Video games and museums

A very interesting development in museum edutainment is also represented by the introduction of video games into the museum, not only in the form of a real work of art, as seen above, but also in fruitive and educational mechanisms. Most of the critical literature on video games is in agreement in attributing the value of this form of mediation with the public not so much to ‘narration’ as to interactivity in terms of the physical, visual and emotional involvement of the players. This is an enormously important factor in considering the new ways available of enjoying culture. In the fruition of culture, the public and, more specifically, the visitor or the tourist seek the involvement, the experience and in this sense the world of gaming (and by extension the world of video games); the encounters between gaming and digital technology offer themselves as a privileged place of this relationship.

Through the use of apps, which are accessible directly from a museum’s website or downloadable on mobile devices, museums offer playful experiences within their space by combining the app with the concept of a video game. In fact, the integration of a video game system allows for knowledge to be obtained through ‘learning by doing’ with the active participation in the available experience. In the gaming sessions, the user can decide which moves to make and which directions to take, obviously within the limits of the hypothesis formulated by the game developer, and in this way, the experience becomes more compelling. In fact, Italy is one of the most active countries on this side of the intersection between the gaming industry and the cultural sector.

Among the most significant examples of such integration is that of the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, which produced Father and Son, an application that can be downloaded on mobile devices that takes the museum ‘outside’ its walls. Father and Son is a narrative game, conceived by the collective TuoMuseo, with the same criteria of a 2D video game. Essentially, the game invites one to explore the spaces and works of the museum’s collection. With almost four million downloads worldwide, this application has allowed the museum to bolster knowledge of its already important collections and attract potential visitors to the museum. Applications that use a similar language are Firenze Game, designed to bring tourists in unknown places to the major art of traditional city tours, or Past for Future made in collaboration with Mibac and the National Archaeological Museum of Taranto, which combines gaming experiences with cinema. The technological playfulness thus contributes to making the viewing of a city, a museum or an exhibition unique and personal; it makes the spaces of culture less dusty without affecting the cultural component, which remains, of course, the most important aspect.

Among the most innovative and interesting systems in the realization of new experiences of the fruition of art and museum places is the application of augmented reality, an immersive form of technology that allows one to amplify the visit of the places by taking the visitor, through technology, directly into the past. Among the softwares that have anticipated augmented reality, we must mention Second Life, the website produced in 2003 that, at the height of its success before the triumph of social networks, had morethan a million users. Through a virtual avatar, the user could act within a ‘second life’, assuming another identity and conducting business as he pleases. This game, unlike more traditional ones, did not have a final goal; a player’s purpose was simply to escape from everyday reality and live in a parallel world. In the same way, by wearing specific devices such as 3D glasses, a visitor to a museum or archaeological site has the opportunity to have first-hand experiences of these locations of the past; the narrative is therefore replaced by a direct and therefore more engaging experience that promotes attention and understanding. Among the first archaeological sites to be so equipped in Italy is the Brixia Archaeological Park of Brescia, which has seen its visitors multiply (from 3,000 in August of 2012 to 38,000 in 2015). The glasses provided to visitors are equipped with a camera that recognizes what the visitor sees when moving in space; therefore, the virtual image of the original environments, reconstructed on the basis of the information that emerged from the studies and excavation campaigns, is recreated in front of the users’ eyes together with the real vision. While observing the archaeological remains of the amphitheatre, the visitor can also see its original form and even the activities that took place in it in Roman times.

In this sense, the worldwide explosion of multimedia-immersive exhibitions dedicated to the life and works of the most famous protagonists of art history is also worth mentioning in this speech. These are exhibitions in which the work, the artefact, disappears completely and is instead replaced by high-resolution images. The aim of the experiential path is to enchant the public, involving them emotionally and psychically in a sort of journey within painting, which, fundamentally deprived of the material component, is something different from the actual work of art. The ‘loss of aura’ of the work of art as theorized by Walter Benjamin at the dawn of the photographic and cinematographic revolution is complete in these cases; the work is transformed into a pure vehicle of optical illusions. It is for this reason that such exhibitions are generally appreciated by a public not accustomed to frequenting museums and instead more taken by places of pure entertainment in a Disney key. The multisensory journey through lights, colours and sounds is completely totalized for the visitor with the declared aim of helping facilitate understanding of the artist’s life and work. The result is often very far from a true understanding of the real nature of art. It is therefore very difficult to include these experiential exhibitions in the cultural sphere precisely because the playful aspect often prevails over the cultural one.

Ultimately, edutainment achieves its goal of promoting learning while having fun, only if the content is conveyed accurately and pure fun or marketing does not completely take over.