Museum Games

I have recently been playing (and enjoying) the new release of Two Point Museum. It’s the latest in the series of ‘Two Point’ Management simulator games that are the spiritual successors to the venerable Theme Hospital. It’s a great game, but it’s not really a game about museums, or even a game of a museum. 

This is something of a trend if you look at ‘Museum Games’ they are largely just other types of games with a museum themed wrapper. They are point and click, puzzle games, or even a card battler set in museums that use the display cases and exhibits as props. This isn’t per se a bad thing, but it is something that’s worth noting, and I think we can do more.

What a museum game can offer

Digital collections are now a normal part of almost any major museum. They offer constant access and enough space to offer basically whatever you want next to them.

As with most things, a proper examination of digital collections is more than a topic in its own right. But despite the near endless possibilities in my experience the general public isn’t so keen on them. For most a near endless catalogue of items just isn’t all that interesting.

The idea of using a ‘game’ then is that we can grab people's attention and meet them where they are. A place that they already want to be and have interest in, and there are a few different ways to go about this.

VR Museums

The most obvious solution is to simply make a museum that is wholly within a digital environment. There are plenty of people out there who have done this and you can access them today, either through your computer or even a VR headset. Things like Occupy White Walls, Infinite Art Museum, or The VR Museum of Fine Art. This is not a modern phenomenon however, I have distinct memories of having a virtual museum you could walk around some time in the early 2000’s and some quick googling shows a variety of computer programs even earlier than that.

A delightfully retro Virtual Gallery ‘Relocating the Remains’ (Image from Tate)

You will note rather quickly however that many of these digital spaces act mostly as art galleries or contain rather basic amounts of click boxes that act as labels. This I fear rather misses the point of having a virtual museum. In a real museum you are limited by space, having multiple visitors trying to interact with the exhibits, and of course being financially limited.

Whilst developing a virtual museum is by no means free its is much cheaper and it makes things like walking through a hall and turning into a room to be confronted with a 100 ft tall Buddha Statue on a snowy plain (as happens in The VR Museum of Fine Art) the same price as having a much smaller version sat on a plinth in the middle of another muted room.

One of the few virtual museums that I'm aware of that has a more proactive approach is the Museum of Other Realities. Whilst far from what I might expect to be possible it plays around with being able to jump into scenes, taking advantage of volumetric sounds and allowing you to directly interact with exhibits.

Screenshot of the Digital Art Museum Museum of Other Realities (Image from Museum of Other Realities)

The collection is once again largely artistic rather than trying to emulate an actual museum and teach about a subject but it goes some way into showing the kind of things that can be achieved with the technology.

Playable Digital Archives

Another obvious way to do it is creating a game out of digital elements, the kind of thing that wouldn’t work all that well in a real location. Things like Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking which focuses on presenting an archive of the lockpicking mechanics from a host of different games. You can walk around the admittedly rather lo-fi museum floor and try out different mechanics seeing how they have evolved over time and across different genres.

Screenshots of the Museum and some of the lockpicking activities from other games (Image from Museum of Mechanics Lockpicking)

More common however is a kind of mini library of an older series which includes multiple games you can play through as well as a variety of other related materials such as development discussions, concept art, and even adverts.

Taking this to an extreme the PAC-MAN MUSEUM+ even makes this something of a game in itself where playing various iterations of PAC-MAN franchise gives you coins that you can use to deck out your own virtual museum.

Screenshot of A Player Made PAC-MAN Museum (Image from PAC-MAN MUSEUM+)

Assassin’s Creed Museums

The most groundbreaking and best example (in my opinion) of what can be done are the Assassin’s Creed Discovery Tours. Available either as standalone products or as part of the games they’re based on, you can explore 425 BC Greece, 40BC Egypt, and 873 Viking Britain (with 1580’s Japan presumably coming soon).

This presumably came from the idea that in building respectively Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Origins, and Valhalla the team put huge amounts of work into researching the worlds to make them as authentic as they could reasonably get. So they decided to show off all of that research as a kind of explorable museum.

A Player Getting a guided tour of the Theatre of Dionysus (Image from Assassin's Creed Odyssey)

The discovery tours allow you to freely explore the entire worlds of the games without any of the story, quests, or combat. Instead a mixture of audio tours, tool tips, and even acted scenes to describe a historical setting.

This is the kind of thing that living museums wish they could be. Huge reconstructions of different areas filled with hundreds of costumed people going about some facsimile of daily life. The ability to listen to a tour, wander off for something that grabs your attention and then come back with hardly a break in the stride is ideal.

I can heartily recommend that you give one of these a go as they really open your eyes to what could be possible. And by being couched in the language of games and linked to such a huge franchise they generate immediate interest.

Being part of a huge franchise is also the only way that this kind of thing could currently get realistically made. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla made over $1 billion which gives the wiggle room for the kind of value-added prestige product like the Discovery Tours to be made. The amount of development work that would be required to make something like this without the original game would be prohibitive. Still, I think it shows a real potential and I hope that more people can do something similar in the future.

How to Visit 10+ Museums a Day

When people ask me about my holidaying and I say that I can visit upwards of 10 museums/historical sites in a day (my record thus far is 16) they are often shocked and ask some mixture of how and why. So I thought that I would share the secrets here. 

Wear Sensible Shoes and Trousers

This is one that it took me far longer to learn than it really should have done. In a day I'm usually out of the hotel around 08:30 to get to the first place and depending on how things go I might not be back until gone 18:00.

This generally means that you're looking at something like 8-10 hours of near constant standing and or walking. Either going round galleries or wandering the city between them. So what you're going to want is decent quality and comfortable walking gear. This is in many ways a walking holiday and should be treated as such. 

Plan Your Route

This is probably one of the biggest things. You need to have an idea of where it is that you're going, as well as if and when things will be open. You want to be at the earliest thing to open and then have your route finishing with whatever closes latest (within reason). 

When planning a holiday I first make a spreadsheet of all of the different museums, points of interest, and attractions (you can find my Amsterdam one here). This lets me consider how much I want to see particular things and also get an idea for what things might be more restricted in their visiting. 

At the same time I make a map of all of these places (my Amsterdam one is here). This lets me then group nearby places together and see if there's anything that's really far away. 

Once I've got these I typically pick the key places that I definitely want to visit and then either pick out routes to or from them. I tend to group these in broad directions such as ‘south of hotel’

Map of Various Museums and Points of Interest in Berlin Grouped into Various (Own Image)

Linger Only on the Things that Interest You

It’s important to make sure that this is a fun experience. I do this for the love of seeing different museums and the way they tell stories (one particular example is the very different interpretation of the ‘Sale of New York’ as shown in both the Museum of the City of New York and the National Museum of the American Indian). This means that there should be no ‘set time’ that you should spend in a given place.

It's important that you don't feel like you're trying to ‘get your money's worth on the ticket price. If a big and expensive museum sparks no joy then it’s totally fine to just have a quick browse. But equally if one museum draws you in then there’s nothing wrong with spending hours in it. Visiting so many museums is not a challenge or a goal so it’s totally fine for plans to change depending on what you are or are not enjoying.

Have Lunch, But Don't Make a Meal of it

Many times I've looked at the time and realised that it’s long past midday and I haven't eaten. However, when I finally do stop and have something I suddenly realise how much I needed it.

That said, midday is a prime time for visiting places. When on holiday my family often luxuriates over long lunches spending maybe a couple of hours really soaking in the ambience. However, not wanting to miss out on crucial visiting time when it’s just me I tend to keep an eye out and find a nice looking place between museums and grab something quick and ideally hot.

Once again, I don’t set limits on this. If I feel the need to sit around for a while longer or get a bigger meal then that’s totally fine. But usually it’s a quick half an hour and then off again.

Public Transport can be a Trap

By and large when visiting these cities I don’t often take public transport unless the thing I want to visit is particularly far away. Even then I might take public transport to the furthest out point and then walk my way back visiting other things along the way.

This is for two main reasons. Firstly, I tend to find that public transport may not actually be that fast. Whilst Metros are usually pretty good, buses are often slow and you may be stood around at the bus stop for a while. This twinned with a carefully planned out route means that often it’s simply quicker to walk to the next place.

Secondly I think it also helps me get a much better idea of the city i’m visiting. I see far more than I would on a bus, I might see interesting places to take diversions into. Admittedly this has led me to wander through some more ‘interesting’ places where people who are not large 6’3” men may not feel comfortable being. But some of the more interesting places I find on a trip can often come from just walking about.

You Probably Shouldn't 

I feel I should finish this all off by saying that this almost certainly isn’t something that you should do. This is a highly specific way of holidaying that appeals exactly to me and works entirely off my own whims.

It is certainly not a relaxing way to spend a week though I do believe it is a good way to really get a feel for a place, its history, and its people. But maybe that’s just me.