I was invited to contribute a section to Ed Rodley’s Designing for Playful Engagement in Museums: Immersion, Emotion, Narrative, and Gameplay, now available on Routledge press.
The piece revisits my earlier scholarship on games and museums, which was used to establish games programs and exhibitions like SFMOMA, MOCA Los Angeles, and the Hammer Museum. Now, over a decade after the sector-wide reckoning as to whether or not games belong in museums, I have revisited the topic for Ed’s book.
With a new chance to revise my thoughts around games, play, and museums, I introduce some new complexity into the discussion with three suggestions for adding some much-needed texture into the discourse concerning museums and games: refocusing on play rather than games; ending the institutional obsession with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow”; and introducing a new taxonomy for defining, developing and evaluating the transformation of audiences through play experiences.
Got questions about museums and games?
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