COLLABORATOR: Erica Gangsei, Manager of Interpretative Media, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

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1 Crowd Sourcing as Museum Tool Presented at the California Association of Museums Conference February 20-22, 2013 Santa Barbara, CA COLLABORATOR: Erica Gangsei, Manager of Interpretative Media, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art AUTHOR: Emma Thorne-Christy, CAM Fellow When Erica Gangsei put out the open call for proposals, her requirements were simple: create a low-cost game to be played in San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). As a staff member of the Interpretive Media Department at the SFMOMA, she had collaborated on developing activities for the museum in the past, such as the SFMOMA Families App for smart phones. Gangsei wanted this program to be different. Why is the museum creating all these games and activities, for the most part, without the thousands, millions, of people who design games? she asked. Many museums develop games in-house, but Gangsei decided to turn to the Bay Area community for ideas. She explains, I want to figure out ways to tap into my local creative community to come up with new ways for visitors to engage with the artwork in the museum and museum experience in general. Gangsei sees her Bay Area community as a great resource for the museum: I wanted to give a platform to the experimental/creative energy I see in San Francisco, an energy that I think is vital for the arts. I wanted to see how I could incorporate that creative energy into the gallery experience beyond the art from local artists we sometimes see on the walls. She explains that there is a large city-as-playground scene in San Francisco that she wanted to employ in the museum. And so ArtGameLab was born, an interactive game exhibition that opened in January Photo caption: In the game Dialogues in Motion players use movement to respond to words used in the museum. Here, a player acts out the word Line. Image courtesy Gayle Laird. There s a very specific person who loves bread and butter interpretive media content. They love the ninety-second audio stop, they love the extended object label, the three minute artist video of the talking head. That s their home. But there are a lot of other people who don t feel

2 that way about museum content and don t feel that way about museums, Gangsei observes. These other people became her target audience. More specifically the exhibition was geared towards families, self-identified gamers, and people that are here because they want to do something social, because they just want to have their horizons expanded in some way. Those are the people who are really interested in the games. Not everyone comes to a museum to play games, and Gangsei realized this. She was not trying to appeal to everyone who visits SFMOMA, acknowledging that, To get something out of a game you have to decide you re committed to the experience. So people who played the games were the type who were looking for that kind of activity no matter where they are. With her audience in mind, Gangsei developed goals for ArtGameLab. There were three main goals. First, test out new strategies for visitor engagement. Fascinatingly, Gangsei did not have experience or educational goal requirements for game proposals. There were to be no ulterior educational motives behind the games. This decision came out of her observation that gamification is infiltrating all levels and aspects of life. Gangsei wanted to see what would happen if there were no explicit educational motives to get in the way of visitor fun. However, she does note that since many of the games required looking closely at the artwork and extended visits to the museum they had implicit educational and experience results. Her second goal was to do a beta test of crowd sourcing as a means of developing museum programs. SFMOMA had never previously used crowd sourcing in this arena and Gangsei hoped this experiment with crowd sourcing would prove a successful means of developing new interactive visitor experiences. Lastly, she aimed to create a platform for discussion about games inside museums, not just as a means of visitor education but as an emerging art form and curatorial discipline. Several museums have made recent attempts to collect, curate and exhibit video games, and Gangsei wanted to use ArtGameLab to encourage the discussion of the function not just of video games but of games in general, in the art world. Gangsei ed a call for proposals to colleagues, as well as game and interactive designers she researched, she thought would be interested in such work. The call was open for two months, and resulted in fifty game proposals by artists, game designers, performers, and other generally creative types. Games ranged from strictly digital to games played on paper. What 2

3 Gangsei noticed was that paper games tended to be zanier and more fun and creative. Narrowing it down to a handful of finalists, Gangsei was in serious dialogue with the designers, working out game content, language, aesthetics, and game mechanics. She finally settled on five games to implement, choosing games that would be affordable to produce and selecting a variety that would serve different types of visitors. The final five ranged in types of games: alternate reality game, multi-player online game, word game, role-playing game and performance game. All the games ended up being paper-based, which made the exhibition feel more experimental and like a prototype. Gangsei says one main advantage of paper games is that one gets more games for their buck, but she also feels that paper is more accessible to a wider audience. She notes that, technology can sometimes be a barrier to entry and a barrier to participation. Gangsei paid the final five designers an honorarium and worked with them to develop their games. An in-house editor read through text, visitor services made sure activities were safe for visitors, and the graphic design team looked over the physical designs and helped print materials. Then it was up to the exhibition design department to create the exhibition space, which evoked a laboratory type-feel to match the experimental nature of the program. A breakdown of her $15,000 budget shows that most of her funding was spent on printing and graphics. When asked if she believes other museums could execute a similar project, she responds, Absolutely. You just need enough reach to pull people in that have good ideas and are interested in working things out. A program could be implemented by a museum on a smaller budget, or larger budget, by scaling up or down on either the number of games or on the production values that are used to produce and display materials. Photo caption: I Know What I Like instruction panel and character cards. Image courtesy Gayle Laird. 3

4 Surveys from the exhibition showed that as she expected, most visitors who played the games were self-identified gamers in their twenties and thirties, as well as families. When asked how she would expand the visitor demographic for future interactive game exhibitions, Gangsei says she is not sure. It is not always about serving everyone in a program, but providing new programs to communities in the Bay Area who might not otherwise think of SFMOMA as a place for them, such as twenty and thirty year old gamers. Photo caption: Dialogues in Motion instructional panel in gallery. Image courtesy Gayle Laird. Gangsei says that the most difficult part of this program, which for the majority was a onewoman show on the part of SFMOMA, was balancing ArtGameLab atop her other day-to-day work responsibilities. She ended up sacrificing personal time to implement her brainchild. In the future, Gangsei hopes to work on a suite of experimental interactive projects that further venture into dialogues about the role of games within the museum. Photo caption: Super Going Mission No. 228 Create your own version of a work of art you find at SFMOMA. It can be an exact copy or an interpretation. Photo courtesy of Super Going. 4

5 About the Author/CAM Fellow Emma Thorne-Christy is an MFA Design candidate with an emphasis in exhibition design at the University of California, Davis. With an undergraduate degree in American Studies from Occidental College, she is interested in the diversity of American experiences and reflection of these experiences in popular culture. During her time in Los Angeles she worked for a community organizing non-profit, and developed a deep connection to social justice work. Her graduate research focuses on the development and design process of exhibiting controversial material in the museum, and museums as advocates for civil and human rights. She can be contacted at ethornechristy@ucdavis.edu. 5