Quickie Excitement: My Current Project in the News

There's a New York Times article today about the virtual CSI:NY experience that will be launching in Second Life on October 24. There's a link to a video clip from the episode that will kick it off here. I've had a blast working with The Electric Sheep Company and Anthony Zuiker (creator of CSI) to design the narrative game that will accompany the superlative CSI:NY virtual environment. For all those who wonder whether Second Life can be used for a mainstream, mass audience experience, the virtual CSI:NY experience will be a great test. Stay tuned for more...

Participation through Collaboration: Making Visitors Feel Needed

This summer, I got married. My husband and I moved to Santa Cruz in June, and then spent the next seven weekends having a distributed wedding at our new home. Each weekend we had a new group of folks, a theme, and a related activity. It was our way of having a small wedding and inviting everyone we knew.

It also allowed us to experiment and iterate. As part of each weekend, we did a project. At first, we’d planned for these to vary from fun activities (i.e. Frisbee golf) to manual labor (tree house construction). But after a couple weekends, we learned, strangely enough, that the manual labor activities were far more successful than fun ones. People told us again and again how much they enjoyed smashing concrete, clearing brush, pulling weeds, and splitting wood. Almost every part of each weekend, from the ceremonies (open guided discussion) to the meals (homemade) was participatory. But the most social, energized part—no matter the mix of guests—was the manual labor.

Are our friends and family psychotic closet workhorses? I don’t think so. Instead, I think we uncovered one of the secrets to creating successful participatory experiences: people like to feel useful. If there’s a project to be done, they like to feel like contributors. They like seeing the tangible results of their labor. They like assuming a clear role and performing. And they bond with each other when they are working side by side. Contributing to the discussion about “balance in relationships”—that’s fuzzy. Smashing concrete together is clear.

I bring this up in the context of thinking about how to design exhibits and programs to be meaningful participatory experiences for visitors. Now that the concept of “turning visitors from consumers into participants” is out there, I’m starting to think beyond the soft and fuzzy to the practical. What does it mean for visitors to be participants? How can we do more than just give it lip service?

I think we have to couch participatory museum experiences in terms of collaborating with visitors. Collaboration is only meaningful when the parties involved actually have some stake in and influence over the outcome. Have you ever been part of a fake collaboration, one in which a project leader purported to want everyone’s input but really just wanted everyone to say yes to theirs? Those situations are exasperating at best, and at worst, can make you lose faith in the leader’s (and the institution’s) commitment to the team approach.

The same dynamic plays out when it comes to participatory museum experiences. If we let visitors give their opinion of an exhibit in a video kiosk, but then we don’t follow up, they’re fake collaborators. If we let them build inventions but don’t display or engage with them, their effort is an exercise in futility. These incomplete experiences make visitors suspicious of the museum’s level of interest in their input—which eventually leads to no input at all.

People who are attracted by participatory experiences want them to be purposeful. We would never have asked people at the wedding to move dirt without a reason. Purposefulness serves the visitor (they feel involved) and the museum (getting stuff done, making the visitor experience more engaging).

I’ve always loved Citizen Science initiatives that bring scientists into museums not to showcase their work, but to use visitors as assistants to help further it. Why do a simulation of an experiment when you can get involved in the real thing? Similarly, visitors who may not care to use an art station may get passionately involved in a mural painting. It’s exciting to see yourself as a member of the team and to see the tangible, useful results of your efforts.

I know this is a tall order. “Sheesh.” you may be thinking. “First she wants us to open up discussion about museum content via blogs and other forums, and NOW she wants that discussion to be actionable?”

And I know that collaborating—especially with large numbers of disparate visitors—won’t be easy. But collaboration is a two-way street; we should be doing so in the service of actually learning how to make museums better.

If participatory experiences aren’t actionable, they won’t be taken seriously by institutions or visitors. Every meaningful relationship is based on this concept: that all parties take each other’s contributions seriously. We can’t play benevolent dictator to visitors, parceling out opportunities for them to share comments in some kind of democratic “exercise.” If we want to encourage participation, we have to create new platforms for visitors’ contributions to mean something. We have to stop putting exhibits out as fait accompli. We have to find ways to smash concrete with visitors side by side.

Wedding ceremonies often include some acknowledgement of the importance of the guests as witnesses to and supporters of the commitment between the two partners. This acknowledgement often feels false to me: is the memory of Aunt Elma nodding off in the sun really going to pull you through those tough times? The people who support a project or a commitment are the ones who work on it, care about it, and are rewarded by it. Museums are starting to do a great job holding weddings, acknowledging their audiences, calling their visitors participants. It’s time to dispense with the ceremony and start making it real.

I don’t have the answers on how to do this. Please join me, collaborate with me, to figure it out.

Wielding Web 2.0 Intelligently: the SFMOMA Experiment

Last week, I saw the new Olafur Eliasson show at SFMOMA. Artwork aside, SFMOMA deserves kudos for taking on every maintenance nightmare short of fire—the exhibition includes falling water, pools of water, moving floorboards, and the piece de resistance—a room permanently kept at 14 degrees F to preserve the icy art car inside.

But this exhibition isn’t just a descent into sub-freezing temperatures; it’s also a tentative first step for SFMOMA using blog technology as part of the online accompaniment to the exhibition. I say “blog technology” instead of “blog” because SFMOMA has done something unusual and admirable; rather than creating a standard blog, they created an online tool, using a third party blogging application (Wordpress) as a base, that specifically suits their needs. So often, people struggle to shoehorn museum content into new technologies. Instead of letting the technology take control, SFMOMA put their needs first and used the technology as a tool to create an intelligent, simple application for visitor comments.


The Eliasson blog doesn’t look like a blog. There are no posts. There’s no RSS feed. It’s not separate (either in design or location) from the rest of the Eliasson online exhibition. SFMOMA’s goal was to create a way for visitors—online and onsite in their learning lab—to "share their experience" of the Eliasson show. To achieve this goal, they hacked the Wordpress blogging application, stripping it down a comment sharing/moderating/displaying system. When you go to the Eliasson online interactive feature, you can click on images from the show, leave your own comment, and view other comments on the image. That’s it.

Of course, Web 2.0 purists may say, “This isn’t a blog! It’s just a glorified comment board!” It is true that the Eliasson application doesn’t fit the standard definition of a blog: it does not present content in a chronological order nor can it be accessed as a feed. That’s a negative if the goal is to get out into the blogging or social network community. There’s no way to add the Eliasson blog to your blogroll, or even to access it through traditional blog links or sources. When I asked Tim Svenonius, the SFMOMA producer of the online interaction feature, why they call it a blog, he agreed that it's not a blog--it's just run by a blog engine. He surmised that the marketing folks may have branded it as a blog because the word has more cache than a phrase like "share your own experience."

But whether it's called a blog or not doesn't really matter. What matters is that SFMOMA recognizes the value of Web 2.0--and is willing to do some work to repurpose the technology to fit their goals. SFMOMA looked at themselves, and realized they didn’t want to publish original content in posts and try to elicit related visitor comments. They wanted to use the museum content directly, with no chronological timed release. They wanted a way for people in the museum’s learning lab and people at home to share comments and to see each others’ submissions.

On the technical side, working with the Wordpress engine offered Tim and his team some powerful readymade featurees. Wordpress has a built in comment and comment moderation system. Multiple users can be logged in at the same time to work on or moderate the site. Of course, on the flip side, the SFMOMA team had the challenging task of modifying the wordpress application to remove unwanted features and, most significantly, to massage the comment style seamlessly into the larger Eliasson site. Tim commented that next time, they will either be less vigilant about style-matching, or they will host the content completely on their own server (for greater flexibility in modification). Despite the headaches, however, using wordpress as an engine allowed SFMOMA to quickly get off the ground running with this pilot project in visitor participation.

A few other museums are also using third party applications to allow visitors to comment on images or content from their site without having to commit to continual content updates. Blogging applications aren’t the only or necessarily the best ones to use, especially if you are willing to have your content reside on another server and play by someone else's style rules. Some museums are using Flickr to allow people to comment on exhibit images. Others are uploading videos of their public programs to YouTube. SFMOMA went for a more customized approach, skinning the Wordpress comment service as part of the online experience.

This all excites me because it implies some mastery and ownership of Web 2.0 as a tool. At its best, all technologies are tools--things we know how and when to use to our benefit. Think of a chef’s knife. I’m an average knife-user: I know how to mince garlic and slice eggplant, but fundamentally I only know about three ways to wield a knife. My friend who’s a chef, however, is a knife master. She can effortlessly use the same knife in a huge range of cutting situations. That versatility allows her to do more with less, and to know when and how to use knives.

Right now, most museums are at the beginner stage in their comfort with Web 2.0 technologies. They’ve just been handed their first knife, know it’s sharp and potentially dangerous, and are more than a little nervous that they will use it incorrectly. The fact that the Eliasson blog is SFMOMA’s first foray into online visitor participation means their team spent a lot of time thinking about and getting comfortable with the potential value of blogs before they ever picked up the knife for the first time.

There’s a huge range of Web 2.0 applications out there to explore. Many have the same core functionality (create, share, and comment) with different content, visual interface, or focus. It’s worth spending some time in the virtual knife shop, as SFMOMA did, to see what you like and what works for your needs. And then, once you’re ready, you’ll be able to cut through the hype and the techno babble to create something that truly works for you and your visitors. And isn’t that what this is all about?

Game Friday: Shuffle Your Brain

The very first game post I ever wrote was about incorporating game mechanics into museum experiences. A year later, and Amy Jo Kim's presentations about ways that personalization, feedback, collecting, points and exchanges can make all kinds of experiences more engaging and sticky still resonate with me. Amy is the Creative Director of Shufflebrain, a game design firm that has unique expertise in identifying and exploiting behavioral human predilections to make games and game-like experiences compelling in everyday contexts. In other words, Amy is the brain behind how and why we game.

Rather than occupying your attention with my own analysis, I encourage you to go straight to the source and check out her two fascinating slide presentations (from eTech 2006 and GDC 2007 respectively) on how to put "the fun into functional." While her main audience is software and game developers, I think the material translates directly to other experience providers (like museums).

The first presentation explains the five game mechanics and gives examples of how they are used to make Netflix (personalized feedback), MySpace (friending people as social exchange), Ebay (leveling up via those little colored stars!), and other software tools more appealing.

The second presentation focuses on the growth of user-generated and shared content in social media, and talks about how game mechanics are involved both in the applications that support such content (YouTube, Twitter, and others), and how such content sharing can enhance games themselves.

Enjoy, and please share your comments with others.

Master Mashup: Viral Marketing from Bob Dylan

Someone should give Bob Dylan's publicist a raise. He or she has created one of the most innovative, enjoyable mashups out of a cultural icon. Click the red box above once the video has loaded to see what I'm talking about (thanks to Jim Spadaccini for sharing).

What's a mashup? In 2.0 speak, it's a web application that combines data from more than one source to create a new tool. One fun example is overplot, a mashup that takes quotes overheard in New York City (the data) and places them on a Google map (the tool), so you can browse the quotations by address. For example, you can click on "Midtown" on the map, go to Columbus between 89th and 90th, and find a gem like this:

Chick: I have to run in here and get more ChapStick.
Guy: You just bought chapstick yesterday.
Chick: My dog steals them and eats them.
Guy: That must be why his lips are so soft.

This mashup turns a simple list of quotes into a geographically browsable conversation. And if you know New York, it's so much more delicious to "see" the quote location rather than just reading the intersection listing. (warning: many overplot quotes are decidedly less PC than the example above.)

Map-based mashups are popular because they provide a well-understood visual representation of data. They're used to chart everything from crime statistics to Craigslist postings. Other more ambitious mashups, such as We Feel Fine, pull in data passively from blogs all over the world to create stunning visual datasets.

Whether simple or complex, mashups are most successful when they create new value out of the combined content. At their worst, they feel like hack jobs--a toaster spliced to a television. At their best, they are elegant combinations whose sum is more interesting, or at least differentiated, from the parts.

The Bob Dylan video at the top of this post is an example of a mashup of particular interest to museums because it overlays user data (personal messages) onto a cultural artifact (the Subterranean Homesick Blues video). This seems like a brilliant way to advertise museum shows--to find ways to allow visitors to embed their personal messages, opinions, or content into the museum content, thus fusing the interests of the visitors with the offering of the museum.

Of course, there are potential rights issues to be ironed out, but as in most museum/2.0 tensions, it's mostly a question of control. In this case, ceding control/use of the museum content to visitors can create a powerful message that the museum content truly is "for them." In the Dylan example, a video that was push technology (giving content TO the user) transforms into pull technology (eliciting and becoming a platform for content FROM the user).

How do we convey that the exhibition is truly FOR the visitor? By allowing them to put themselves into it.

Admissions Anxiety: The Case for Consistency

Pop quiz: How much does it cost to go a museum? And I don’t mean cost in a global bottom line sense—I mean how much does it cost to walk up to the admissions desk and buy a ticket? How much for a family? How much for a student? How much for an adult?

The answer, of course, is that it varies. Museums can range from free to about $30 for admission. There are secondary admissions fees, like parking, and optional fees, like for IMAX shows, traveling exhibits, and other add-ons. It’s often confusing to wade through the choices: do I want the underwater pony show or the artist-led splatter tour? But even more than this confusion, I believe museums suffer from a lack of consistent expectations when it comes to price and purchase options.

On face value, confusion looks like the main culprit. And yet movie theaters, restaurants, and carnivals are all masters of multiple options and combo tickets. No one runs out of a restaurant overwhelmed by the volume of choices and potential meal combinations. It is possible to offer a menu of options—with varying prices, durations, and content—without scaring people off.

So why can’t museums do it? I’d argue that it’s because museums, unlike these other experience providers, are inconsistent. There’s a difference between offering many options and offering a consistent experience. There are no free items on a restaurant menu. There are small items (with small prices) and large items (with bigger prices). But in museums, sometimes the large items (general admission) are free and the small items (traveling exhibits) are expensive. Sometimes it’s the other way around. In short, the museum menu is inconsistent, and therefore confusing.

Why is inconsistency the culprit? Because people don’t have a clear concept of how much their museum outing might cost. When I go to the movies, I’m not surprised by the price of tickets. I know the popcorn will be overpriced and that I can get a better deal at 2pm than at 8. There’s consistency to the price experience of movies—they probably cost about the same in your town ($9-12) as they do in mine. When I go to the movies, I can look in my wallet and know what I’m in for.

But imagine if movie theaters operated like museums. Suddenly, the theater in your town is free, whereas mine costs $20 to enter. Hers gives you admission to two movies at once, and his gives you a discount on a second movie when you buy a ticket to the first. In this scenario, the consistency of movie prices is in doubt—and with that price confusion comes confusion about value. Is the more expensive movie worth more? Is it worth more to see it in the more expensive theater? Or should I hold out to see it for free somewhere else?

Some might argue that this problem is not one of consistency, but of unfamiliarity. More people go to movies and restaurants than to museums, and therefore, perhaps, they have a better understanding of how to deal with menus of options in those environments than in museums. But there are other cultural and recreational activities with similarly small (or smaller) market share in the experience economy which are more consistent than museums price-wise. I’ve never been to the opera, but I have a general concept about how much opera tickets cost. The same goes for skydiving, music concerts, and camping fees. The value of the experiences offered—whether cultural, recreational, or natural—have consistent price expectations associated with them.

Some might also argue that it is precisely this inconsistency, this range of museum prices, that make museums great cultural resources. After all, if all museums cost $10, none would be free and open to the public at large. While I appreciate the desire for free museums (and would potentially prefer all museums to be free), their existence alongside $20 museums makes for muddled expectations. If all museums cost X—whatever X might be—then people could evaluate museum visits alongside other cultural or recreational options more easily. “Let’s go to a museum,” could attain the same universality (price-wise) as “let’s go to the movies.” In some ways, what I’m talking about could be construed as an argument for museums to become a more consistent cultural commodity—which I believe would positively impact both museum prices and their presumed value.

Because the related problem to price inconsistency is value confusion. There’s no question that there are good movies and bad movies, movies made for a dime and others made for millions. And yet there is a general, universally accepted value to the movie-going experience. That value is intrinsically linked to its price, just as the value of a meal in a restaurant is linked to its price.

But what’s the value of a museum experience? And is the value of a $20 museum experience directly relatable to that of a $5 one? Why are we asking our visitors to make these complex determinations?

Interestingly, direct museum competitors, like Ripley’s Believe It or Not and Madame Tussaud’s, have pretty stable price consistency. They value the experience they offer at about $30. I wouldn’t be surprised if the public catches on to the consistent price of these “edutainment” venues and responds positively to their consistency by visiting several such institutions.

Ultimately, that’s a great potential side effect of consistency—that providing consistently valued (and priced) museum experiences promotes museum-going in general. Maybe there’s an option, like in restaurants or theaters, for different museums to convey different levels of experience (with commensurate levels of price). There could be fast food quickie museums and long, programmatically rich ones. Or, maybe we should consider a “one price fits most” model. It might change people’s perceptions of museum experiences as highly differentiated and encourage people to visit museums more broadly and generally. If I liked that $10 museum, maybe I’ll also like this one. Let me know what you think. I’ll be at the matinee.

Game Friday: Treating Players Like Experts

I read a description this week of a new hidden object game that is based in a Mayan archeological dig. The reviewer called the storyline "intriguing" and described the player’s role as follows: “You are an archaeologist with a deep knowledge of Mayan culture investigating the demise of the last known Mayan family.” Oh, really? And where did I acquire this deep knowledge of Mayan culture? What does this statement really mean?

Most games grant players a certain amount of starter skill. Rare is the game that forces new players to truly enter as total novices. Whether the skill involved is casting spells or doing skateboarding tricks, you start at a level of proficiency. You may not be Tiger Woods on the golf course, but in a game environment, you are his worthy opponent. You already know how to hit the ball. And these starter skills or proffered proficiencies are part of what make the games compelling; they offer an opportunity for players to do and experience things they can’t do in their regular lives. Most of us will never be Guitar Heroes or NBA contenders--but we can play them in these games.

But those are skill-based games. More interesting to me is the phenomenon of granting players some “starter knowledge”—for example, expertise as an archaelogist. In knowledge-based games, it’s hard to mask player non-proficiencies. You can't claim, "You are an expert in Aramaic" and then expect players to start spouting off in an ancient tongue. You can’t give people a starter inventory of knowledge, unless you want to send them to the library before playing.

The way most game designers deal with this is by using the concept of starter knowledge as a hook, not a real part of the game. In the Mayan example, players are not actually required to have deep knowledge of Mayan culture. They are expected to take that role as a premise and then play a game (solving riddles and finding hidden objects) that is tangentially related, at best, to the actual knowledge and skill set of an archaeologist.

But what if you are in an educational setting, like a museum? Is there a way to legitimately give players roles they know nothing about and expect them to work in that context?

This was a huge challenge in designing Operation Spy, a live action narrative immersion game at the Spy Museum. One of our goals was to give visitors a sense of what it really feels like to be an intelligence officer. But of course, the real officers go through years of training. How do you tell someone he or she is a CIA agent and expect them to know what to do with that information? How do you design a safe-cracking experience that feels real for players who have never cracked a safe before in their lives? How do you throw someone into a situation where they have no proficiency and treat them like experts? I

don’t have the solution to these questions. I do, however, have some tricks and observations that I’ve seen successfully applied to this problem.

Language. One of the easiest ways to convey expertise is to flip around the language used to transmit information. Most museum labels assume the visitor starts with little or no knowledge. For example, a label might say, "This chemical is used in jet fuel." But if you are trying to support the fiction that the player is a chemist, you might say, "As you know, this chemical is used in jet fuel." Those three magic words, "as you know" presume that the person you're talking to is an expert, and yet conveys the same information. The player can sagely nod his/her head and think, "yeah, I DID know that." Social scientists have shown that if you tell someone a fact in way that seems like you are reminding or asking them to verify it, people more often believe they actually knew it than if you ask/tell them straight.

Treatment. If you treat someone like an expert, they'll start believing in their own expertise. Consider the example posed in the Peter Sellers movie Being There. Throughout the film, rich and powerful people treat a mentally childlike gardener like a brilliant statesman. The gardener reacts passively, but the others keep treating him like a star--until he is one. The point is, it takes very little action on the part of the player/gardener to be seen as an expert. It just takes aggressive onlookers/game masters.

Leadership. One of the easiest ways to feel like an expert is to be the guide for someone else. Little kids are great at this. In fantasy play, one kid will often assume the expert role and will set the rules: "I'm the teacher. You have to do this. This works like this." And when someone solicits you for help, you feel even more powerful. Some video games have taken advantage of this by pairing the player with a weaker, needy partner whom the player must protect and take care of. In live action games, this role can be assumed by the facilitator, who can seamlessly slip into helplessness (to give the player the authority) when the player is ready to be the expert.

Metaphor. In many situations, what it feels like to be an expert is more important than what it actually is like. Do you need to sit in a car for 12 hours to understand what a stakeout feels like? Do you need to spend 8 years in medical training to understand the pressure of working in the ER? Ultimately, a lot of the interactives we designed for Operation Spy convey the feeling of spy work, even when they didn't convey its reality. This may sound suspiciously like the Mayan example--that we took espionage as a premise and departed to play our own games. But I'd argue that there's a distinction between metaphorical play (which is analogous to the real thing) and play that departs from the real experiences. When experts talk about their work, they often use metaphors. Does scientific discovery feel like a flash of brilliance, finding a needle in the haystack, or a reward for tedious work? Each of these could be expressed quite differently by different kinds of games. If you can't be true to the complicated knowledge required to make decisions or discoveries, you can be true to the universality of what those experiences feel like.

Treating players (or visitors) like experts gives them confidence and allows them to explore beyond their typical experiences. Where have you seen this work well? What's missing from my list? As you know, I care what you think... :)

Performance Anxiety: Visitors and their Audience

I had a great conversation with Darcie Fohrman yesterday about visitor input exhibits like video kiosks. She told me an anecdote about an experience with the Stanford Art Museum exhibition, Question, which included a keyboard where visitors could type their own thoughts about art, to be projected on a wall along with quotes by famous people. One day while Darcie was observing, some kids took charge of the keyboard and started keying in some swear words. A guard stepped in to stop them--and then Darcie stepped in to pull back the guard and let the kids be.

This story highlights the existence of the audience for visitor input exhibits. Arguably, all exhibits are relational--you lifting the giant lever affects me as an observer and fellow visitor. But by displaying visitor content, visitor input exhibits take this relation to the next level. Who is the visitor input experience for? Is it for the inputter, who has the experience of recording their thoughts? Or is it for the inputtee, who sees those thoughts displayed? What is the relationship between visitors and their audiences?

My impression is that most such exhibits are designed to be inputter-focused. But the audience can't be ignored. At Stanford, the kids were the inputters/performers, and the guard was the audience--an audience who didn't like what s/he was seeing. Were the kids aware of their audience? Was the idea of other people seeing "Shit" projected on the wall part of its appeal? Or did they do it for themselves?

We're already comfortable with the idea that museum exhibit and program designers create content for an audience. That audience--our visitors--expects that museum content has been developed with them in mind. If the Stanford Art Museum had chosen to exhibit a quote from a famous person that included an expletive, the guard probably wouldn't have raised a complaint--he or she would have rationalized that the exhibit designers had a good reason for including the swear word.

But are visitors as audience-minded as we are? It depends. It's partially our choice. One of the design considerations when creating visitor input exhibits should be signaling who the audience is and how the input will be displayed, if at all. A video booth with signage that says, "Record your thoughts for our archives" might garner different submissions than one that says, "Record your thoughts for inclusion in this exhibit." This signaling may result in different content, or, more significantly, different users.

Some people are excited by the idea of performing for an audience; others get scared off. In museums, there's rarely clear signaling about how or where visitor input will be displayed, so the museum gets neither the positives of audience awareness (desire to do one's best and be "famous") nor those of the private experience (potentially more personal content). Perhaps designers should think about the kind of content they want to elicit, and whether a public or private display best accomodates that.

The Experience Music Project in Seattle is a great model for skillful use of both audience-centric and private visitor experiences. Creating music can be both a private and public experience, and they address both. I appreciated getting to be behind closed (sound-proofed) doors, banging away on instruments I didn't know how to play. Had I been recorded and broadcast, I would have put the drumsticks down. But I also enjoyed the sound stage where you could "perform" a song for a crowd. Sometimes you want to be famous. Sometimes you just want to be alone with your guitar.

Of course, even when signaled, different people interpret their own actions differently. This is a fascinating component of Web 2.0--the balance between public and private audiences. Is your MySpace page a vehicle to promote yourself to the world, or a personal place to communicate with friends? Is your Flickr page a handy place to store photos, or a public exposition of your travels and exploits?

We do a disservice to our visitors when we don't encourage them to consider these questions, to consider their own audiences. One of the things that makes YouTube successful is the overt presence of the public audience; it makes you aware that people are going to watch your content and judge it. It makes you feel like there are people out there who want your content--people you are doing this for. The same goes for blogging. I could be writing this for myself in a journal, but I'm sharing it with you instead. I'm thinking about you as I write this. I'm wondering how you'll react, where I got too long-winded, etc.

And that awareness, hopefully, makes my content more useful to you. If visitors were more aware that their input was being produced for an audience--whether online, in the collection, or in the museum--they might take the input experience a little more seriously, and spend less time just giggling at the webcam. Or, maybe they'd hijack the opportunity and use it to put on their own off-topic, inappropriate shows. Either way, the resulting content would be made FOR someone, not just by someone. The visitor experience wouldn't just be input--it would be an output experience as well. Instead of just using the exhibit, visitors would get a slice of what it's like to create an exhibit, on a small scale, for someone else. And when that happens, we can start honestly talking about visitors contributing to the museum experience.

Talking Through Objects 2: The Rollercoaster Conundrum

Last week, I wrote about the ways that dogs can be useful social objects--and you had lots of good comments and input. This week, I'm hoping you can help solve a mystery on a similar topic.

You see, I've found another object that's a successful stranger-to-stranger social enabler, but this one is harder to understand. It's a rollercoaster; specifically, it's the 100 year old wooden coaster on the Santa Cruz boardwalk, the Giant Dipper. A couple months ago, I rode the Dipper for the first time. While standing on line, I noticed something surprising: when a car full of riders came back to the boarding area after their ride, people in line stuck out their hands to slap the hands of the riders in the car. I went back a couple months later to photograph it.

Step 1: people on line wait for rollercoaster.



Step 2: people see car is coming and stick out their hands.





Step 3: a successful "five" is given.













Why does this happen? It's not because the boardwalk is a social place. Sure, it's social, but people stick to their own "pods"--families, teens, adults--and don't diverge or merge. If you were to go out on the boardwalk proper, teeming with people on a summer night, and stuck your hand out, no one would give you five. So why do they do it at the rollercoaster?

Maybe it's because people are excited about the ride. Maybe it's because people waiting in line are bored and want something to break up the monotony. But the best reason I can imagine has to do with barriers and shared experience. Out on the boardwalk, or at the zoo or a museum, there's a common experience of the sights, sounds, smells, activities of the place. But since the spaces are largely open, it feels threatening to approach strangers. You'd have to do it face to face. You could be rejected, or overpursued, or any number of anxiety-inducing possibilities, and you can't hide or reasonably extract yourself from a negative situation.

On the line for the rollercoaster, on the other hand, there's a physical barrier separating the people in line from the people in the car. In fact, it's impossible for people in the car to have any kind of sustained interaction with people in line, because a. they are moving past the line-standers in a car with a restraining bar and b. they are required to leave the building when they depart the car. The interaction between strangers is necessarily short. There is a foregone conclusion that it will not be prolonged to the discomfort of either party. It's a controlled environment--and while neither individual is in control, the partially limiting barrier makes it feel okay to act atypically.

These "partially limiting barriers" are successful in other venues as well--most notably online, where it is personal anonymity rather than temporal transience that makes the interaction between strangers feel controlled. But it's the same inhibition that allows otherwise shy people to dance with strangers at clubs--for some people, loud music and a less intimate setting are opportunities for social interaction rather than limiters. It's also a reason that people will game with strangers; in that case, the games' rules form the partial barrier that facilitates social interaction.

But I'm not so sure of this. How do you interpret the Giant Dipper hand slapping? Where do you see barriers used as springboards for social behavior?

Game Friday: The Thrill of the Chase

A simple little game today, Lonely House Moving, which caught my eye not for the gameplay (urban Mario) but for the intoxicatingly simple story. Girl and boy talk. Girl gets into U-haul. Boy has epiphany and starts racing after her.

You play the role of the boy, dodging squirrels, bird poop, and the lampshades falling off her truck as you try to catch the moving vehicle and, presumably, announce your affection. It’s like every modern romantic comedy compressed to its most basic form. And the impact is powerful; in the discussion area of Casual Games, comments ranged from

“Go nameless lonely guy! For the sake of love!”

to

“dodging stuff in the context of this little guy's newfound love-struckedness is a nice illustration of the way you have to prioritize if you discover that you really want something. I honestly feel like I'll take a little piece of this game away with me and it might improve my life in some tiny way.”

What makes this simple narrative so impressively conveyed? There isn’t any dialogue or facial detail on the characters. There’s no carefully composed heartstring music. Visually, the game uses two devices to great effect: the relation between two faces, and the passage of time.

First, the relation between the characters. It’s no more detailed than the fable of Mario and the princess (less if you consider the occasional text in Mario about the princess needing help). And yet the game designers here did something brilliant: they keep the two characters in the visual frame throughout the entire game. The boy isn’t moving towards a goal (the girl). He’s chasing her. For most of the game, you watch his body, constantly moving towards her, while she is facing the other way, unaware as she rides the truck that she is being followed by her friend (and is losing several personal items off the back of the truck). Seeing both of these heads and their directionality continually reinforces the relationship between the two, and you are constantly hoping that she will turn around and see you. That tension and hope fuels the game.

The other thing the game does well is passage of time. It’s accomplished in the cheesy “sun goes down then comes up in the background” way, but it works. In the context of the simple story, it conveys the length that the boy will go to follow the girl, and you can imagine how the 12 hours pass in each of their minds.

Ultimately it’s this invitation to the imagination that makes the simple strokes of this game so emotionally appealing. The game sets you up with everything you need to get invested, get interested, and get imaginative. You can port your own emotions onto the characters, thinking of that one woman or man or job or chance that got away. And then you run and hope to God this time you’ll catch it.