimum. That is, the definition of the Aesthetic Criteria, the creation of a set of Rules or Game Mechanics, a good Story, and a solid Technological approach. Considerations regarding the different items while in the museum like game space, objects, puzzles and challenges connected to actions to undertake, the predefined rules, rewards, and a proper balance between skill and luck need to be attended in the design of the interactive experience regardless of the technological implementation (textual, video-based, 2D, 3D, photo realistic, digital, analog, etc.). Not to mention that the design needs to contemplate several Accessibility and Inclusion criteria as the experience must be enjoyed by a truly diverse audience.
Once inside the museum, the gamified experience, that is the applied or “serious” game, will present the rules to the participants to guide them toward achieving the goals. These will be educational and fun at the same time. In fact, not necessarily simple but fair and equal for everyone attending to their skillset which varies depending on age, background and prior knowledge, cultural connections, origin, interests and motivations, etc.
To favor Playability, that is Gameplay, Accessibility and Usability, we need balanced developments of our museum-based Serious Games and therefore based on fair designs for everyone and a proper balance between challenges and the success in overcoming them. We are not interested in too easy-to-solve puzzles because our audiences will lack interest, and we need to be careful with sharply difficult ones because we will promote frustration and abandonment. The Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi extensively studied the relationship between human Creativity and Happiness. He is well known as the architect who defined the concept of flow in Psychology which is essential for successfully achieving any significant goal within a Serious Game. He explains the importance of achieving a proper balance between the difficulty of missions (challenges that increase in complexity) and the skill of the user who undertakes them. A good balance will ensure an appropriate level of immersion (and competency learning), while the opposite could lead to abandoning the experience (frustration) as we said already. And that is where the virtue lies, in the ability to design considering the person’s capabilities and the content that we want them to enjoy and learn without becoming tedious at any time.
Museums are full of stories. And memorable experiences in them should have a unique historical-cultural context. Let’s remind ourselves of the stated pillars and the importance of Narrative and therefore we can apply the Monomyth (or Hero’s Journey in Audiovisual Narrative). A great resource, originally defined by Joseph Campbell, that consists of several stages that revolve around a main character (or hero). This could be our user at the museum. In a monomyth, the hero begins in the ordinary world and receives a call to enter an unknown world of strange powers and events (the quest in a museum). The hero who accepts the call to enter this strange world must face tasks and trials, either alone or with assistance (the challenges and missions and the clan). He or she must survive, often with help, and if surviving there’s a great gift (the unlocked knowledge, achievements and rewards). The hero must then decide whether to return to the ordinary world with this boon (a new power, a great knowledge). If does, he or she might face challenges on the return journey. And when returning successfully, the gift may be used to improve the world (the social cooperative factor). We can recognize this pattern in novels, theater plays, movies, series, comics and in serious games too. And it works.
Serious games can be seen as simulators. According to Melinda Jackson, simulators allow people to learn faster because knowledge is transferred directly. These interactive tools extract meaning from complex data sets such as museums databases and let participants manipulate and touch it. And if more senses are implied, a better learning is guaranteed. To learn, we need a context, a social experience in which we are active and can practice with a specific role to learn “by discovery.” And museums can truly benefit from the ability to manipulate time and space, control speed, emulate all kinds of situations, access “the inaccessible,” and display each scene and path with detail.
We should let our users experience plenty of “Eureka moments” by feeling autonomous and in control. By taking decisions thanks to the choices presented and by investing significant amounts of time and effort to practice competences such as creativity, openness to new situations, analysis and synthesis capability, teamwork, communication, among many others. All of them are required in a regular and daily living basis. Sid Meier, a quite renowned game designer, said once that “a good game is a series of interesting choices.”
Let’s enjoy i-Game and the seeking for memorable museum-based experiences for lasting memories!