“Fun is one of the important motivators for learning. That’s why game-based learning is discussed as an effective approach to teaching and learning”.
This is a growing reality, especially for the young generation, which is socialized with the internet and digital games. Today’s “Net Generation”, or digital natives as Van ECK calls them, “who have become disengaged with traditional instruction” is one factor responsible for the changed image of educational games. While prejudices and skepticism against using games for education are decreasing. The use of games beyond the private sphere in contexts like museums for cultural heritage is not yet generally accepted. However, there is a project that is ongoing within the museum to investigate the benefits and problems of developing a serious game to be integrated into a museum exhibition.
Naturally, the purpose of a museum goes beyond only providing information. Museums are places of exploration, which stimulate people’s minds with their exhibits. They present physically, what books show only on paper. In many museums, however, interaction with the visitor is a one-way communication. In order to preserve ancient exhibits, museums impose very strict rules of behavior on their visitors, including the most popular one “Do not touch”.
Therefore, in many cases, visitors have a passive role and no possibility to “respond”. That is one reason why museums are constantly trying to improve their communication with visitors. Interactive exhibits are one-way museums found to enable visitors to act and to explore exhibits actively. As they inspire and provoke exploration, interactive exhibits are entertaining, and at the same time, they increase the visitor’s engagement and thus the learning effects. Responding adequately to the visitors’ actions, they support a learning-by-acting behaviour.
Challenge and Feedback
Some of the key characteristics of games positively influence motivation for learning. In contrast to mechanical interactive exhibits, digital games can place exhibits in a context. They can tell stories, for instance, about how exhibits have been used in the past and create a meaningful interaction between visitors and virtual exhibits. Through games, visitors can experience the former environment and functions of exhibits. He or she can interact with the exhibit without the risk of destroying valuable objects. While having the potential to enhance the visitors’ experience, multimedia devices in museums, however, hold also the potential to distract visitors from paying attention to the actual artifacts.
This problem is especially evident when visitors spend more time looking at screens than at the exhibits, as frequently occurs with mobile tour guides or collaborative educational games based on handheld devices. This competition for the visitor’s attention should be avoided although, the success of a game can be measured by the time spent on it, or the number of times players want to repeat playing, there must be a balance between the game and the environments where the game is inserted. The game should rather provoke visitor’s curiosity towards the exhibition.
The task of developing a game for a museum environment has to cope with the contradictory demands of being engaging enough for the visitor’s learning motivation, but on the other hand not taking too much of his visiting time. This was tried out in a project for master’s students in German Maritime Museum Bremerhaven and it was related to the main exhibit. In this project, a stationary solution was developed with the game running in a kiosk, which is supposed to be integrated into the medieval exhibition about “Hanseatic Times”.
Main Issues of Serious Games in Museums
Among many others, the value of a museum for a society regards not only preserving the memory of a civilization but also educating and raising awareness about the culture of a nation.
Museums are considered as public accessible places and a close and trusted way of reaching the past. At this point, visitors have the chance to learn a bit about other serious life history as composed in an exhibition. They can go through the hall, pass by the rooms, and see how the family of an object is arranged in whatever manner. Their experiences will stimulate individuals to think about how were living then and what their feelings and thoughts were. Another reality is that visitors will have the opportunity to be in touch with concrete and physical pieces of memory. This memory has to be preserved.
However, usually, museums are limited to only showing static objects and artifacts. They cannot show them in use or how they worked in their historical contexts. For instance, in the German Maritime Museum, it is unthinkable to go for a ride in a submarine. Even if possible, the complete notion of living during the Nazi persecution, or being in a war under the water would not be realizable. Those limitations are easy to understand and those facts will probably never change, but this gap can be diminished with the use of multimedia technology, especially interactive serious games for museums. We already have a long tradition of including technology within our exhibitions, but still, they are not very open to digital games. We claim, however, that museums are one of the most suitable places for educational games. On one hand, by seeing the real artifacts, visitors get a notion of space, size and form.
They can smell and sometimes even touch objects. On the other hand, by playing, individuals can have another kind of experience. When acting within the game world, visitors can have a better comprehension of how those artifacts worked and of the cultural context to which they belonged. “When we play, we explore the possibility space of a set of rules-we learn to understand and evaluate a game’s meaning. Video games make arguments about how social or cultural systems work in the world – or how they could work, or don’t work”.
Of course, due to the restrictions of the digital medium and the designers’ construction of reality, the means of these medium games are also limited. No matter if the game is implemented on a handheld device or a stationary computer, the designer is restricted to buttons, screens, speakers, capacity of processing, and so on.
Moreover, the “reality” has to be algorithmically interpreted in a way to fit those devices. The restricted means of interpretation and encapsulation are not adequate to present the full quality of the real artifact, but they can support and contextualize their concept. At this point, the potential of multimedia games becomes evident. They can work as interactive texts, which explain concepts but are not capable of replacing the weight of the real artifacts. An advantage of having games inside museums and side by side with historical objects is that individuals can do real-time comparison and interpretation. This is especially valuable for young visitors like school classes, for whom a museum visit means an informal learning activity.
It is important to make clear that digital games should not replace textual information, or decrease their amount. But they should be integrated as a complement to the whole experience, in which their contribution is to support the comprehension of the role the artifacts had in the past. On the other hand, the real artifact prevents misinterpretations that the virtual artifacts represented in the game may cause. In the end, the result is a very profitable combination between digital games and traditional museum exhibitions.
In order to profit from the potential of adding complementary value to an exhibition object without doubling the exhibition content, close cooperation with the museum is necessary. Museum experts have to provide the game designers with information about interesting aspects of the exhibition object to be explored and experienced when playing the game.
The challenge for the game designers then is to create a meaningful story related to these learning objectives and to add competition and interactive game effects, which engage the players and make it fun to play. As the museum experts are not only consultants for the game developers but also stakeholders of the project, their further requirements have to be considered especially regarding the location of the game in the exhibition, limitation of sound and audio effects, authenticity of the game content, and duration of the game played. When the museum demanded to have a limited playtime of five minutes in the case of our game, it was a hard surprise for the game developers, who were used to games with unlimited play time, many difficulty levels, and challenges for the players. Another problem arises from the typical trial-and-error behavior of museum visitors.
A quantitative study has shown that a typical museum visitor spends 1-2 minutes at a museum object. During this time, labels and instructions for interactive exhibits are usually not read. Interactive exhibits are tried out directly and people just refer to the instructions if they fail. From this, it follows that a learning game in a museum has to avoid long instructions and it has to be intuitive and easy to use. This challenges especially the user interface designers, who have to create self-explanatory metaphors and guidance for the graphical user interface.
Avoiding long instructions without reducing the learning potential would be the most challenging demand in our project, if and when developing a completely reviewed game prototype after the first usability tests.
Integrating a Serious Game in a Museum Context
The following may be considered in integrating a serious game in a museum context.
1. Base the game on relevant learning objectives and historical facts
2. Make the game engaging
3. Limit play time and
4. Make the game self-explanatory.
The confidence with these four is that it will not only enhance the experiences of visitors but also increase learning success. Hence we are convinced that museums can benefit a lot from the interactive potential of digital media by applying highly interactive multimedia technologies which offers additional benefits in presenting and visualizing certain aspects and interrelations of exhibits making individuals apply knowledge informally and entertainingly.
This can be increased greatly if the software is supported by the hardware because the possibility to interact with concepts and representations is one of the main reasons why technology is suitable for museums.
However, designers should take a humble attitude towards the museum and be aware that the game takes a secondary role in the whole setting rather than spending too much time with it, it should only facilitate and fastback their stimulations. They should find the right balance and produce good results in the end.
Wasa Gertrude Mobunubhata, Assistant Director Museums, National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Benin City, writes from Benin City.
