Reviews: museum game apps

I got a lovely email last week from the people working with the Tate to announce their newest game app, “Race Against Time.” As I was downloading it, I remembered that Dave Schaller had sent me a link to Eduweb’s latest game app “Moon Walking”. Must be time to tackle games again.

This past Summer I wrote a series of four posts on gaming and museums.  It covered interactivity, the qualities of good interactives, games and play, and finally “gamification” the process of applying game principles to non-game activities.  Now, there’s a growing crop of museum games you can try out to see what’s possible.

Apps as ways to fill interstitial time
Somebody wise said the killer apps for mobiles is that they are a way to kill time while waiting for the bus – those down times that occur while we’re between places, or waiting for something to happen are a great time to engage an audience. Three of these games fit that bill.

Race Against Time

Tate’s latest game, possesses the same irreverent spirit that animates Tate Trumps, their first game.  In it, you play the part of a color-collecting chameleon, out to save the world from having all its colors sucked up by Dr. Greyscale.  Along the way, you traverse 12 decades of modern art in the background.

Race Against Time is a classic sidescroller (think “Mario Brothers”) where you gobble up color while avoiding perils and enemies. The concept is pretty simple “Don’t get killed.” I will confess I’ve been unable to get past the Fauvists before getting killed.  You can play the game anywhere, and there’s no benefit I can see to playing it in the Tate.

Meanderthal

Meanderthal is one of Smithsonian’s most appealing apps in my opinion.  It’s another dead easy app in terms of functionality; you take your picture using the phone’s camera, choose a human ancestor and presto, the images are combined to make you appear Neanderthal. You can also learn about the three early human species presented in the app, but clearly the thrill lies in having your picture morphed.

What I like about Meanderthal is that it is a great snack. It does one thing and does it very well. And you actually learn some paleontology along the way. It’s got rudimentary social features like email and Facebook sharing, and it actually uses a built-in feature of a mobile – the camera – which is still surprisingly rare in museum apps.

MoonWalking

An app that goes a bit further in using the mobile platform’s advantages seems to be Eduweb’s augmented reality (AR) app MoonWalking. This app lets you overlay scenes from the first Moon landing over wherever you happen to be at the time. Thanks to GPS positioning, you can walk around Tranquility Base and use your mobile as a window into real-time recreations of highlights of the mission.

What I like about the concept behind this app is the potential it has for heritage sites, or anywhere out in the world where you might want to overlay digital content on what you’re looking at. A ruined castle could be restored, an archaeological site become a living settlement. And it is best done with a mobile device. How well MoonWalking works in the wild I can’t say. My iPhone is too old and my iPad doesn’t have 3G so I can’t get the app to work.

LaunchballI think Launchball actually predates mobile apps. This simple physics simulator-meets construction set game was launched as a website (how old school is that?) back in 2007 to much acclaim. It won awards at Museums and the Web and some other conference called SXSW, where it picked up Best Game and Best of Show awards. In 2009, it was released for iOS and is available for iPhone.

UPDATE: Mia Ridge clarified the development history for me. Thanks, Mia!

@erodley good piece! FWIW, Launchball was developed in-house and with an agency and based on Launchpad gallery experience. Mobile diff ppl—
Mia (@mia_out) January 11, 2012

NOTE: Apparently, Science Museum and the game’s developer are renegotiating contracts, so the game has been taken down from the App Store temporarily.  Try the original Flash version to get a sense of it’s addictive gameplay.

What I like about Launchball is the extent to which it works as a great game, and as a museum game.  It lets you play loads of levels, but it also lets you build your own, and share your creations with the Launchball community. First and foremost, it’s a good game. Second, it does a great job of getting you to experiment and engage in the “I wonder what would happen if…” thinking that’s an essential prerequisite to learning how scientists and engineers think.

Apps as ways to encourage visitors to pay attention in the museum

All the games I’ve mentioned thus far could be done anywhere. Nothing about them requires a museum visit, though you probably would never find them unless you were at that museum and saw a sign directing you to download the app.

Tate Trumps

Tate’s most well-known app, Tate Trumps, behaves differently than the apps above. It was originally designed to work in the Gallery, and has been updated to work anywhere. Like the title says, it’s a way to play a simple version of the card game trumps, only the cards are various artworks at the Tate.

In each of the three different games that make up Tate Trumps, you pick a hand of cards that are Tate artworks, that have attributes, some mundane like “size”, and others wildly subjective like “strength”.  When you assemble a hand, the game picks a suit, and the players try to put out their highest card with that attribute. Winner gets points, player with most points at the end of seven hands wins.

Tate Trumps is a brilliant piece of work in my opinion. It has multiple modes of gameplay. You can play it alone, or with your friends. The attributes are strange enough that they got me to look at the artworks differently than I would’ve on a more typical visit. In Collector mode, you add artworks by going around the gallery, typing in ID numbers off the object labels, “collecting” the pieces you want before your opponents can get them. And it’s connection to the Tate is crystal clear. It’s a game that only Tate would’ve made.

So what can these games teach us?

As I said in my previous app review, trying to synthesize learning from such disparate experiences is a challenge, but there are some things that rise up when I look at these games.

Good games are fun.
Seems like a no-brainer, but as you know, so many “educational” games are educational first and games second (if at all). They’re really gamified (ack) interactives, and they usually suck. If it’s going to be a game, it has to be a game first.

Be in for the long haul
Tate Trumps is on version 5, and has not only fixed bugs, but added major new functionalities as time has gone on. That means the business model has to be a software development model with new version releases and point releases, not a museum exhibition, “Build it and it’s done” model.

Success has costs
I doubt anyone at Science Museum could’ve predicted that Launchball would have such a long life, and morph from being a website to being a mobile app. And whatever agreement they originally had with the developers, I bet it didn’t include this contingency.

Things you can only do with a phone make more appealing apps
Almost all of these apps use the mobile platform to do things you couldn’t do any other way. Using the camera, communication functions, GPS, etc… all make the experience more compelling because it’s obvious that you could only do this with a mobile.

What museum game apps have you played and enjoyed?

A Tale of Two Exhibits: “It was the worst of times…” Part One

An earlier version of this was posted among the Reviews at MuseumMobile.

Last month, I had two very different mobile experiences in one afternoon. I took a mobile tour on a Segway, and participated in a large-scale SCVNGR trek. I was looking forward to both, and had bike like mad to get from one to the other in time. At the end of the day, I felt let down by both. Looking back, they both left me feeling like I’d been marginalized and boy did I not like that feeling.  It doesn’t happen to me too often, so I think it was a good thing for me, because it reminded me how awful it feels to be willfully ignored.

#1) Boston Glider Segway tour

I had the opportunity to spend a couple of hours cruising around Boston as part of a Segway tour with a group of colleagues. I have a great job! It was a mobile experience of a very different sort, but it shared a problem with many handheld museum experiences, an unfortunate focus on the technology at the expense of the user.

The Segway is an interesting device. If you’ve never tried one, you should.  They’re dead easy to use after about ten minutes and “wicked fun” as we say.  And on the surface, it would seem to be a great way to “see as much as possible” which is something tourists have been trying to do since tourism was invented.  A guided Segway tour of Boston’s waterfront should be a big hit, or so I reckoned. In downtown, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting something historic or worthy of note. The tour promised basic Segway training, and an hour out on the town with a guide who could talk to us through little radio receivers we got as part of the package. And yet, by the end of my hour-plus tour, I was more tired than if I’d been walking, and had seen less than if I had been walking.  What happened?  If I had to guess, I’d speculate that the people who worked on the tour were far more invested in the Segway than in the users’ motivations and experience. The tour actually did a great job of letting me experience a Segway. It just billed itself as a sightseeing tour of Boston, so my motivation (seeing sights) got trumped by their interest in their shiny object.

A perfect example of this misplaced focus is “Seg leg.” It turns out that you need to keep your feet motionless on a Segway, and I do mean motionless.  While you’re leaning and back forth and left and right to control the device, your feet are doing nothing. Try standing completely still for an hour. It aches after awhile.  So a constant undercurrent of the Segway experience after twenty minutes is, “Can I move my foot? No! Now? Oooh, red light! I can shift… Ah…” Not so conducive to focusing on the sights. When we returned our Segways and several people in the tour mentioned their leg fatigue, our guide laughed and replied, “Oh yeah. We call it ‘Seg leg.’” and continued collecting our headsets. If you love Segways as much as they do, you put up with it, or wear it as a badge of pride. If you’re a first time or casual user, you suffer. Not a great way to build word-of-mouth buzz.

Our tour covered an enormous amount of ground, easily a couple miles of the waterfront.  And yet, I took no pictures of our day out sightseeing.  Because you need both hands to drive, and if you never stop, you never get the chance to do that other thing tourists have been doing for ages; taking pictures of each other.  The tour route was obviously optimized to let us travel as long as possible between intersections and congested pedestrian areas.  And to make sure we covered as much ground as possible, we never stopped. We stood in place at red lights, but we never stopped and took time to be where we were.  It would’ve been a challenge to get us all off our Segways and back on again, so I can see how the tour planners would not want to do that.  But as a tourist, I wanted to be able to take a picture occasionally, and the experience didn’t allow it. So I breezed along, trying to hear what the guide was saying and wishing I could stop.

I won’t get into the tour content, because I missed a lot of it. I was at the end of the line and apparently their transmitter didn’t have quite enough range to get to me. I listened to a lot of white noise, a lot of wind over the tour guide’s mike and occasional content.  Compared to the care they lavished on making sure the machines were working and we were securely helmeted, the ostensible actual point of the exercise – the tour – received pretty cursory attention.

As we walked back to the Museum and debriefed each other, it became clear that we all experienced the same dissatisfaction. It was good to be on the receiving end of someone else content design decisions.  I often wrestle with exactly this kind of issue. In a science museum, you often wind up with shiny new devices that people think you ought to do something with because “They’re amazing! Have you seen what this can do?”  Technology is seductive and the lure of a solution seeking a problem can be hard to resist.  But resist! If you let your focus get stuck on what the shiny object can do instead of what your audience wants/needs/expects, you’ll probably get yourself in hot water.

A Tale of Two Exhibits: “It was the best of times…” Part Two

Have you ever had one of those days when amazing things unexpectedly happen and make you remember why you go to work every day?  Tuesday was one of those days for me.  I had two very different, very magical experiences in two very different museums.

#2) Charles Sandison, Figurehead
Peabody Essex Museum

After tearing ourselves away from the de Cordova and Halsey Burgund’s Scapes mobile app, and dropping Nancy Proctor off at the Peabody Essex Museum, Sandy Goldberg and I decided to take a quick spin around the museum. Our host suggested we check out their new Chinese exhibition and an interactive installation in the East India Marine Hall.  Sandy was interested in the Chinese stuff, and I’m a sucker for anything maritime, so we agreed to try both.  The Chinese exhibition was big and impressive, but what grabbed us both was the crazy light show we encountered in Charles Sandison’s hacking of the East India Marine Hall.

Peabody Essex has a history of mixing and matching contemporary art with their historical collections in interesting ways, so I didn’t know what to expect. East India Marine Hall is the oldest part of the museum complex, dating back to 1799 or so, and is an artifact in its own right. Think high ceilings, bright, light walls, a restrained orgy of Neoclassical ornament, dark oil paintings, nautical goodies, and cabinets of curiosities from foreign ports and you’ll have an idea of the room. Or at least an idea of what the hall looked like before Sandison set up Figurehead.

We made our way through the intervening galleries and as we approached I knew something was up.  The hall was dark, as in all the lights were out. Playing over every surface of the room were swirling dancing projections of words, helices of pixels, clouds of pixels, rivers of pixels.  We entered the nearly-empty room and were immersed in a storm of movement.  I’m probably dating myself but I had same feeling of stepping onto an empty dance floor while the disco ball filled the school cafeteria with lights.  Only Sandison used a lot of projectors and some serious computing power.

After our obligatory moment of completely gobsmacked, it quickly became obvious that the lights were not just a cycling projection, but that there was some kind of intelligence directing their movement. Even with a dozen projectors throwing images around, it was still quite dark, too dark to see any of the artifacts in the room. As we turned in circles trying to take in the enormity of the whole installation, it became clear to me the streams of pixels were running along the edge of wall, as if they were following the line of the ceiling. And as I expanded my focus, I could now see that there were emergent patterns in all the pixilated swirl.  Words in archaic handwriting would become pixels, pixels would turn into a helix that stretched into rivers moving in definite patterns.  Sometimes tributaries would cascade down the walls, carefully avoiding paintings like water running downhill.  It was fascinating to watch.

One of my favorite parts of the installation was watching the pixels flowing through the clusters of paintings on the walls. They’re hung according to a 19^th century aesthetic, high up, and in neat rows. While I was watching the pixels flowing between the frames and trying to imagine the programming necessary to achieve the effect, something wonderful happened.  Pixels broke off from the stream and passed over one painting and stopped at the bottom of the image, like water filling a vessel. As we watched, the light slowly “filled up” one painting, revealing it for us. Then the pixels drained away and another object was highlighted, this time a figurehead on the next wall. The artist was directing our gaze from object to object, and I suspect was trying to suggest more, but I managed to neatly avoid the lone, dark label describing the piece, so I missed all the deeper connections I might have made. You can get an idea of what I missed by reading the description at the end of this.

So what made this experience work?

1) Immersion works.  Standing inside a 1,500 sq. ft. room full of moving images on every surface hooked me. It was clear we were “inside” something, not standing in a room looking at things.  Sandison obviously studied the room and used every inch of it.  The museum even set up a little row of chairs at one end so you could let the installation wash over you.  An older couple sat there silently the whole time we were in the room, just watching and taking in the spectacle.

2) Size does matter.  It was impossible to see the whole installation at one time, so I was constantly shifting my focus, looking at this detail and that. I don’t think I got to see everything, so I’ll have to go back and look some more.

3) Being willing to do the unthinkable is powerful. Turning off the lights in one of your signature galleries and rendering some of the oldest pieces of the collection unviewable was a pretty impressive sight. It clearly conveyed the impression that PEM’s commitment to showing new work was not a half-hearted one, but a serious institutional goal. It made me take the experience more seriously, because I could only imagine the initial meeting where the curator gets up and says, “OK, we’re gonna turn off all the lights in the room and projectors are going to be the only light source…”  Wow.

What didn’t work for me?

1) Words that mean nothing mean something.  I’ve looked at a lot of 17^th-19^th handwriting, so I could make out the words and snippets of sentences that played across the walls, but they were too low-res to read easily.  I am a word person by trade, so I might be biased, but when I see words, I expect to be able to read them. If they’re in another language, I expect a translation. If they’re hard to read, I expect a transcription. Words exist to convey meaning, and I often get lost or unhappy when artists use them as mere decorative elements. I don’t know whether Sandison intended them to be, but I couldn’t read them most of the time, so I felt like I was missing out on part of the fun.

2) An insufficient introduction is worse than no introduction. The only label I could find was about 8 x 10 inches and told me the name of the series this work belonged to and the artist’s name. I didn’t know the piece was called Figurehead until I looked on the web.  There, I learned lots of things that would’ve enriched my experience of the piece.

Quibbles aside, it was a great experience. Unfortunately, it was also that photographs badly, being dark and constantly moving. Here’s one photo, courtesy of Sandy’s phone, to give you a sense of the space.

I’ll be going back.

[POSTSCRIPT - Jim Forrest from PEM thoughtfully sent a link to a video feature they've made on the making of the exhibit. It includes video that does justice to the artwork.  Check it out.]

Description of the project, cribbed from the Peabody Essex Museum site.

Charles Sandison, Figurehead

Internationally renowned for his animated digital projections, artist Charles Sandison installs a site-specific artwork created for PEM’s East India Marine Hall. Sandison will activate the words of 18th-century ship captains’ logs to create an immersive environment drawing upon the trade routes, politics, competition and voices that led to the founding of the museum and the origins of PEM’s remarkable collection. Working at the intersection of visual art and computer programming, he uses his own customized software to map trajectories around the room; the projected images respond to algorithms that guide their behavior. In Figurehead, Sandison’s algorithms draw on real-time weather data from the internet, making the installation organic and ever-evolving.

Organized by PEM’s Curator of Contemporary Art, Trevor Smith, this installation marks the first in a series of contemporary art interventions in PEM’s FreePort initiative.