As museum educators, we know that learning is most effective when students feel like empowered participants in the learning process. Our goal is to provide a safe space where students can explore different roles, iterate on strategies, and fail safely with the chance to improve upon mistakes. Games can fulfill all of these requirements, while providing fun and structured entry ways into observing, interpreting, and responding to art. In this video, I'm going to demonstrate some specific games-based strategies for engaging with art. Before I do, I wanted to clear up some common misconceptions about games. Number one: Games aren't just for kids. Any well-designed game has the potential to appeal to both the young and old. In fact, I've seen grandparents having just as much fun playing the games I've helped design as their grandkids. Secondly, remember that when we talk about games, we're not necessarily talking about digital. A low-tech game can be just as engaging as an elaborate video gameâ and games have been analogue for most of human history. The games I'll be demonstrating involve nothing more your imagination and at most a pen and paper. Finally, games do not have to involve loads of content in order to be educational. Cramming games with factual content is a tactic some designers have used to prove the educational worth of their games. But today we're not interested in quizzing our players, nor getting them to regurgitate facts. We're interested in getting them to think creatively. The games we'll present today are as open to interpretation as the artworks they help students to engage with. Deep learning occurs when a student is personally invested in the subject matter. She takes risks, shows persistence, and seeks new challenges as her skills improve. Each cycle of failure and iteration means she is constructing a deeper level of understanding. This sounds a lot like to the types of behavior that game players exhibit. The pleasure of playing the game becomes its own "intrinsic" reward, even if no "extrinsic" or external rewards present themselves. They enter into an intently focused, nearly automatic state of mind that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes as a state of flow. By using games to teach about art, you are giving your students a way into this flow experience, potentially hooking them into a deeper and more personally rewarding relationship with the artworks. With time, this initial spark of curiosity may grow into a deeper and more extensive type of learning. All games have five basic elements. Goals are what the player must accomplish in order to win. Rules are the restrictions placed on every player of the game. Mechanics are the "verbs" of the game, or the actions that the players will take. Space is where the game takes place, or the game's general look and feel. Components are the pieces or objects that make up the game. If you change any of these elements, it will have an effect on the others. Modding, derived from the word modifying, is a term game designers use to describe the process of changing a game by altering one or more of the basic elements. Most games are in fact "mods" of other, more well-established games. As you watch the following demonstrations, think of which elements you might change to customize the game experience for your students. Exquisite Corpse is a collaborative poetry and drawing game invented in 1920s Paris by the artists and poets of the Surrealist movement. The game is played by several people, each of whom draws or writes on a sheet of paper, folds the paper to conceal their contribution, then passes it to the next player who does the same. To play the drawing variation, all players must agree ahead of time on a sequence of features for the jointly drawn creature. For example, head first, then torso, followed by arms, legs, feet and tail. Before creating a collaborative poem, all players must agree beforehand on a sentence structure, which determines the sequence by which words are written down. For example, "The adjective noun verb adverb the adjective noun." Whether written or drawn, the basic rule is that each participant remains unaware of what the others have written down. At the end, all players share the reward of seeing their surprising and often absurd creations. The Surrealists used the Exquisite Corpse as a generator for making new poetry and art. But I could also see using the game as an engine for generating creative responses to an already existing artwork. One mod you can try is to have your students base their words or drawings on details they see in an existing artwork, or even in their surrounding environment. With this mod, the game becomes a hook into the following skills: looking closely, analyzing and reflecting. Material Bingo is a game designed by MoMA educators to strengthen close-looking skills. As with all games, it can be played by kids or adults, and its highly visual nature makes is a natural for engaging people from a cross-section of cultures. The game is a "mod" of the more familiar Bingo board game. But instead of numbers, the bingo board displays an array of materials from which art can be made-- from the more familiar materials like canvas, oil paints, and woodâto more "unconventional" ones like plastic, dirt, and hair. Players explore the galleries, checking off the boxes as they encounter each new material. The first player to complete a row across, up, down or diagonally wins. In designing the game, one of the goals was simply to convey, with one glance, the vast possibilities for art-making materials in the world around us. Another goal was to create a game that could help transform any space into a game board. Finally, the game acts as a hook for slowing people down and getting them to look closely at the objects around them. There are a plethora of possibilities for modding your own version of the game. We could imagine using different shapes, shades of colors, or different visual motifs. Everyone's a Critic is a game of observation and persuasion designed by The Museum of Modern Art in collaboration with Institute of Play. The game was designed for use at MoMA, but can be easily be adapted for use in different spaces, and to engage with different types of collections. The rules of the game are simple. First, gather three or more people and assign roles. One person assumes the role of the Critic, and the rest of the players are Artists. The Critic chooses a Theme word from the list provided, or comes up with a new thematic word. Then, each Artist explores the gallery or classroom for one artwork or object that best exemplifies the theme. One by one, the Artists make their arguments to the Critic about why their choice best fits the theme. The Artist who impresses the Critic with the most convincing argument, wins. The mechanics of Everyone's A Critic are pretty simple, but in order to win, players must use a fairly complicated set of skills. Artists must use their powers of observation to construct an interpretation based on that sensory evidence, and present that argument in a persuasive and witty way. Critics use the same skills in evaluating and choosing the winning argument. You can download the original version of the game, or customize your own. I want to emphasize that for us the museum is our classroom, but that this and the rest of the games we present can be used in a variety of settings -- your classroom for instance, or even walking around your neighborhood. We invite you to make your own versions of any of the games, and to try them in different contexts.
