In February, the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery (Ramm) in Exeter held a family-friendly Minecraft day, part of the venue’s work with the popular Minecraft video game in which players build things using blocks.
A key element of the day – which was the second of its kind held at the museum – was a build battle, where teams competed to create things within a set period of time. Other activities included workshops led by well-known Minecraft personalities and the chance to be photographed and added into the museum’s version of Minecraft.
While the day was a chance for visitors to engage with Exeter’s past, Ramm’s digital officer, Rick Lawrence, says that historical accuracy was not always strictly adhered to.
“On the Roman Fortress version of Minecraft, a lot of people enjoyed infesting the fortress with zombies – sadly not toga-wearing ones,” he says.
Museum games come in all sorts of forms and can serve many purposes. They may be physical experiences hosted on site – such as a murder mystery escape room themed on ancient Egypt, which was developed at Torquay Museum in Devon.
Or they might be online games that can be played off-site. National Museums Scotland launched a range of online games to coincide with the opening of 10 new galleries at its flagship venue in Edinburgh in 2016, including a game where players need to keep Gen, a digital creature, alive using items from the museum’s biomedical collections.
In 2011, the Wellcome Collection’s High Tea game – where people play the role of a 19th-century British opium smuggler – accompanied an exhibition at its London home on recreational drugs. The game was played more than three million times in three months.
Other games, such as Breadcrumbs, which leads players on a cryptic trail around the galleries of five London museums through a series of texts or messages, use digital technology to encourage engagement in the physical museum space.
Some projects focus on engaging individual creativity. A workshop in January at the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea encouraged children to code their own computer games.
Others aim for a broader sense of playfulness, such as the annual Playful Museums Festival run by the Northern Ireland Museums Council, which involves activities, workshops and events aimed at pre-school children.
Permission to play
The huge variety of games being offered indicates the increasing levels of interest in exploring the potential of games and play in museums.
Ramm’s work with Minecraft has formed part of a three-year collaborative PhD project, in partnership with the University of Exeter, investigating gamification in museums.
Gamification is not only about using video games, says Lawrence, but also introducing playfulness and creativity more generally into the museum’s work.
“Using game techniques as well as technologies allows us to get people engaged in all sorts of different ways,” he says. “It’s about making the museum seem a less serious and lecturing place – more informal and fun.”
Insights from the PhD project will be used to inform the museum’s future work. One advantage of games, says Lawrence, is the opportunity for “stealth learning” – for example, incorporating links to information about museum objects into a Minecraft map.
“Because it’s quite playful, people don’t really realise they’re learning stuff,” he says.
Games can also bring new people to the museum. “When you talk to visitors at our Minecraft days, it’s interesting the number of people who say: ‘I’ve never been to the museum before. I really like it’,” says Lawrence.
“It’s a great of way for us to achieve that classic museum objective of reaching new audiences.”
The digital world can also offer people different experiences than those they would find on a physical museum visit. Ramm has used Minecraft to recreate a model of 18th-century Exeter that it holds in its collection, allowing people to explore the historic city more actively. The museum’s Minecraft maps are available online to download.
“Now that the model of Exeter has been created in Minecraft, you can actually explore the 18th-century city and meet some characters from the time, rather than just looking at the object,” says Lawrence. “It becomes a more active experience. You are actually inside a museum object.”
The museum has also put on physical games, such as a re-creation of a Playstation game called Joust, where the players had to try to make each other jump or twitch in order to knock them out of the contest.
“We had people of all ages and physical abilities playing it, including young children and disabled people with a helper,” Lawrence says.
From digital to physical
Holly Gramazio, a games designer at Matheson Marcault, who works mainly on real-world physical games, says that the boundaries between physical and digital gameplay are becoming more fluid.
“There is growing interest in the way that digital technologies can be used to enable physical play, or the way that physical play can be documented and shared – there is a lot more crossover,” she says.
Gramazio says that the way games engage people’s emotions can be harnessed to prompt a greater interest in a subject, and draw attention to things that people might otherwise not notice.
She says that games are particularly good at helping to explain systems.
Matheson Marcault created a number of games for a festival run by New Scientist magazine in 2016 including a coconut shy-type game involving scale models of the planets in the solar system.
“You can intellectually realise that Jupiter is massive and Mercury is comparatively tiny, but you really get it when you are trying to knock them off their posts with a ball,” Gramazio says.
Although it is not specifically focused on games, Fun Palaces, a not-for-profit initiative that operates across the UK and beyond, incorporates a heavy dose of playfulness as part of its campaign promoting “culture at the heart of the community and community at the heart of culture”.
Fun Palaces events take place every year over one weekend in October, in locations including libraries, community centres and arts centres as well as museums. They involve a wide range of grassroots-led activities.
Farnham Museum in Surrey held its fifth Fun Palace in 2017. The events, which took place in the museum’s garden and garden gallery, have included activities such as a talk by the local astronomical society, clay workshops, ukulele playing, a democratic cafe and origami.
“We had arts, crafts, science, and a bit of politics,” says Carine Osmont, who helped organise Farnham Museum’s Fun Palace.
The events have also offered outdoor games, such as giant dominos, for people that did not want to participate in the workshops. Last year there was a “digging box” where people stood in a large box full of soil, in which they dug to discover museum objects, such as a dagger, bones and coins.
Emma Sutcliffe, the museum’s assistant curator, says that the event attracted a different type of person to the museum.
“Usually on a Saturday we would get 20-30 visitors, but there were over 100 at the Fun Palace this year,” she says. “And anecdotally, there were people who came along who had not visited the museum before.”
A key element of the day – which was the second of its kind held at the museum – was a build battle, where teams competed to create things within a set period of time. Other activities included workshops led by well-known Minecraft personalities and the chance to be photographed and added into the museum’s version of Minecraft.
While the day was a chance for visitors to engage with Exeter’s past, Ramm’s digital officer, Rick Lawrence, says that historical accuracy was not always strictly adhered to.
“On the Roman Fortress version of Minecraft, a lot of people enjoyed infesting the fortress with zombies – sadly not toga-wearing ones,” he says.
Museum games come in all sorts of forms and can serve many purposes. They may be physical experiences hosted on site – such as a murder mystery escape room themed on ancient Egypt, which was developed at Torquay Museum in Devon.
Or they might be online games that can be played off-site. National Museums Scotland launched a range of online games to coincide with the opening of 10 new galleries at its flagship venue in Edinburgh in 2016, including a game where players need to keep Gen, a digital creature, alive using items from the museum’s biomedical collections.
In 2011, the Wellcome Collection’s High Tea game – where people play the role of a 19th-century British opium smuggler – accompanied an exhibition at its London home on recreational drugs. The game was played more than three million times in three months.
Other games, such as Breadcrumbs, which leads players on a cryptic trail around the galleries of five London museums through a series of texts or messages, use digital technology to encourage engagement in the physical museum space.
Some projects focus on engaging individual creativity. A workshop in January at the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea encouraged children to code their own computer games.
Others aim for a broader sense of playfulness, such as the annual Playful Museums Festival run by the Northern Ireland Museums Council, which involves activities, workshops and events aimed at pre-school children.
Permission to play
The huge variety of games being offered indicates the increasing levels of interest in exploring the potential of games and play in museums.
Ramm’s work with Minecraft has formed part of a three-year collaborative PhD project, in partnership with the University of Exeter, investigating gamification in museums.
Gamification is not only about using video games, says Lawrence, but also introducing playfulness and creativity more generally into the museum’s work.
“Using game techniques as well as technologies allows us to get people engaged in all sorts of different ways,” he says. “It’s about making the museum seem a less serious and lecturing place – more informal and fun.”
Insights from the PhD project will be used to inform the museum’s future work. One advantage of games, says Lawrence, is the opportunity for “stealth learning” – for example, incorporating links to information about museum objects into a Minecraft map.
“Because it’s quite playful, people don’t really realise they’re learning stuff,” he says.
Games can also bring new people to the museum. “When you talk to visitors at our Minecraft days, it’s interesting the number of people who say: ‘I’ve never been to the museum before. I really like it’,” says Lawrence.
“It’s a great of way for us to achieve that classic museum objective of reaching new audiences.”
The digital world can also offer people different experiences than those they would find on a physical museum visit. Ramm has used Minecraft to recreate a model of 18th-century Exeter that it holds in its collection, allowing people to explore the historic city more actively. The museum’s Minecraft maps are available online to download.
“Now that the model of Exeter has been created in Minecraft, you can actually explore the 18th-century city and meet some characters from the time, rather than just looking at the object,” says Lawrence. “It becomes a more active experience. You are actually inside a museum object.”
The museum has also put on physical games, such as a re-creation of a Playstation game called Joust, where the players had to try to make each other jump or twitch in order to knock them out of the contest.
“We had people of all ages and physical abilities playing it, including young children and disabled people with a helper,” Lawrence says.
From digital to physical
Holly Gramazio, a games designer at Matheson Marcault, who works mainly on real-world physical games, says that the boundaries between physical and digital gameplay are becoming more fluid.
“There is growing interest in the way that digital technologies can be used to enable physical play, or the way that physical play can be documented and shared – there is a lot more crossover,” she says.
Gramazio says that the way games engage people’s emotions can be harnessed to prompt a greater interest in a subject, and draw attention to things that people might otherwise not notice.
She says that games are particularly good at helping to explain systems.
Matheson Marcault created a number of games for a festival run by New Scientist magazine in 2016 including a coconut shy-type game involving scale models of the planets in the solar system.
“You can intellectually realise that Jupiter is massive and Mercury is comparatively tiny, but you really get it when you are trying to knock them off their posts with a ball,” Gramazio says.
Although it is not specifically focused on games, Fun Palaces, a not-for-profit initiative that operates across the UK and beyond, incorporates a heavy dose of playfulness as part of its campaign promoting “culture at the heart of the community and community at the heart of culture”.
Fun Palaces events take place every year over one weekend in October, in locations including libraries, community centres and arts centres as well as museums. They involve a wide range of grassroots-led activities.
Farnham Museum in Surrey held its fifth Fun Palace in 2017. The events, which took place in the museum’s garden and garden gallery, have included activities such as a talk by the local astronomical society, clay workshops, ukulele playing, a democratic cafe and origami.
“We had arts, crafts, science, and a bit of politics,” says Carine Osmont, who helped organise Farnham Museum’s Fun Palace.
The events have also offered outdoor games, such as giant dominos, for people that did not want to participate in the workshops. Last year there was a “digging box” where people stood in a large box full of soil, in which they dug to discover museum objects, such as a dagger, bones and coins.
Emma Sutcliffe, the museum’s assistant curator, says that the event attracted a different type of person to the museum.
“Usually on a Saturday we would get 20-30 visitors, but there were over 100 at the Fun Palace this year,” she says. “And anecdotally, there were people who came along who had not visited the museum before.”