Game Friday: Vocabulary, Poverty, and Meaningful Score Keeping

This week, Free Rice, a very casual game that can allow you to use your erudite mastery of the English language to provide rice to hungry people via the United Nations World Food Program (UN WFP).

Here's how it works: define a word properly, and the site's sponsors will donate the equivalent of ten grains of rice to the UN WFP. There is no limit on how many words you can define, and the level changes dynamically based on your ability.

It's not rocket science--just another variation on the "click to donate" phenomena, which has debated value. Free Rice is linked to a sister site, poverty.com, which disseminates information about world hunger and other issues. This is an interesting sort of hybrid--supporting a content site with a game that seems unrelated. Yes, you continually see your bowl of rice fill up, but it's not one of those games where the challenge is to figure out how to distribute the food. It's a simple vocabulary game, and fifty words in I haven't encountered any underlying thread of words associated with poverty or hunger. It's just a game.

It's also pretty addictive, especially if you're a word nut like me. Unlike click to donate, where the incentive is purely about charity, Free Rice gives you a strange secondary incentive to contribute: leveling up in play. When I read the comments on lazylaces (where I found this game), they're split about 50-50 between people wondering about the rice donation strategy and those celebrating their high scores. Many people do both in the same comment.

To me, this is a really clever application of meaning to addictive gaming. How long would I play a vocabulary game like this if there were no poverty.com tie-in? The level, while compelling, isn't as exciting as the score--which is measured in grains of rice. Unlike click to donate, where you get a "win" for doing almost nothing, Free Rice only gives you rice to donate when you define words correctly. Each time you fail to do so, no more rice for the UN WFP, which, instead of disincentivizing me to play further, made me more committed to defining words properly.

How many games of pinball or pacman have you played without so much as a glance towards the score, constantly ticking up, seemingly inconsequential? Free Rice applies a simple, powerful consequence to scoring.

It's also a nice "put your money where your mouth is," not wholy unlike that at the Bronx Zoo's Congo Gorilla Forest, where you choose which gorilla advocacy group your admission fee will support. These kinds of games could be a great way to publicize and support advocacy that museums are already doing. Imagine a simple math game where high scores donated dollars to programs like the Girls Math and Science Partnership. Or a fish-identification game where scores related to work done to protect the marine protected areas. Particularly when sponsors are willing to foot the bill (as on Free Rice and many click to donate sites), this can be a win-win for the museum, the cause, and the player.

And it seems apropos here to mention Beth Kanter's current blog-based effort to collect $10 donations to send a Cambodian orphan to college. If you are interested in the leveraging of social media sites to raise money for charity causes, Beth's blog is a great resource.

Human + coLAB Experiment Post Mortem

Thanks to all who visited the coLAB and participated in the Human + collaborative experiment over the past ten days. For those who didn’t see it, this project was an open conversation about development of a planned traveling exhibition on human enhancement technology (Human +). The exhibition is being developed by the New York Hall of Science, and I worked with Eric Siegel, the Director of NY Science, to initiate this project. The project is powered by a free software called Voicethread. To view the conversation, turn on your speakers and click the play button below. There’s about 30 minutes of content here, but you can flip through the slides and voices as you see fit.




In terms of numbers, this collaboration was a success. 206 unique people from 131 cities all over the world viewed the site 358 times. (See map on right for distribution.) There were 54 comments made by 17 people. It was blogged by three sites, including Beth Kanter of the highly regarded non-profit social media site Beth’s Blog.


Logistically, it was simple. It took Eric and I about 2 hours each to get the site up and running (content plus distribution plan). We each spent another 2 hours throughout the week checking in on the voicethread and responding to comments. There were no financial costs. There were no problems with spam or inappropriate comments. This was an unmoderated experiment, though I did add additional slides halfway through the experiment to add more venues for contribution. But impact is what really counts.

Here are some observations from this experiment, gleaned from my impressions and yours:

A lot of you like this technology. Several people were impressed by the sound quality, the personal nature of voice, and the ease of use, and a few indicated that they would use Voicethread in their own institutions. Some of you were more fascinated by the technology’s demonstration than the specific content (which is fine!).

Participation was high. On this blog, about 0.5% of people who read a given post comment on it. On the voicethread, 8.5% who viewed it made comments, and many came back a second time to see how it had evolved. The participants were diverse, ranging from museum exhibit developers to NPR accessibility engineers to content experts to e-learning professionals. There was some emergent behavior where content experts previously unknown to Eric or me offered their support to the exhibition.

There was an inverse relationship between time of first view and participation. Participation dropped significantly after the first four days. The conversation reached a critical mass of participants quickly. After that point, many people emailed me to comment that it felt unwieldy, or that they perceived it as something already completed. It's hard to browse through lots of audio. As one person said, “it felt like watching a disjointed play.” It seems that there’s a sweet spot where just a few people have contributed to the conversation and you feel like it’s open to you. Too many and it feels overwhelming or like your contribution is not needed. It’s easier later in the process to look at the voicethread and feel like enough has already been said—thus promoting lurking over participating.

The content was interesting, but not always what was asked for. Some (including the creators of the technology) found it varied and fascinating. But there was no easy way to spin off individual “threads” of conversation on a single slide, so a divergent (interesting) point brought up by a couple people became hard to follow. The content stayed fairly surface-level, though many interesting comments, both personal and professional, were contributed. -The purpose wasn’t totally clear. While Eric and I actively responded to other contributors, I think we could have done better to give people explicit challenges or goals so they could apply themselves concretely to solving a problem. The problem given, related to collaboration, was somewhat open-ended and proved less appealing than the Human + controversies themselves.

There was no clear way to identify the people speaking, except via their name, image, and voice. A few people commented that it would have been nice to see some basic information about speakers’ expertise and professional interest in the topic. I also would have liked an update function where people (myself included) could be notified when a new comment was added to the stream.

I left the experiment with a few core questions:

• How can we encourage sustained participation throughout the life of a project, rather than just at its outset? How do we encourage new users to join partway through?
• How can we guide collaboration towards a goal? What’s the balance between inviting people to talk about what they want versus what you want?
• What platforms or technologies humanize rather than dehumanize the process?

What are your questions or comments? I look forward to doing more experiments with other technologies in the future. If you or your institution wants to get involved, let me know.

Missed Connections and Matchmaking: A Case for the Desire to Socialize in Museums

I've been thinking recently about the "why" behind encouraging social interactions among strangers in museums. I've been arguing that "visitors as participants" means participating BOTH with content and with other visitors, but that begs the question: do visitors really want to have social experiences with each other? After all, people visit museums in their own pods for a reason. Why am I so interested in breaking down those self-defined constructs? Is this actually about encouraging something visitors want, or is this just about me and what I want?

This question has bubbled to the surface both because of some of your comments (advocating for the personal, contemplative museum experience) and the words of Cynthia Sharpe, an exhibit designer who has brought the message "It's not about you" powerfully to the table here at ASTC. It doesn't matter if you are creating a didactic diorama or a participatory smorgasborg if the experience is fundamentally about your desires rather than visitors'.

So I did some soul-searching and realized that one of the reasons I believe people secretly want to break out of social barriers and interact with strangers is typified by the "missed connections" phenomenon. "Missed connections" or "I saw you" is the section of the personals where people describe people they almost interacted with in real-time... but didn't. This kind of personals ad has overrun sites like craigslist, where on any given day you can find hundreds such submissions mourning missed opportunities and hoping for a second chance.

"Missed connections" browsing reveals that besides being a killer exhibition, Body Worlds (2) is a matchmaker. Witness this posting placed on craigslist yesterday:

Lovely Blonde at The Tech Museum on Sunday - m4w - 46 (san jose downtown)

---

Date: 2007-10-14, 9:05PM PDT


We chatted briefly while attending the Body World exhibit at The Tech on Sunday in downtown San Jose. You were with what I assume was your mother, and we ended up sitting next to each other inside the Imax theater during the 4pm show. I thought maybe there was a spark, but I didn't pursue. I was with my sister and held back, now I regret not extending myself to you...

You: Caucasian, blonde, late 30's/early 40's
Me: Caucasian, salt-n-pepper, silly grin

If you see this post and say "Hey that's me!" - then send me a message. I'd love to see you again.

-----------------------------------

This person isn't alone in his desire to reconnect. There were four other Body Worlds-related missed connections in the last week alone. I had a friend who was a waiter at an upscale coffee lounge in DC who once complained to me that everyone in the place would sit there with their laptops in their own private pods, "I saw you'ed-ing" each other. Imagine the postings: "You, brown couch. Me, black sweater." These people aren't missing connections--they're avoiding them out of fear of rejection, social stigma, or just being seen as weird. Technology has filled this gap where we feel more comfortable pursuing the slimmest glimmer of hope from a safe place rather than opening ourselves up to social risk.

There are two ways I think we can be using this in museums. First, I think we should support the proliferation of museum-based "I saw you's." These are random gifts of kindness which make the museum both an environment for desire and one for attention to fellow visitors. And second, we should help bridge the gap. When they foster a spirit of inclusion, museums have the unique ability to turn missed connections into real (desired) interaction. Imagine the drool emitted from marketing folks' mouths if museums were seen as viable places for singles to meet in a friendly, culturally interesting environment.

Devon Hamilton of the Ontario Science Centre told a lovely story about the way hosts (floor staff) are trained in their innovation center to connect visitors with one another. A visitor asked a host how a particular kinetic art piece worked. Instead of answering the visitor or even engaging him/her in exploratory questions, the host called out to another visitor: "Yo! We need your help over here with a question." Devon's spin on this was that visitors in the innovation center start to understand that this is a place where they construct the meaning and share it with each other. But it can also be seen as an example of the host "matchmaking" between visitors.

Matchmakers have a mixed portrayal in our culture. They are the pushy intruders who insert themselves into our lives messily. But they do it with love. They have a genuine interest in connecting people to each other--for romantic, professional, or personal reasons--and it's hard not to appreciate someone who earnestly introduces you to someone else. It's like receiving a gift. Even if the gift is wildly inappropriate, you appreciate the gesture and the feelings of reward and gratitude that accompany it.

It's not too hard to imagine floor staff in this role as social lubricators or party hosts, introducing visitors to each other. The harder challenge is to imagine the unfacilitated matchmaking exhibit, the "connection machine" that could perform the introduction on its own.

But I think it's worth it. There's a lot of talk going on about the "unique value propositions" of museums, and I'm excited about the idea that museums can be a place where people feel safe and encouraged enough that they don't have to miss the connections. While there are plenty of museum competitors offering interactive, immersive experiences, there are few that do it in a deliberately inclusive environment. It sounds like many museum folks are seeing visitor-generated content not just as a way for visitors to speak their minds, but for them to do an activity (creation) that isn't available to them from the competition. Enabling that creation to be social helps cement the uniqueness and inclusion of the museum experience.

I know this is neither a rigorous nor a complete argument for encouraging social interaction among museum visitors. But it's something worth considering, especially when dealing with the precious adult market. Full disclosure: I was once "I saw you'ed." It was a strange and exhiliarating experience to feel noticed and appreciated by an anonymous person. It was an experience I don't get at the movies, or in theme parks, or in museums for that matter. It was special and confidence-boosting. It was something that helped turn me into someone who talks to strangers and matchmakes friends. It was something I'd have bought a ticket for, something I wish everyone could enjoy.

Game Friday: Open Worlds, Open Museums

First of all, thanks to all who have contributed to the Human + coLAB. We're learning a lot, and your comments and contributions are wonderful. The site will be active until Oct 16, so keep the ideas coming!

And now, back to Game Friday. Gamasutra has a feature up entitled Game Design Essentials: 20 Open World Games. In it, John Harris provides a whirlwind tour through arcades, Ataris, and Nintendos, discussing the design principles and evolution of video games described as “open world” or “exploration." John defines these as

games where generally the player is left to his own devices to explore a large world. What all of these games share is the seeking of new, interesting regions at whatever time the player deems fit. No force forces the player's motion into new areas. There's no auto-scroll, and there are no artificial level barriers.

Wandering around, exploring, collecting experiences… sounds like a museum visit to me! I read the (long) article fascinated, wondering if such a resource might exist for museum exhibitions, charting the top 10 exhibitions that use play, or storytelling, or any other core museum design tenet. So, with the caveat that I've played a grand total of one of these games, here are some real-world lessons I learned from John's commentary on this genre and its evolution.

There must be meaningful interplay between the map and the gamespace. When you are playing over a vast landscape (say, a 100,000 sq ft science center) with no rules governing sequence of travel, the map becomes an essential counterpart to gameplay. John points to the Nintendo game Super Metroid as a pioneer of the "automap" which fills in with icons to remind you where you've been, where you've conquered, and the places left to explore. Reading this, I was struck by the extent to which players rely on and consult the map as a useful, updated source of information that helps them structure their gameplay. I know plenty of museums that hand out maps, but few that structure those maps as core parts of the visitor experience. It might be interesting to create a map that could be scanned at the entrance and exit from exhibitions to chart your progress, or, simpler, stamps available to mark the exhibitions you've visited.

The second interesting thing about maps in open world games is the design decisions that govern what is included and what concealed. Most game maps do not reveal all of the secret passages, hidden doors, potential obstacles and rewards in each area--they just offer a basic structure. In fact, game designers are constantly trying to strike a balance such that the map is a jumping off point but not a cheat sheet. How might we think about this in museums--giving people maps that give thm the information that gets them interested in an area, with the expectation that there are surprises in store?

There are surprises in store. Every one of the games covered includes easter eggs and hidden wonders, ranging from cool objects to collect to secret worlds to explore. All of these games rely on the expectation that exploration is a worthwhile and fun activity, but designers also recognize that players like to be rewarded for their travels with more than just another interesting landscape. Yes, these rewards can affect gameplay (points, powerups), but just as compelling are surprise characters, corridors, or cut scenes made special by their scarcity. Grand Theft Auto is the master of this kind of reward, so much so that many players abandon the traditional game story to pursue the myriad of colorful characters and opportunities found in random corners of the game space.

Of course, one thing that enables this kind of reward is the near-infinite availability of virtual "space" for players to explore. In a museum, we're limited by the physical. And yet, how many museums take advantage of blank walls and random corridors to reward guests with something new? I love museums that put content in the bathroom--I'm always pleasantly surprised to close the stall door and feel like I'm getting some special, personal content. Similarly, at the Spy Museum, we converted a boring mechanical room, used as a pass-through for large school groups, into a clandestine "spy lab" that looked as if someone had just been twiddling with the oscilloscope. Instead of being a transition room with no content, that room became something private and surprising for the groups that walked through it.

There are meaningful transitions between areas. When the world or museum is vast and has an open architecture, clearly defined thresholds help people understand where one area ends and another begins. John seems conflicted about whether it's better for the areas to share basic design concepts (i.e. rooms of a castle) or be highly differentiated (sewer area versus cloud area versus warehouse area). But in either situation, the transition from area to area is consistently marked by a variety of changes: in architecture, in audio, in difficulty, in gameplay. And unless it's a trip back to the map, the threshold between areas is fluid--there isn't an interstitial no man's land.

Compare this to the experience in most "exploratory" museums. In sequential narrative museums, the exhibits flow from one to the next, following the designed expectation that visitors will follow a particular path. But when there is no recommended path, museum design tends to trend towards no thresholds and no contextualized transitions. Or, if the museum is divided into many individual exhibit rooms, the rooms open out on a central hallway that is more "no man's land" than transition area. Such hallways, like main thoroughfares of malls, are disorienting and can disrupt the flow of the museum experience. In games, on the other hand, exit from one area is clearly marked, rewarded, and signals the entrance into the next. The barriers can be "hard," such as levels, or "soft," like the bridges in Dragonquest 3, which signal entering areas of differing difficulty.

Partway through the article, John comments that:

Action games are about fighting, and the maps are a setting for the fighting to happen. Exploration games are about place, with the fighting being what you do there.

It's interesting to turn this statement towards open world style museums, and think about how we are (or are not) consciously designing the place to be as interactive, feedback-providing, and engaging as the exhibits within. Happy exploring!

Try This! Experiment in the Museum 2.0 coLAB

This week, with the gracious help of Eric Siegel of the New York Hall of Science, Museum 2.0 is launching an experiment in collaborative exhibition design. This one-week test will hopefully be followed by many more progressively ambitious projects to develop new tools for museums, scientists, artists, experience designers, visitors, and all kinds of folks to work together to create high-quality exhibitions.

I (and probably many of you) have always wondered about the basic challenge of deriving quality from mass participation. When is the wisdom of crowds really successful? In the spirit of that question, Museum 2.0 will be sponsoring a number of test projects in collaboration under the banner of coLAB.

The first of these is up now and will be active for the next week. In it, Eric Siegel shares some of the planning concepts for a proposed traveling exhibition, Human +, about human enhancement technologies. We are soliciting your feedback and thoughts on these concepts, using VoiceThread, a very cool application that allows you to literally add your voice to the conversation.

To participate, you need about 10 minutes. A microphone (most laptops and newer computers have them embedded) is highly recommended, as is a photo of you so people have a face to put to the voice. If you don't have a microphone, you can contribute text, but the voice component is pretty powerful.

This conversation will only be active until Oct 17. On October 18, I'll publish a post-mortem with some of your comments about what worked and didn't in this experiment.

Go to the coLAB site to get started now!

Game Friday: Conference Bingo!

Starting Tuesday, I'm headed to three conferences (Virtual Worlds Summit, WMA, ASTC) in one week. In the spirit of "networking" and related social conference challenges, I offer this simple game. Print out the image below (click to download fullsize powerpoint version), bring it to the conference of your choice, and enjoy!

And if you're going to ASTC and want to play, there's a prize in store. Complete the whole card (blackout) with unique individuals you've never met before, and find me (Nina). I'll be there until the end. The blackout with the best story wins a post on the topic of your choice on Museum 2.0. It can be a guest post, an interview with you or your dream person, or I'll write on your topic.

I'm using this as a way to a. motivate to meet new people and b. find out something interesting about them. I hope it's useful for you as well. Happy Bingo-ing!

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.