Hi, Here's a question for those of you who are developing museum interactives, particularly museum educational games.
How much are these games developed for only one setting. E.g. an in- gallery kiosk OR the web. How often are they developed for both platforms (web and gallery)? I've been looking at the games that museums share via their websites, but I expect there are many more that have been developed only for in- gallery usage & are inaccessible to everyone except on-site visitors. There are some good reasons this is the case, e.g. the in- gallery games are designed to be used with a touchscreen or other custom input interface. What are the hurdles to getting these out to a broader audience? Just thinking: 1. it might be interesting to be able to aggregate a selection of museum games to make some comparisons, conducting some focused testing (this 24hr Museum has kindly done this for online UK museum games - http://www.show.me.uk/games/games.html) 2. would people be willing to turn over executables for comparison 3. There are a number of efforts underway to preserve console and PC games. Where will the groundbreaking museum interactives end up? I'd also point museum game developers to the Values at Play/Social Impact Game Contest 2007 that just opened up this week. ( http:// valuesatplay.org/ and http://www.socialimpactgames.com/) Surely there are some museum games that qualify. Richard Urban, Doctoral Student Graduate School of Library & Information Science University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign rjurban at uiuc.edu http://isrl.uiuc.edu/~rjurban
