The Curated Game: Can Museums and ARGs mix?

Scot Osterweil

Thu., June 10, 11:00–12:30, Old Madison

The MIT Education Arcade is currently developing an alternate reality game (ARG) in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution. The game will go live in the spring of 2011, and it will involve middle school students in scientific practices while engaging with a science fiction plot about mass disaster.

As designers and developers, the questions before us include:

• Can a game encourage scientific thinking, data analysis, and reasoned argumentation in its players, and do so in a way that actually leads to an appreciation and enthusiasm for science where it didn’t previously exist?
• Can ARGs truly serve diverse audiences, rather than just the dedicated puzzle solvers they traditionally attract? What kind of fiction is necessary for an early adolescent to suspend disbelief and engage with a game that simultaneously pretends to be in the real world, while never truly hiding the fact that it is a game?
• Can an ARG foster player engagement with museums, and represent a novel way of extending museums’ missions beyond their walls? Can we develop a model that is replicable for other museums?

In this interactive workshop we invite participants to think through the design challenges of ARGs, as well as the nature of the relationship between the practice of science and the practice of gaming.