Updating the ACMI Games Lab with a new selection of videogames

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ACMI LABS

15 min readJun 22, 2018

Background

The Games Lab is part of our permanent free exhibition Screen Worlds. It has a selection of fifteen playable videogames from around Australia and the world. The last suite of games was installed in 2016, and while some of them were clear audience and staff favourites (I’m looking at you, Mario Kart and Pro Evolution Soccer), the Games Lab was in need of a refresh. A team reshuffle meant I was given a shot at looking after that refresh.

I took this chance to do some quick and dirty research into what opportunities we had to test new interpretation ideas. ACMI has a long history of exhibiting videogames (including Code Breakers in 2017, Game Masters in 2012, Game On in 2008 and a significant mini-gallery style Games Lab from 2003–2007), so I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, but I had some questions of my own going in. These included:

How and why are people using the Games Lab space at the moment?
How can we best teach people how to play a game when they pick it up?
Given that labels kind of disappear next to an interactive screen, how do we add our curatorial voice to a game?
How do we highlight the important aspects of game design without visitors having to play the entire thing?
What makes a game more or less suitable for display in an exhibition context? If not suitable, what tools do we have to make it suitable?How do we communicate that games just aren’t for kids without showing horror/violence/rude bits?

I was also presented with some constraints. First was that Screen Worlds is scheduled to close in March 2019, as part of our recently-announced renewal. As the exhibition is nearing the end of its life, it didn’t make much sense to make any dramatic physical/architectural changes to the Games Lab. Second, I had six weeks to deliver the project, which ruled out any major technological interventions. Finally, as a free exhibition Screen Worlds has a healthy proportion of family visitors, with an audience expectation that everything in the exhibition will be appropriate for children. For context, we had previously exhibited the game Firewatch in the Games Lab, but it was removed following a complaint that it contained the f word. So. PG games only.

With all this in mind, I made a rough plan: spend a week doing research (visitor observations, subject matter research, other exhibitions we could learn from), choose some games, prototype some interpretation, install the games. Simple, huh? Shouldn’t be too hard.

Research Findings

I spent several hours watching people at play in the current Games Lab, and had a chat with some of the people there. My immediate observation is that visitors will often leave a game after 5–10 minutes of playing it, meaning the next person who picks up the game starts several minutes in, and misses crucial introductory information. (“It was a little difficult, because you jump straight into the middle.”)

One thing that was confirmed very quickly is that there’s a broad spectrum of game literacy among our audience. For instance, some visitors will run up to a controller, pick it up, and immediately be able to play the game, because they intuitively understand the grammar of control systems (left analogue stick to move, right analogue stick to look around, A to jump, X to interact). Other people, who are perhaps just as keen but not as familiar have trouble working out how to play the game. As one visitor said, “We didn’t really know what we were doing, so we were just pushing buttons”.

An interesting trend among visitors who were experienced game players, especially those in their mid-20s to 30s, is that several reported that they used to play games much more than they do now. These seasoned (perhaps jaded) gamers aren’t as interested in playing games for the sake of playing games. They’re looking for something new or different. (“I was looking for stuff I haven’t seen before. It’s great to see what people are making these days.” “I pretty much only pick up the controller if it’s a title I am already interested in, or it looks like a puzzle so I can get a partial experience while I’m there. I definitely wouldn’t pick up [a first-person shooter].” “I have every console at home, except the Wii U, so it was cool to get to try that.”)

We also saw people who were disinterested in playing games, or at least disinterested in playing games in the Games Lab. This partly seems to be a view that games are for children, or aren’t “real art”. I’ll share with you two quotes from different respondents to the same market research survey:

“I am afraid I would rather see old fashioned real art rather than items put up by these plurry machines.”
“Games culture doesn’t appeal: unreal worlds, heavy on violence and avatars, people wanting to be ‘superheroes’ with no effort, kids (and worse, adults) spending hours glued to the screens rather than getting out and about and contributing to the real world.”

These are probably extreme representations of this opinion, but they do capture a challenge: how do we demonstrate to these visitors the artistic merit and maturity of the medium, especially if we can’t show ‘mature content’ (in the current configuration)?

The environment of the Games Lab itself is a challenge; there are often many groups of visitors aged 10–17 in the area, happily (and sometimes noisily) enjoying the games, which discourages the visitor looking for a more focused or quieter experience. Or if four people are gathered around one game, it becomes socially difficult to play the game next to it, because the space has been dominated. Or, one person may become ensconced in a particular title, and play it for an extended period of time.

Finally, some family groups played games together. I would see kids and grown-ups working together to solve puzzle, or joyfully racing each other in Mario Kart. I also sometimes saw a disconnect within family groups — kids would be playing, but their grown-up would be next to them on their phone. We want to encourage the first set of behaviour: play of, and conversation about, games between family members, especially intergenerationally. One visitor with a child remarked “I wish he’d spend more time over there [gesturing to our section on the history of the moving image] but he just wants to play.” This suggests that to some, the games on display are viewed as “just playing”, and don’t have a historical lineage, or cultural weight. We can do better to equip grown-ups with background knowledge to facilitate educational conversations about games.

All of this research resulted in a matrix of our target audience, balancing experience and enthusiasm:

If possible, I want to increase visitors’ enthusiasm for and awareness of games, like so:

this infographic courtesy 26 seconds in microsoft paint

We’re probably not going to turn a never-played-a-game-and-I’m-just-visiting-for-a-Godard-retrospective visitor into someone who mainlines Call of Duty overnight. But if we can nudge people towards embracing the artistic merit of games, or slightly broaden their understanding of what games can be, I’ll be satisfied.

The section of this matrix with the most potential for us to deliver a transformative experience is the Curious Novices, at the top right. These are people who are open to games, but maybe don’t know where to start, or who don’t have the inclination or means to invest in the requisite hardware yet. I did some highly agile (read: non-rigorous) research into this demographic of curious novices, and asked them what would entice them to try games in an exhibition setting. Answers were broad, and sometimes contradictory, but fell into four broad categories.

Low barrier to entry: simple premise, controls are easy to learn, you can drop in and out, minimal time commitment
Aesthetic appeal: looks cute, has a quirky or strong art style, interesting genre or story
Calming: no quick response events, time-based coordination like running and shooting simultaneously, no heavy penalties for dying
Reduced fear of getting it wrong: players can see someone else play first, game is social/collaborative (not competing against each other), contains recognisable franchise/characters (eg. Lego Star Wars) has an easy bridging experience from familiar to unfamiliar

Using these research findings, I arrived at four goals for the Games Lab refresh:

Lower potential barriers to entry for visitors to play and watch games
Present ACMI’s curatorial voice, discussing analysis of, context behind, and connection between, individual game titles
Create a social experience, catering to players and watchers of games alike
Meet the needs of audiences who may have varying degrees of game literacy

Selection Criteria

Curatorial Agenda

The first step in choosing works was to deciding what sort of games I would be looking for. You see, there are lots of games out there, at least ten, and I needed to reduce the scope. I was thinking about how to demonstrate the maturity of the medium, but without showing Mature Content (as discussed above). The solution came in the fact there is more than one kind of maturity. I sought to display not an adolescent maturity of hyperviolence, power fantasies and nudity, but an artistic maturity of emotional intelligence, curiosity, empathy, and political nuance.

There were several qualities I was after in the games I was looking for. I termed them “The Mechanic is the Message”, after Brenda Romero’s outstanding analogue game series. These are games that use their interactivity and mechanics to convey an artistic message. Some, like Florence and Brothers, transform social interactions and emotional connection into gameplay itself in innovative, heart-wrenching ways. Games like Thomas Was Alone and Rumu create deep empathy for the characters onscreen. Some titles, Push Me Pull You and Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime among them, teach players to work together and build friendships. Others, like Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, use something akin to Brechtian distancing to remind you you’re playing a game, and discuss the nature of gaming while you play.

I wanted to try and find a balance between games that did each of these things, while hopefully also retaining a balance of genre types.

Suitability for exhibition

Based on the visitor observations, industry research, and conversations with ACMI’s AV and tech teams, I put together a list of formal and technical elements that make a game better suited to display in an exhibition environment. These included:

A repeating structure that resets often. These encourage short play sessions and allow new players to easily start at the beginning. For instance, Stanley Parable, Queers in Love at the End of the World.
Short title screens/intro sequences, with few options at start, so that players can begin playing (or exit and restart) as quickly as possible
Simple/obvious controls, with in-game instructions on how to play. Or controls introduced gradually through the game.
Clear objectives communicated throughout the game
Subtitles (or minimal dialogue), to suit a noisy environment
A demo/exhibition mode designed for showing in display environments. Usually this has a brief playable sequence that best represents the game, rather than the whole game, and a screensaver feature or attract mode to entice players while the game is idle.
On standard/easily available consoles
Preferably a PC game so we can install extra software to prevent hi-tech hackers from exiting the game and trying to install Fortnite (which, of course begs the question, why didn’t we install Fornite in the first place?).
Doesn’t have in-app purchases or require internet access

For more on the tech side of these requirements, I recommend my colleague Sean Doyle’s article Museum-ifying the games in Code Breakers.

I doubt there are many games that meet all of these (if you find one that does, please please please tell me about it), so for this exhibition I prioritised games that met more of these criteria than not.

Developers

It‘s important to me that ACMI represents a broad cross-section of the types of people who make games. As the national museum of moving image culture, it’s we should be representing Australian developers, and as a Victorian state government organisation, we have a responsibility to showcase the local industry (which, y’know, isn’t difficult given the quality of the Melbourne games scene). Seven of our final fifteen games were made by Australians.

It’s imperative that we be showcasing games made by women and gender diverse developers, because we just should and also to build a connection to our recent Code Breakers exhibition. In our final selection of games, eight of them had women on the development teams, including CEOs, Lead Developers, Producers, Animators, and (in one instance) a Tap Dancer. As Carly Kocurek argues in her excellent Ronnie, Millie, Lila — Women’s History for Games, the traditional auteur theory of game development centres discourse around the work of (usually straight white) men, and women’s contributions in other roles are significantly overlooked. For this exhibition we chose to credit games to studios instead of individuals (except for the games that were made by solo developers, of course).

I also wanted to represent work by people of colour in the exhibition, and while there are some in the selection (Never Alone, Florence, and The Bridge among them), this is something we definitely could and should do better on in future exhibitions.

On-Ramps

Based on the audience research I mentioned above, we needed to choose titles that helped visitors without much gaming experience feel like they had a way in. This included choosing titles with a low barrier to entry, high aesthetic quality (strong/quirky art style, balancing eye-catching visuals with subtle ones), calm gameplay, and reducing fear of getting it wrong.

Some of the ways we met these needs included reducing time pressure by including puzzle games (The Bridge, The Gardens Between) and exploration games (Paperbark, Everything), and creating collaborative environments through co-op gaming (Push Me Pull You, Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime). The curatorial focus on story, emotion and empathy also helped these visitors find a way in.

Overall

So, putting all of this together, the game selection process simply involved:

Finding games that meet the curatorial agenda,
Selecting a healthy mix of developers,
Prioritising games that work well in an exhibition environment,
Balancing titles to meet a range of audience needs,
Taking out anything that has content stronger than PG,
And then filtering all this through the consoles we have available.

Piece of cake.*

Interpretation

For what it’s worth, my ideal presentation of a game in an exhibition looks something like: a short (2–5 minute) playable experience that just shows the most relevant part of the game, with the ability for us to customise the experience and overlay our curatorial voice (somewhere between Vanity Fair’s Notes on a Scene and the Portal developer commentary), with a second screen to make the game experience visible to other visitors, and related ephemera (sketches, notes, walkthroughs, clips, prototypes, merchandise) exhibited nearby. I’ve attached some links to readings that informed this thinking at the bottom of the article.

However, for various reasons this ideal experience wasn’t going to happen, so I looked for ways to work towards this idea within our means and the information points we had. My observational research had presented a few opportunities for changes.

The first was that 9 of the 15 games in the Games Lab are presented against a large curved wall. While this wall had abstract geometric designs on it, I saw that we could use this wall behind screens to show contextual/curatorial information in a way that is more easily read than the labels next to each game. I did some quick and cheap visitor research to ask them what sort of information they might find useful here.

An early sketch of text that could go on the wall above the games. I don’t know why I said Brothers was a Party Fun game. Please don’t tweet me.

Combining all the possible information became quite maximal, including the name of the game, age recommendations and the general tone of the game.

ACMI’s design team and I reduced the text on the wall to just the top heading, to help people choose the kind of game they wanted to play. The headings we ended up with are ‘Reality-Bending Puzzles’, ‘Gentle Adventures’, ‘Fast-Paced Fun’, and ‘Charming Challenges’. These were placed above the wall using vinyl cut-outs.

The final vinyl, with phone-quality photos

As you’ll see in the sketch, these games against the wall have two information points — one text in a lightbox on the counter, and another text on the wall to the right of the screen. The old version of the Games Lab had the same information on both labels, descriptive information about the game (maker credits, year, objective, similar titles). I thought it could be worth trying shaking this up, to make use of the available real estate.

The counter text is now the descriptive information about the game, this time with added how to play, and how to reset information — even if only 20% of visitors read it, it’ll improve their experience. We also added a ‘suggested play time’ field, so our staff have something to tap if someone is hogging one of the games. while the wall text is more interpretive — why it was chosen, what it has to say. My hope is that this interpretive information will help foster conversation between visitors about the game as they play (or while one of them plays and the others watch).

An expanded version of this interpretive information is also up on our website. Each game has its own page, with links to purchase the game, relevant media, information about the makers, and some interviews with developers. (This sort of work on connecting the dots between works, makers, and themes, is indicative of some of the thinking around database tech that will be in place in the new ACMI when we open. Shhhhhhh.) I’ve linked to most of the games in this article, but you can find the full list here. We also talked about adding URLs at the bottom of each label that pointed to the relevant game page on our website. Visitor interviews suggested that these links would not be as used by visitors as we might hope.

Finally, a point raised by our CXO Seb Chan was that the positioning of games was a simple way to let the games speak for themselves, or rather in dialogue with each other. If you’re playing a gentle sidescrolling platformer, but I’m frantically mashing buttons next to you, the differences between the games become apparent in the way that we’re responding to them. This will be immediately obvious to the curators among you, but I’m new here. The final arrangement of games created a nice difficulty curve, starting with gentle puzzles on the left, and ending with the really quite hard games (Cuphead, Getting Over It) to the right. This also happened to coincidentally concentrate the boisterous younger visitors in one spot (at the difficult games), making the rest of the exhibition feel more open to other visitors.

Conclusion

The last stages of install — making sure the games play right.

On the morning of 8 June, we installed our games, added the new wall text, and changed the labels over. At 10.00am ACMI opened. At 10.02am we got our first feedback: “Hey sir, why don’t you have Fortnite?”. By 10.45am someone had gone through and factory reset all the Playstation 4s. Our AV team were champions and reinstalled all the games. Exhibitions, huh?

Nonetheless, the games seem to have been received well by the rest of our audiences. Now that the Games Lab been updated, it certainly isn’t finished. I’m keeping in touch with our Visitor Services staff and Volunteers to hear feedback on how it’s going. I’m in the space regularly to see how visitors are responding to it, and I’ll be making tweaks to it as we go, to make it as awesome as possible. I’ll update this article as changes happen. We may even put Fortnite in, who knows?

Thanks to the amazing team at ACMI for making this exhibition happen: Nadia, Rob, Travis, Fiona, Seb, Jess, Lucie, Arieh, Vincent, Caitlin, Andy, Serena, Amita, Chelsey, and Dylan. It really takes a village. And of course to all the developers — thank you for your time and generosity, I heart you much.