LearningGamesNetwork

[This is Part One of a two-part post. Part Two is an interview with Georgina Bath of the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Luce Foundation Center.]

The intersection of games and museums – that's what I've been thinking about lately. A few weeks ago, I came across this post on Musematic, a blog by experts from the Museum Computer Network and the American Association of Museum's Media & Technology Committee. Posted nearly a year ago, Richard Urban's questions about game platform selection (web vs in-gallery kiosks) got me thinking about how games can extend museum experiences beyond visits and how they could integrate with learning in other settings – schools, libraries, homes, or elsewhere.

Then came my discovery last week of the alternate reality game (ARG) that's currently underway at the Luce Foundation Center for American Art, an "open study/storage facility displaying about thirty-three hundred objects from the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum." Hailed as the first ARG produced for a museum and designed by City Mystery and Playtime Antiboredom Society, "Ghosts of a Chance" officially launched on Sept 8 (with a teaser, of course, back in July) and will conclude with a 5-hour live event at the museum on Oct 25.

What is an ARG? From Wikipedia:

An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions.

It's equally important to understand that ARGs typically aren't played in a vacuum [emphasis added]:

Players interact directly with characters in the game, solve plot-based challenges and puzzles, and often work together with a community to analyze the story and coordinate real-life and online activities. ARGs generally use multimedia, such as telephones, email and mail but rely on the Internet as the central binding medium.

[Sidenote: If you've joined our reading group and are beginning to digest James Paul Gee's Learning and Games this week, consider the collaborative nature of ARGs (see folks analyzing "Ghosts of a Chance" at Unfiction.com) and Gee's thoughts on the importance of the social settings in which games exist.]

In the case of "Ghosts of a Chance," clues span several websites, but a central site ties together the game and serves as a stepping stone into it – players can join as late as the game's final event. In its current phase, players are asked to interpret weekly challenges by creating and mailing artifacts to the Luce Foundation Center. Entered into the museum's collection, these items represent a player-generated gallery collection that unlocks further clues in the game's narrative. In addition to the game's grand finale, other live events have been incorporated into the game experience, including a recent "behind-the-scenes" tour of the National Museum of Natural History and an upcoming visit to the Congressional Cemetery.

However, unlike your typical ARG, the museum will be using some of the assets developed to create a module for use after the game ends in October. This condensed experience will be available to museum visitors and is expected to take about one and a half hours to complete. To read much more about "Ghosts of a Chance," head on over to Smithsonian Magazine, ABC News, the Tate Handheld Conference wiki, and – where I first discovered the game – Museum 2.0.

If you read the Smithsonian article, there's a great quote from Georgina Bath, who describes the ARG as "one way of creating a layer of interactivity in the space without putting the artworks at risk." The second part of this post will be an interview with Bath, the Luce Foundation Center's Interpretive Programs Manager, in which she answers a few questions about the game's design and some of the challenges associated with bringing a fictional narrative into a museum setting.

I'm very curious to see how this unique museum experience will influence others looking for new ways to engage learners. Getting back to the initial question of how games can integrate learning across different settings, will the next ARG-like experience sponsored by a museum, library, or other cultural institution be a product of even more partners, reaching further beyond the walls of its hosts? As the ARG genre grows, do you anticipate city-wide games bringing players into these and other civic spaces as part of coordinated learning experiences?

Leave a comment below with your thoughts.

Don't miss any updates – click here to subscribe to our RSS feed.