Museums as a model for gaming

Yeah right. Compare musuems to games?

Well yes, there are similarities, we are reading a book on Learning from Musuems by Faulk and Dierkling. They prove that people learn from musuems given by how much personal knowledge the bring and how what they learn is integrated into their life over time. I call it learning in 4D - personal, sociocultural, physical and time.

Thinking about video games there is one experience I've had where the game attempts to adapt to you -- Kingdom of Hearts. This disney-themed, role playing game by Square Enix tries to get a sense of your motivation, fears and preferences, early in the tutorial. The game goes on to craft a story and some of the gameplay experiences around that. I wish I could say definitively that it made me want to play the game.

I never would have guessed how many similarities there are between musuem research and gaming. In games you've got to create a free choice experience that rewards exploration, you've got to construct learning over time embeded in these immersive 4-D environments. This has at least two immediate implications for developing and leveraging extrinisic and intrinsic knowledge in a game. First, opening game tutorials can assess what information you are bringing from outside the game, extrinsic knowledge, and customize your tutorial. Second, intrinisc knowledge developed within the game does not have to be used immediately. If you provide some environmental trigger later on in the game, the person will recall the learning and even adapt it. The benefit is the environment feels more free choice and thereby increases motivation.