Games and museums

I went to a session earlier this week at the MA conference with Ross Parry (University of Leicester) and Mike Gogan (Blitz Games). They were talking about gaming in the museum sector.

Ross brought out a couple of interesting facts at the beginning of the talk:

1. The UK games industry injects £2 billion p/a into the UK economy;

2. 2006 saw a 7% increase in games sold in the UK

In short: gaming is massive news. Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last couple of years (without your PSP…) then you probably knew that already. The big question being asked by Ross though is “if this is so huge, then where are museums?”

There are of course some who are doing very cool stuff. The major nationals, including (of course!) the Science Museum are constantly pushing gamey content out there both onto the web and on-kiosk. But it doesn’t feel like the groundswell that it “should” be, given the enormous rise of gaming as an activity out there in the real world.

One of the big questions once you start thinking about gaming is where it starts and ends. Is a quiz a game? Is a 3D environment like Second Life? Is an “interactive” website? UGC? If you assume that anything “interactive” is by definition a game, then the scope for including museum activity becomes that much wider. I’m not sure that anyone goes with this argument, though…

Mike Gogan pointed at realism and engagement being two factors which defined a (successful) game. But “realism” isn’t a part of something like Tetris or Katamari Damacy – often the most compelling games are the weirdest and most disassociated from anything real at all. Engagement, granted, is definitely part of the checklist. But that therefore means, doesn’t it, that Facebook is also a “game”…? Probably not, but I’m not entirely sure why.

Leaving the definitions aside for a moment, the question still remains: where are museums in this space? Ross has a take on this: he believes that the way that the Games Industry talks to museums is essentially flawed – he reckons there needs to be a dialogue between the two sectors in order that each can better understand the other. I think he’s probably right, and so do the Serious Games Initiative who are looking at “…helping to forge productive links between the electronic game industry and projects involving the use of games in education, training, health, and public policy“.

Personally, though, I think the issue is way, way more basic: games are really, really, really expensive to commission and produce. As soon as you start talking “Flash Interactive” (and I’m deliberately focussing on Flash, web-based games because that is the obvious place..), you’re by definition meaning at least £5k and probably way, way more than that to do anything really cool. Five grand is (usually) ok for a national museum or as part of a funded project, but if you’re in a local museum then that is probably a years’ worth of marketing budget. That just isn’t going to wash.

Spending this kind of money would be ok if the debate about the “value” of gaming had already been had, and won. Unfortunately, it hasn’t: although many now believe that games can truly aid learning, there are still voices of dissent – and while this goes on, budget probably won’t be allocated nearly as readily.

Museums Association Exhibition

I’m here at the Museums Association Exhibition in Glasgow. I seem to have the bug for blogging live from events, and this time I’ve got the luxury of a laptop (and not just my PDA) so I thought I’d shuffle up a quick post.

It’s strange for me to be this side of the line – involved in a company who make technologies for museums, rather than a museum looking for new technologies. Having said that, there are a huge number of familiar faces passing by already (and it’s only 10am) so it feels like a place I know and understand.

Just round the corner are ico design with a very cool stand which Ben built using RFID which detects hat-swapping (it makes sense when you see it…). And here’s a picture of Ben on ours. Note free mints and pens. Hurrah.

Library 2.0

This week I’ve been doing some research on “Library 2.0″ – I’m presenting at a UKSG seminar called “Caught up in Web 2.0? Practical implementations and creative solutions for librarians and publishers” in November.

One of the better papers – or at least one which seems to have been well researched, and covers lots of interesting ground – is by a chap called Jack Maness and is called “Library 2.0 Theory: Web 2.0 and Its Implications for Libraries“. It’s a great introduction to what libraries are doing in the brave “new” world of Web 2.0, why they’re doing it and what the particular challenges are. He doesn’t unfortunately mention one of my favourite YouTube clips – an oldie but goodie: “Introducing the book” which I link to whenever given half a chance…

I’ve got a fair amount of experience of what the issues are facing museums in this space, and it’s fascinating to spend some time looking at a parallel sector. Not only do the similarities come shining through, but I’ve found that looking at this from a different angle also sparks off some thinking which I haven’t had before. It’s refreshing to “know about Web 2.0″ but to be naive about a particular application of the various technologies and techniques. My experience of libraries online has until recently been almost entirely limited to OPAC searches at university, which was a frighteningly long time ago, and the integration with Unicorn which we carried out as part of the NMSI Ingenious project.

So many of the challenges which we face as museums – challenges which I’ve frequently tried to articulate at various conferences – are echoed in the library world: What about authority? Can we cope with the resource implications? What does it cost? Why should we “do Web2.0″? What does the future hold?

Mr Maness does a great job in articulating the various approaches to Web2.0 in the library sector. I’d recommend reading the paper, especially if you’re new to this sector. Here’s a few choice snippets to tempt you..

“Library 2.0 is…communally innovative and rests on the foundation of libraries as a community service, but understands that as communities change, libraries must not only change with them, they must allow users to change the library…”

“Library 2.0 blurs the line between library and patron, creator and consumer, authority and novice”

He also focusses on the vital nature of the cross-over between physical and real – something which readers of my Electronic Museum blog know I bang on about a fair amount:

“Library 2.0 will show no distinction between or among formats and the point at which they may be accessed”

Once I’ve done my presentation at UKSG I’ll of course post it to the web and link to it from here…

Walking seamlessly through virtual worlds

Today I read three stories, all loosely connected which could make for interesting time for social networking in the not too distant future.

Firstly theres social stream, which seems to offer the potential for users to share their socal data to many different applications, an approach discussed at the recent FOWA conference by Yahoo and their Fireeagle application, which is also designed to share the (location based) information of a subscriber to multiple applications …but i digress (told you so).

Social stream, suggests that the guys at Carnegi Mellon University are working towards a solution which will allow you to share social data across multiple sites, if you, like me have mulitple profiles on multiple socal networks, then this Unified Social Network as they describe it, could be a godsend. One place for all my virtual friends, for me to discuss the finer points of life with them and ……they with each other? wow. ok thats freaky…but ’super’ cool.

Then there comes the news that Ibm and Linden Labs are working ona project that would allow users to share avatars across virual worlds, ok so now i can not only create my USN but i can create a persona that can literaly walk from one virtual environment to another. Socially thats impressive, economically thats opportunity, considering the value of some of this vitual property how long before the first virtual bureax de change is set up virtual tour operators selling virtual holidays and renting space in other virtual networks, what next, world of warcraft tie ins, dwarfs and orcs running riot in second life…no wait ill get back to the point.

In his article social networks and groups formed Shiv Singh described (amongst other things) how, in social networks, ‘isolated regions’ became part of the more active middle region by nodes (users) in the group joining the larger middle region. Thus the larger middle region grows organicaly and new isolated regions are born, is this going to happen to all social social networks, ultimately will they become part of the collective, the single unified social network, web 4.0?

Then along comes Google(again), who its seems have been busy, it would appear that they have decided to out do facebook in the TechCrunch article, google to out open facebook Michael Arrington discusses how google are to open up the API to their social graph data, big deal, who uses orkut anway right? But wait, go back to the the begining, and add into the equation the work Google are doing with the social stream bods and there Unified Social Network stuff.

disclaimer, ok heres where you put on those rose tinted specs, this is the intraweb we are talking about

So now we have everyone moving across every (ok maybe not every) social site, and the API is and 100% open….with avatars. now that really is super cool and possibly a little scary, will there emerge a brave new world in cyberspace with an entirly new set of rules, a new reality and should I stop taking the Matrixtoo literally?

meh

maybe Ferris Bueller had a point I’m off to trash a ferrari, virtually of course

MySpace announces Platform

Facebook launched their developer platform back in May 2007 to some serious applause from geek types the world over. The Facebook figures on usage of the Platform since that date are impressive – at the Future Of Web Apps conference last week, I went to a session with Dave Morin, the Platform manager. Apart from the 43 million users, 50% of whom return daily (enough to make you really sweat..), he also said that there are now more than 5,000 applications built on the Platform – in only 3 months. More interesting is that over 80% of users have added a Facebook application to their profile.

Doing the maths, I reckon that means: 0.8 x 0.5 x 43,000,000 = 17.2 million users using Facebook applications, which if averaged out across the 5,000 (bad assumption, but go with it) means each one has over 3,000 users. That’s 1,000 users a month – a pretty impressive take-up rate, especially when you consider that the audience isn’t a bunch of developers but Joe and Joely public…

Morin talked about how “growth, engagement and monetization” were the three phases in the development of any web application and that Facebook was quickly sidestepping the first two and beginning to enable the third.

Whether this is true or not, the (at least partial) opening up of the social graph is obviously hot news.

So. That’s presumably why MySpace is doing the same thing – with a formal announcement expected next week. It’ll be very interesting to see what this means for Facebook, who have had all the column inches recently. The battle over the true opening up of the social graph to the outside world (and not just to the Platform itself) could be a future battle. For now, it’ll be interesting to see what difference – if any – this makes to the battle of the social networks…

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