Our Museum Game

Abstract

The 'Our Museum' board game (referred to as 'the game' throughout this paper) is a dialogical tool for museum professionals, researchers, exhibition designers and developers. The game is designed and developed through a coordinated effort between museum professionals and researchers. The work presented here will detail the conception of the game and establish parts of the theoretical background for the game design, offset by two iterations that are based on insights from two separate playtests. These insights have been reworked and implemented into the current version of the game. With the game, we aim to offer a tool-supported method to tackle user-centered challenges in the exhibition space, by bringing different roles together and provide a medium to form a shared language as a part of the design process of creating exhibitions. The work here could be interesting to both practitioners as well as researchers working within the museum context and to an extent within the fields of games and gamification.

A Matrix for Gamifying Development Workshops

“…Games as drivers for innovation is not limited to the previous examples. Patricio [2], presents a study on the game IdeaChef as an approach to address innovation challenges; or Madsen and Krishnasamy [13], who present a game as a dialogue tool for designing museum experiences. Lastly, Thomsen, Sort, and Kristiansen [14] have developed a set of booster cards as an inspirational and ideate tool to innovate business model configurations.…”

“…By looking at already existing games for innovation development processes, it is possible to place them in the matrix by looking at their purpose, the game mechanics they used, and the level of facilitation that was required. To do this, we have chosen three gamified approaches that have been documented academically [4,13,14] and can be used to visualize three different placements in the matrix to exemplify that workshop games vary between the parameters. Lastly, a use case that illustrates how the matrix is used for deciding on the level of gamification is presented.…”

“…The Our Museum Game [13] is designed as a game for the innovation of interactive museum communication. The game is intended as a user-centered collaborative dialogue game, one that brings together different professions around the game to discuss new ways to communicate to their users based on the users' challenges.…”

“…The game is intended as a user-centered collaborative dialogue game, one that brings together different professions around the game to discuss new ways to communicate to their users based on the users' challenges. The Our Museum Game [13] uses game mechanics to drive and facilitate the progression and ideation throughout the game while being supported by questions to drive dialogue.…”

“…The game consists of a game board, a clear set of rules, and multiple game mechanics, such as time constraints, tokens, and roles [13]. The Our Museum Game uses these mechanics to guide participants through three design stages: define, design, and evaluate, thereby facilitating and visualizing a process of ideas, discussions, and choices rather than being an actual game.…”