Approach
Art exhibitions communicate implicit or explicit stories. Visitors are typically expected to take on a “spectator” role, and more or less follow the curated stories individually, on their own, personal pace.
ΠΙΣΕΤΟ seeks to investigate a different, more social and playful approach.
Inspired by Nina Simon’s reflections over the “Participatory Museum”, we envision cultural institutions as live, social places, where the visitors can interact and socialize around cultural heritage content, through ludic or game-based activities.
- From “Spectator” to “Participant” visitor role. ΠΙΣΕΤΟ assigns active roles to visitors. It poses gameful challenges and motivates to engage with the artworks in creative and playful ways. The visitors are asked not only to follow the exhibition’s stories, but also to participate in group activities, and make new stories of their own.
- From Individual to Group experience. People are social beings and the value of social interactions is repeatedly highlighted in museum studies. To that end, ΠΙΣΕΤΟ designs group experiences that carefully orchestrate moments of personal reflection to gameful social encounters. The main objective is to cultivate face to face conversations, social activities and emotions.
- From “Physical Space” to “Experiential Place”. In the course of the ΠΙΣΕΤΟ experience, participants are guided to gather in groups, narrate and perform stories in front of their companions, make choices and discuss them. In between, they are prompted to move freely in the physical space and playfully explore it. Through this process, ΠΙΣΕΤΟ re-appropriates the exhibition environment, transforming it from an unfamiliar cultural space to a live, social playground, making it personal for the visitors in a new way.
Main Game
We leverage a storytelling game that we proposed in our previous work, and extend it towards several directions.
The game is titled “Find the Artwork behind the Story!” and assigns different roles to the group members: “Storytellers” conceive and narrate stories about the artworks of a cultural exhibition, and “Voters” try to find the artwork behind the stories. When votes are revealed, the group members elaborate on their choices, revealing and sharing their personal perspectives with the whole party.
The first main objective of the project is to investigate the potential benefits and implications of the proposed gameful experiences, identifying promising use-case scenarios and concrete design guidelines. Under what circumstances may such gameful experiences take place? Can they be combined to traditional visiting conditions? How can cultural experts participate in the group games?
Envisioning “game events” in the environment of cultural institutions, we plan to invite people to participate in gameful, cultural social experiences, not just once, but over and over again, with potentially new groups, in different environments, and with varying cultural collections. To that end, ΠΙΣΕΤΟ pays special attention to “repeat play” phenomena and requirements, complementing the original gameplay with a series of in-game activities and extensions.
The second main objective of the project is to develop an integrated technical framework to enable: i) quick design and creation of cultural gameful experiences, and ii) provision of digitally enhanced, cultural journeys to groups of visitors, promoting “visitor-to-artwork” and “visitor-to-visitor” interactions.