The Stories We Tell
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Presenter: James Collins, Digital Media Project Manager, Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access Every gem, artifact, and painting in a museum contains a story. How do we make games that do justice to our collections? How do we make games that go beyond teaching skills to teach an understanding of the world? Let’s rediscover the art of playful storytelling.
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The Stories We Tell
- 1. The Stories We Tell James Collins Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access @JamesCollinsJr
- 2. Braid, 2008
- 3. Five Questions (1)Why games? (2)Why narrative? (3)How do they relate? (4)How does this connect to collections? (5)How can we implement this?
- 5. “Does Game-Based Learning Work? Results from Three Recent Studies” Richard Blunt Can the use of games improve performance on tests? Answer: Yes – sometimes by as much as 30% But other factors are at play
- 6. “Level Up Learning: A National Survey on Teaching with Digital Games” Joan Ganz Cooney Center 55% of teachers use digital games weekly 71% say games are effective for math learning 47% say games benefit lowest performers the most
- 7. “Digital Games for Learning: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis” SRI Digital game interventions perform better than non-game interventions Adaptive games perform better than non-adaptive games Non-competitive games perform better than student vs. student games
- 8. “Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine” Ed Tan “When viewing any film . . . we do not only see solid bodies in motion, and understand that they represent people, but also, and perhaps above all, we feel something for the characters and are somehow moved by the sight of them.” Inside Out, 2015
- 10. “Is There A Text In This Class?” Stanley Fish “Interpretation is not the art of construing but the art of constructing. Interpreters do not decode poems; they make them.” Final Fantasy 7, 1997
- 11. Asteroid, 1979
- 14. “Learning From Fiction: Applications in Emerging Technologies” Ruthanna Gordon “One common source of information is fiction. Although we are capable of recalling and understanding individual facts, we vastly prefer narratives that draw causal connections between the diverse elements of our world. This tendency can be distressing to experts who would prefer that people learn facts in their most accurate and clearly presented form, unadorned by irrelevancies. Fiction, after all, is not usually created with the sole or primary goal of communicating an accurate picture of the world. Nevertheless, this narrative advantage is a principle familiar to every politician who has chosen an engaging anecdote over a pie chart in attempting to influence people’s worldviews.”
- 15. “Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film” Seymour Chatman “[The] transposability of the story is the strongest reason for arguing that narratives are indeed structures independent of any medium.”
- 17. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, 2003
- 18. Prince of Persia, 2010
- 20. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, 1982
- 21. E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial, 1982
- 22. E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial, 1982
- 23. Discrete Narrative – Lossy Transfer Fidelity Loss
- 26. Gee + Chung Audio Tour Display
- 28. Differences in Perspective Discrete Narrative: It is an augmentation of the exhibit. Dependent Narrative: It redefines the experience.
- 29. Discrete Narrative – Game as Add-on Fidelity Loss
- 31. Where can you see our stuff?
- 32. Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981
- 33. Jurassic Park test, c. 1992
- 36. Implementation? FILL IN QUICK MIRACLE FIX HERE
- 41. Five Questions; Five Answers (1)Why games? (2)Why narrative? (3)How do they relate? (4)How does this connect to collections? (5)How can we implement this?
- 42. The Stories We Tell James Collins Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access @JamesCollinsJr
Editor's Notes
- Hello everyone, my name is James Collins and I work for the Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access. A little background on my office: we are a pan-institutional digital education office. That means that we work with all 19 Smithsonian museums, research centers, and the National Zoo to help enable new methods and models for digital education. My work in particular focuses on education technology – specifically interactive media and games. Before I start, I also want to add that you can contact me anytime on Twitter at @JamesCollinsJr or by using my e-mail here. And if you’re ever in DC, please feel free to stop by and chat.
- So the title of this presentation is the Stories We Tell. In this presentation, I’m going to ask you to think about the role of narrative in games – specifically the role of narrative in museum games. I wish that I could handle this presentation through examples. That’s what I would like to do. I would like to take a dozen examples of strong, narrative-based games in the field of museum education and show you studies on how these are affecting visitors. Unfortunately those don’t really exist. Not yet. Or at least not in a robust way. There are examples in the entertainment space – Braid, shown here, is one of them – but the medium is immature in the museum space. So that puts me in an awkward position. It makes it harder for me to argue my point: that narrative is critical to museum game experiences. I can’t skip any steps. So instead I’d like to go through this argument by addressing five different questions.
- First, and I’m only going to touch on this really, is why games? Why should museums use games at all? Second, why narrative? Why is narrative important to the museum education experience? Third, how is narrative incorporated into the game experience? What does narrative in a game mean? Fourth, how does all of this relate to digital collections? And, finally, if we agree on the previous four points, how do we start museums on the path to implementing all of this? Why games? Why narrative? How do they relate? (Narrative as data vs. subelement) How does this connect to collections?(Archiving vs. interpreting) How can we implement this? (Involve curators, designers from start + unis)
- So let’s start with probably the easiest point here. Why games? This is a big question for me at museum conferences. When you’re looking a museum’s budget, the education unit only gets a small portion of the overall pool of resources. The resources that an education office does get often go to supporting physical experiences including school visits, workshops, summer programs, special events, etc. This means that game development is considered a luxury for almost every museum out there. Now, I’m assuming that if you’re here today at Serious Play that you are already acquainted with game-based learning research. You’ll know that games can reach large and diverse segments of the population. You’ll know that games for learning have been able to achieve some compelling results and that these experiences are typically scalable to large groups of learners. More importantly, you’ll know that games are a rich and powerful medium. They can create transformative experiences. We know this. We’ve seen this. Many of us have experienced it. Considering that most of you are already familiar with this research and that other presenters at this conference will be covering this topic in more depth, I’m going to assume that we can state, for the purposes of this argument, that games are an intriguing medium that should be explored in museum settings. For any disbelievers out there, here are a few assorted studies:
- One base line study that I like to mention is an ADL study on the use of games in a university classroom. It answers the simple question: can the use of a game as opposed to traditional teaching methods improve performance on tests. The answer is yes. The ADL study, which was completed for the Dept. of Defense, showed that using a game in university business and management courses increased performance by students on tests by 30% for students aged 18 to 20. The study was conducted at East Coast University and measured performance on business and management tests after playing simulation games. The increased performance boost diminished according to the age of the students. Ultimately the effect capped out at individuals who were over 40.
- So that’s for universities. What about in K12 environments? According to the Cooney Center’s 2014 survey, 71% (so, nearly three quarters) of teachers who use digital games in the classroom report that games have been effective in improving their students’ mathematics learning. Furthermore, 47% of the teachers surveyed say they have seen digital learning games benefit our lowest performing students the most. So teachers, our front line here in education, are not just seeing games being effective they’re seeing them work where it matters most.
- The Cooney survey has been pretty popular lately. The Glass Lab reports coming out of SRI have been even more impressive. They have been conducting a meta-analysis looking at the effect of digital games on learning. The meta-analysis found that 57 published studies have reported that digital game interventions have performed better than non-game instructional interventions. The analysis also identified 20 studies between adaptive games and non-adaptive games. As expected, games that adapt to the player’s actions and keep them in their zone of proximal development did better than those that did not. And the report goes on. If you haven’t read them yet – this report and the earlier ones – definitely look them up. So, I’m not saying that games are necessarily efficient or reproducible ways of reaching these results. Just that this is enough data to convince us that we should consider games as a learning medium for projects. If you’re with me on that, then we can move on to point two which is where things get a little more contentious. We’ll talk about narrative.
- So, why narrative? Why is narrative important to museum education? We know from other domains that narrative can have a powerful effect on people. The fields of literary theory and film theory both devote significant efforts to untangling the presence and effect of narrative. You no doubt know the power of narrative innately – it’s hard to ignore if you’ve ever read a book or watched a movie. As the quote here references, when we watch a film we don’t just see blobs of moving color. We don’t even see the actors and studio sets. We see these moving figures as characters and we are moved by the sight of them. We’ll watch two characters for 90 minutes and then we’ll care if they kiss at the end.
- In his work on the cognitive processes of the narrative experience, Richard Gerrig writes about two experiences found in narratives. The first is the ability to be transported. To be taken away, sometimes for hours at a time, to another place and time. Again – no doubt you’ve experienced this yourselves. We see this in books, in films, and yes in games as well. It’s a powerful experience that can let us forget ourselves and be somewhere else.
- The second experience that Gerrig mentions is the performance of the narrative. By performance he means that when we experience the narrative, we cast ourselves into the story and act out parts of it. We fill in the blanks. We play out the emotions. This is what makes narrative such a powerful tool in teaching empathy along with other socio-emotional skills.
- So narrative is a thing that can: Make us care about otherwise abstract things by Transporting us to somewhere else as someone else And asking us to perform and fill in emotional blanks along the way. The end result of all of this is that we take something – like this assortment of little white lines on a black background – and make people care about it.
- What does that look like in practice? So here’s a personal anecdote. I wasn’t much of a fan of computers when I was in primary and secondary school. I was lucky enough to be exposed to computers at a young age, but the individuals who taught classes on this at my schools weren’t computer science instructors. They were teachers of other subjects who used the computer lab part-time. The topics we learned weren’t engineering or even really computer science related. It was literacy. Typing skills mostly. What I’m saying is that if it was just up to the STEM teachers of my childhood schools, I would never have ended up in computer science in college. The inspiration came from a more unlikely place: Literature. It wasn’t the labs and workbooks that convinced me, it was Jules Verne. And HG Wells and Isaac Asimov. They were the ones who made me care about the abstract things we were being taught in school. They attached characters to ideas and made me care about them. So thanks for that.
- Informally, you see stories like this all of the time. Lucasfilm actually has a page on the Star Wars website dedicated to all of the people who have been inspired by the films to pursue different careers – many of them engineers. Even at our National Air and Space Museum in DC, if you go by the staff offices you’re immediately greeted with Star Wars slogans posted on windows. During an ice breaker at one of our staff meetings, someone from Air and Space described Han Solo as their hero because, I quote, “I’ve always wanted a wookie as a friend”. That’s the power of narrative. Creating something called a wookie and having that lead to someone becoming an aerospace engineer. http://www.starwars.com/news/fully-operational-fandom-how-star-wars-inspires-careers
- Narrative can persuade. Dr. Ruthanna Gordon, a fellow federal employee, wrote an excellent article that pulls together a lot of the research out there on how narratives affect our decision making process. Citing Gerrig and others, she writes about how narratives influence our attitudes and opinions even when we consciously agree that the stories we are being told are not reliable references. She cites one study by Elizabeth Marsh which is particularly telling – in it, the researchers drafted several short stories that each included 8 supposed facts. Some of these facts were true while others were misleading. As an example, one story described a sextant as the primary means of navigation by the stars for ships while another story described a compass as the primary means instead. Participants were tested for knowledge found in the stories after reading them. When the facts in the stories were correct, the participants scored better on the tests. When the facts were incorrect, the participants scored poorly. In either case, the participants showed an increased belief that they - already knew - these facts before reading the stories. So what we’re seeing here is that people listen to narratives. They incorporate ideas from them into their worldview, often without even acknowledging that this is occurring. What this means for us in the museum field is that we need to pay attention to the narratives that we are telling especially when we commingle facts within these narratives.
- So we know that games are powerful and we know that narratives are powerful. But what do we mean when we say narrative in games? This is a topic of much debate. Various theories have been put forward to define the role of narrative in games and to compare its use to its presence in other forms of media. Jesper Juul wrote about this topic frequently at the turn of the millennium. In one of his early articles, he cites Seymour Chatman in saying that: [The] transposability of the story is the strongest reason for arguing that narratives are indeed structures independent of any medium. Now Chatman, writing back in 1978, is talking about literature and film here and Juul takes this thought here and applies it to digital games. Let’s deconstruct this statement.
- Chatman is saying that narrative is independent of medium. And that we can see this by moving stories from one form to another. By definition, a story is discrete. It can be transferred. The implication here is that its transference can then be measured. And if we can measure the transference, we can think of the transference of the story in terms of fidelity. In other words, how much of the story has been transferred and in what quality.
- Let’s look at an example. There was a 2010 film, Prince of Persia, created based on the 2003 video game Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. In the game, we have our nameless protagonist Prince embroiled in an evil plot from a vizier to control a powerful magic item: the sands of time. These sands turn people into monsters but also allow time to be rewound. The Prince is allied with Farah, the daughter of a Maharaja, in this quest. The gameplay focuses on navigating dangerous traps, killing monsters, and using the dagger to rewind time to solve puzzles.
- In the film, we have our protagonist, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, who now has a name and a backstory. There is no longer an evil vizier but rather an evil uncle. There is an allied princess although she fares better in the film version than in the game and a few of her background details are changed. Critically, though, there are no sand monsters and the film features a relatively small amount of acrobatics and trap avoiding. Both key components of the game.
- So we notice several key differences between the two versions. Not just changes in people and events but in agency as well. Even if all of the details were the same, they could play out differently in the game than in the film. The game allows people to play, rewind, save, quit, load, restart, and experience different endings. Based on this we could say that the story loses fidelity when transferring from game to film. We lose agency, we lose multiple endings, and we gain noise (such as the prince’s orphan background story).
- In the reverse, we often see even more issues when a film is turned into a game. One notorious example is ET. You are all familiar with the 1982 film. A heartwarming story of a boy and his found alien friend. Their courageous escape from mysterious government agents and ET’s ultimate return flight to his home world. If you don’t remember, this all focuses on ET building a phone to use to call home.
- You are all probably also familiar with the 1982 ET video game. For those who haven’t played it recently, let me remind you that the boy (Elliott) featured on the cover here only has a minor part in the game. He’s the star of the film, but he’s only a powerup in this game. Instead you play directly as ET, as he searches for parts of the phone. True to the film, ET is chased by government agents, collects phone parts, and then can board a ship to return to his home world.
- Many differences exist here. The film, while prominently featuring ET, can also be considered a coming of age story for Elliott. That critical human perspective is entirely absent from the game as are most of the film’s actors. ET still reenacts the plot’s climax of phoning home – but again only if the player has the skill and knowledge of how to do so. So here again we see significant issues in comparing the narratives of the two.
- Now if we accept this Juul/Chatman understanding of narrative in games, we have an issue in both of these examples. Both the Sands of Time film and the ET game fail in their goal of transposing the independent story from one format to another. Both transfers incur a lot of noise – adding new, unnecessary elements – and both fail to transfer critical elements from the original. So in this perspective, we understand story as transposable but we also understand that this is a lossy type of transfer. The original intent will never be realized upon transfer. We may gain other features, but we cannot recreate the experience of the original medium.
- In this world, where do museum games stand? Well let’s take the most basic example: we have a curator that has created an exhibit and wants to attach a game to the experience. For example, an exhibit featuring dinosaurs. We understand the exhibit as the vessel for the story that the curator is telling. In this way, we understand the exhibit as the primary medium. The narrative of the exhibit is the fall of the largest dinosaurs. Why did they die out? Now, the experience of a physical exhibit is not easily recreated. We have a physical building, other museum patrons, physical skeletons, etc. The game can try to reproduce this but at best it will feel no better than a photocopy of the experience. The physical presence will be lacking – and once rules are introduced the experience will distance itself further from the original medium.
- In this thought experiment, let’s say that the accompanying dinosaur game follows the same time period and creatures but gives you some agency. Maybe you follow the experience of a single dinosaur – attempting to help him survive. You collect food and seek shelter from storms. Interact with other dinosaurs and otherwise live a dinosaur’s life. Can we say that we have transposed the experience? Well some of the story is there – but it’s become less of a global story and more of an individual one. It has different themes. It focuses on discrete experiences instead of large scale shifts. You have agency and maybe even multiple endings now. The story has changed in much the same way as the two previous examples. Critical details are missing. Extraneous details have been added. It’s a very lossy transfer.
- So getting back to the question of adding a museum game to an exhibit: This proposition becomes tangled up in the question of: can museum games provide appropriate fidelity of narrative for exhibit-based experiences? In this way, a museum game may augment or amplify the museum experience but the narrative is distinct and independent from both methods of transmission. So a curator would say: if I create this as an exhibit, can I enhance the experience with a game? This isn’t a bad thing but it’s not exactly exciting either. If the game is just an enhancement it lumps itself together with gallery guides, audio tours, docents, and other resources at the museum’s disposal. It’s likely to be seen as a frustrating endeavor as well because the game will not contain as much fidelity to the exhibit as the curator would like.
- So, me, personally, I don’t like this. This perspective means not a very big budget for my group! How else can we think of this? Let’s think. What if narrative wasn’t independent. What if it wasn’t transposable. What if the story is defined by the medium. You can see hints of this in some other theories of game design. Schell’s tetrad is one. I won’t go into detail about it because, well, you can ask him about it yourself at the reception tonight. But you can see from the diagram – narrative is a building block. In the tetrad, a game is composed of the interaction between the technology (we can read this maybe as the medium), the mechanics of the game, the aesthetics of the game, and the story of the game. So the narrative component is a little more entwined here – although still separate from the medium. Another paper, just released this year, tries to pull together a unifying theory of game design. In that one narrative mechanics and game mechanics are distinct but also overlap. Which makes things a little more complicated. Both systems though get us thinking about this other alternative, the possibility that narrative may exist as a dependent subelement of the overall game – not as an independent, transposable structure.
- Back to the example then: we have a curator that has created a dinosaur exhibit and wants to attach a game to the experience. But now the curator isn’t talking about how to move the story of the exhibit to the game, he or she is saying: what story can I tell with this other medium? And this is all the difference. Again, in the first version. In the transposable story of Juul and Chatman, when we ask ourselves: why add a museum game? We answer with: because it can tell the same story with enhancements. It is an augmentation of the exhibit. But things are different when story is dependent on medium, in this second way of thinking, we ask: why add a museum game? And we must answer: because it is the only way that this story can be told. In the first the curator says: I will create an exhibit and augment its story with a game. In the second the curator says: I will create an exhibit and it will tell a story. If I create a game for the exhibit, it will tell a different story. It redefines the experience because it exists separate from the exhibit.
- If games are only augmenting the museum experience they are optional. Visitors may enjoy them. Over time they may even come to expect them. But they are not critical. They are enhancements. Their goal is to feed back into the physical exhibit. To increase its reach and its appeal but, again, in service of the physical experience.
- But if games are telling different stories then they are redefining the museum experience. Interpretation is happening here that cannot happen in any other medium. That means that a museum that is NOT employing the use of games is not interpreting its collections to its fullest extent. It is therefore no longer optional for a museum to use games. It is critical. Because the absence of these games is removing stories and voices from the museum experience. Now I have given examples of paleontology exhibits but this applies with even more force for cultural and artistic exhibits. We are talking about divergent perspectives that are being silenced in favor of predominant narratives. And that’s a huge issue for us as cultural institutions.
- So let’s talk about what this means for collections. I’ll give you a stat: the Smithsonian has less than 1% of its collections on display at any given time. Now we sink a lot of resources into those collections. We have physical spaces on the National Mall, security guards, metal detectors, exhibit designers, lunch rooms, the whole nine yards. So far the Smithsonian has digitized about 16% of its collections. So if you go onto our collections search, you can see 16x the number of collection objects than you could in person.
- My question to you then, and this isn’t specific to the Smithsonian, but it’s what is our duty to those online collections? To me, right now this very moment, we’re deciding whether we are a museum or an archive. If we are an archive, we can collect, store, digitize, and make accessible. That can be our lifecycle and we can fulfill our responsibility as a cultural institution. We can gather up as much stuff as we have and dump it somewhere with a really good search interface.
- But if we’re a museum in the digital space (like we are in the physical space) then we need to use those collections. We need to adapt them, curate them, create the equivalent of exhibits out of them. Our responsibility isn’t just to make these objects accessible but to make them approachable. We need to tell their stories. And to me there is no greater way of doing this than through games.
- Why am I saying games here? This is just a brief aside. We have seen what attempts to digitally recreate a physical exhibit have looked like in the past. Google Art is probably the most state of the art version of that right now. And it’s not bad. But it’s not better than visiting in person. Pretty much the whole time you’re looking at it you’re saying: ah, I wish I was actually there. Now technology will catch up and maybe eventually there won’t be much fidelity loss – but I have to ask: why restrict ourselves to recreating the physical?
- When we have access to a digital medium we can do anything. We can create any experience. So why create virtual walls and hang virtual paintings on them? We can transport visitors to strange and distant vistas. We can tell them personalized stories. We can have them see the wonder of our collections. Or we can essentially make them stand in a digital queue. Well the more interactivity that we add to these experiences, the more these digital exhibits will look like games. That’s the end point, in my opinion – 16% of our collections online right now – hopelessly adrift in a sea of data. Throw them in a game. Let them shine in context. Curate the experience for the digital visitor. And you’ll have a more meaningful digital museum experience.
- So I’ve told you why games and narrative are powerful. I’ve explained how medium defines narrative and we’ve talked about how this implicates certain curatorial responsibilities on our part. So the last thing that I would like to talk about is how to move some of this forward.
- Well look, we can start small. Here’s a logo for a proof of concept that we’re working on right now. It would be a series of games called Tales from the Smithsonian. We’re not looking at creating games about objects, we’re looking at creating games about stories. The first game in the series would tell the story of Amelia Earhart’s early life. A game about objects would have Amelia Earhart’s goggles, her patches, her plane – and you could maybe explore them. Rotate them. Click on buttons to review more information. Maybe add in some simulations. Each interactive point would tie into a paragraph of text explaining the historical context of the object. So essentially an interactive instead of a game. I’m not joking, this is like the go to experience. Let’s make these objects interactive and fill in blanks with curator text. It’s a physical experience made digital.
- You see, a game-based museum, and that’s what I’m talking about here, would be an entirely different culture. That’s the end goal. It would mean staffing game designers and developers – you might think that’s a long shot but we staff how many designers to do layouts? Artists and sculptors for exhibits? And that’s for less than 1% of our collections. For 16% of our collections, the Smithsonian should be staffing full time game developers – as should other museums. We should be creating robust online game-type exhibits and we would need to hire game developers in order to do this.
- So we need designers and developers. We also need curators with a new perspective. They need to be brought into the fold. Given access to gaming culture. Our American Art Museum is doing this right now. They’ve started collecting games there so they’re also now building a staff gaming lab. You can’t collect art that you don’t understand. Someone over there figured out that they need to increase the gaming literacy of their staff if they’re going to be caretakers of these relics and create exhibits around them. And, of course, at the heart of it all, we need leadership that can understand that games are not just a gimmick. They’re not just for kids – about 40% of gamers in the US are over 35 by the way. We need leadership that can look at games as a serious investment in the future of museums and not as a cheap way to tap into a niche market.
- I’m going to throw out one more recommendation. Involve more universities. What I’m talking about needs a lot of talent, a lot of know how, a lot of evaluation, a lot of ideas. Universities are factories for this stuff. They’re natural resources sitting in the back yards of every museum – and many of these universities, maybe too many even, are creating game design programs the same time that we are. Let’s partner up and find ways to create something – anything – it doesn’t have to be the next Elder Scrolls. We’re looking for rapid creation because we’re already lagging behind.
- So we talked about games, about narrative, about collections, and about this concept of a narrative game-based museum. I hope you can see that I’m not talking about games for the sake of games here. There is a very real need to be able to marry games and narrative because the result of that union is the basis for effectively leveraging our digital collections. Things will need to change. But it doesn’t have to be scary. We don’t have to shutter our doors and switch to being digitally exclusive. We can take this a step at a time. So long as we recognize our responsibility to tell the stories of our digital collections.
- Thank you again for coming. I have time for a few questions. And before I forget I did want to say again to please feel free to contact me on twitter at any time. And if you’re in DC please feel free to stop by and say hi.