Can you play games in a museum?

Can a museum be interesting? What a peculiar question: the answer is, or should be, obvious. Let us put the question another way: can any and every museum be interesting? Here, maybe, someone may have doubts, and say: it all depends on what kind of guide you have to show you round its rooms.

An enthusiastic guide will always find out what interests his visitors. There exist, however, some sceptics who say that you cannot get today’s young people interested in anything: all they want is games. But if they have the opportunity to play games in a museum, this might tempt them into the exhibition rooms. But what kind of games could there be in a museum? That’s a question only asked by serious people: well, we will try to give them a serious answer.

Games as a means of instruction have long had their place in the pedagogue’s arsenal. Games are not necessarily a useless diversion, not by any means. They can be the vehicle of a serious pedagogical idea: that of using games as a means of establishing contact between a bearer of knowledge and his pupils. But the important thing is that a game must be such as can be played together: by parents with children, by teachers with pupils, by old people with young. Game-playing should not be a simple matter: it should involve learning, it should involve understanding rules and objectives. This applies to any and every game. And if the game proceeds in a museum, then the player’s partner is the person who works there, who knows many things, who can explain what’s what. The main thing is that our “guide” should himself love to play games, and should believe that this is not only an entertaining, but also a useful activity: and he should not be afraid of resorting to unusual examples and of posing unorthodox questions. And the more unusual the exhibits are, the more important it is to make use of games in the process of learning about them, in order to get a live, immediate response to what one sees.

And sometimes the role of a guide in the world of knowledge, and of a partner in game-playing, may be performed by a computer. We invite you to look at some examples of multi-media game-playing programmes specially created for a museum and for use in a museum’s space. They are of different kinds and from different times, but you may be sure that children – and not children only – will find them interesting.