How to play in a museum

In 2008, perhaps you’d find one or two members of staff at a given museum who were interested in play and willing to make arguments for it internally, battling their way through to the point where visitors were allowed to play an actual game. In 2019, people working in museums are way, way more interested in how play can help visitors explore ideas or spaces, engaging them in different ways and creating stories and shared experiences.

Once upon a time games in museums were restricted to one-off events on a Tuesday in mid-September when the Assistant Director of Disapproving of Things was out of town. Now they’re increasingly a core part of what museums offer to their visitors.

So that’s great news for people who like museums and games, right?  

Well. Sort of.

If you’ve got a museum lying around somewhere and you want a game to put in it – or if, like me, you’re a game designer and you want a museum to work in – it’s great news. There are a lot of opportunities around, and a lot writing and research and thought that’s aimed right at you. There’s even a whole conference coming up at the V&A. But if you want to actually play, then the bigger picture of games and museums is pretty much irrelevant.

I’m obviously more interested in games than most people, but I still go to museums based on what’s in them, their themes and cost, and whatever else I happen to be doing that day, not whether there’s a game there I want to play.

And if I do want to play in a museum, but the museum I’m in happens not to have something that suits me, then – well, I’m on my own. That’s fine for me: I’m a game designer, I’ll find something to do. Most recently I tried this game, and it was informative and also depressing:

Woman or Concept

But not everyone has a stack of games at hand, or even a sense of their own right to play in a museum. In fact, this sort of unilateral visitor-initiated play is something that a lot of museums are still resistant to, even museums that are at the forefront of thinking about the benefits of play and games.

This makes sense: looking after a building full of visitors and staff and objects is hard; museums need rules to keep people and objects safe, and games can pull against those rules in sometimes dangerous ways. Museums also want to give visitors a certain sort of experience, and games can mess that up. Look at a simple game like this:

Tour Guide

It’s a diverting enough game, but there’s a downside: you’ll probably remember a few of the lies as true. When humans hear “this cool fact has been debunked”, we often forget the boring “debunked” part and just remember the cool pseudofact. A similar thing happens with games like this, where we remember the story, and don’t necessarily remember whether it turned out to be true.

I once ran a True or False Tour around London, with tour guides who would tell duelling stories at each stop – one truth and one lie. Years later, I went on a different tour led by one of those guides, and he told the group one of the entirely imaginary stories that I’d made up. In the intervening years, he’d forgotten it was a lie, and only remembered the story.

You should still consider playing Tour Guide; it’s a nice way to structure a chat if you’re in a museum with a couple of friends. But as a visitor, you don’t have a particular responsibility to make sure you don’t misunderstand anything about any given museum – whereas museums do have a responsibility not to mislead you.

Different games can fit in with a museum’s aims to different degrees. Some games for guiding a conversation aren’t at odds with most museums’ implicit aims in the way that Tour Guide is, but also don’t support them:

Polite Society

More explicitly ‘game’-y games, with win conditions and an ongoing score, can fall into this category too:

Shussshhhh

If we imagine a scale ranging from “supports the museum’s aims” to “pulls against the museum’s aims”, then most official games sit at the first end, followed by games like these that direct players’ attention in interesting but tangential ways, followed by potentially misleading games like Tour Guide. Theoretically we could go even further along this path, towards games that actively break the rules:

Touch Stuff

A friend of mine plays this game; I won’t go to museums with him, and I don’t think he should play it, although I do think it’s funny, and a pretty good piece of game design.

There are less clear-cut ways to break the rules as well. I once worked on a game for a London art gallery, and we were asked to replace dice with spinners – because a dice might roll off under a piece of art, and then someone might try to get it out and accidentally topple a sculpture. As a restriction, this is both really sensible, and really really non-obvious.

Rules and breaking them

So where should you draw the lines for play in a museum? As someone who works for museums, I think it’s wonderful that museums are commissioning explicitly playful work, but I wish more of them also encouraged visitors to engage in self-directed play, exploring this space for playful activities that are currently permitted but not encouraged. Games that people make up on their own might not always be informative about the history of the collection, but having more ways to engage with the space and the objects is valuable in itself.

As a visitor, I feel that my responsibility ends at following the museum’s rules; I’m happy to play self-originated games that may subvert the curatorial aims. And the thing that museums can most easily do to help me play like this is to be explicit about what their rules actually are.

Only when museums are clear about exactly what is permitted in their spaces are people able to confidently judge what forms of play are allowed. I’ve worked in museums for a decade and I’m still sometimes not sure what the rules are in a particular space: do these white gloves by the book mean I can touch it if I put them on? If there’s not a no-photography sign, does that mean photography is always okay? Does that mean filming is fine as well?

Obviously no museum is going to put every possible restriction on a sign (“No dice-rolling! If you need a random number use an app instead”). But by communicating positive permissions as well as clear restrictions, museums can allow play-minded visitors to feel confident in their actions, comfortable about what they can and can’t do – and perhaps put them in the mood for a game.