An intrepid few have been exploring a new dimension in the museum experience: game design. This highly interactive session (seriously - no hiding behind glowing screens at this one) will challenge you to work together to co-design the G4C Festival 15th-Anniversary Pop-Up Museum, exploring two big questions 1) What happens when you treat permanent collections not as static objects, but as pieces on a game board, the museum halls not as temples, but as playgrounds? and 2) Can games bring into alignment the interests of visitors, students, educators, museum curators, and administrators?
The G4C Pop-up Museum will be constructed out of objects donated to the conference by past attendees, objects that represent the 15-year history of this historic festival. Come question and reinvent the idea of what a museum is by working together to build, interpret, and play with the new exhibits. Will you be assigned the role of curator or exhibit designer, copywriter or tour guide? Come join us and find out – and then together we will open the G4C Pop-up Museum, have a parade, and then offer it for G4C attendees to visit in a public space for the duration of the conference.
The Pop-up opening will be followed by an open discussion about museums and games as constructed experiences and what happens when the two are combined, informed by both the previous exercise and recent experiments at museums using game design as an innovative form of public engagement.
Participants will learn about games as a museum experience to focus visitors’ attention and teach key exhibit content; and how a gaming community can participate in the creation of new experiences for conference attendees.
(and if you are reading this AFTER the session concludes, please go to
http://tinyurl.com/G4C15PopUp on your mobile phone to play the museum.)
