💫 Reflections of i-Game’s participation to the Nordic Game Event through Pille Runnel’s eyes 👁️ 👁️
When museums and games meet, the dialogue often stalls around #edutainment. After attending Nordic Game — Europe’s biggest game industry gathering, Pille Runnel, PhD, Heritage & Museum Development Expert, Research Director at the Estonian National Museum, is convinced we’re missing some relevant opportunities on both sides.
Museums and Games don’t just have things to “learn” from each other — they’re already connected through shared missions:
🤝 to engage
to move 🚶♀️➡️
💨 to challenge
to imagine 💭
- So why do we keep building small bridges when there’s space for shared worlds?
- Our team at i-game can think of several insights we could give in terms of policy development, impact evaluation or general contextualisation of major trends, such as mediatisation or platformisation.
Nordic Game was intense, noisy, full of experimental ideas and contradictions. And it gave Pille Runnel four provocations:
1.Retire the Concept of “Serious Games”
2. Game mechanics and exhibitions?
3. Playfulness
4. Museums can feed games
Museums and games don’t need to “learn” from each other in the superficial sense. They’re both dealing with attention, emotion, space, ethics, engagement, participation, memories, identities and storytelling. They just use different toolkits. They don’t need to keep asking whether games can make museums more fun, or whether museums can make games more clever.
We could start building strange, ambitious, perhaps imperfect, but still amazing things together. And we could stop pretending this is about a conversation about technology and markets, because it should be a conversation about imagination and imaginaries.