Between publicity and real cultural mediation, museums combine with video games

On January 4, the famous Prado Museum in Madrid announced the launch of a new initiative aimed at the 34 million Nintendo Switch game players. Animal Crossing: New Horizon. The principle of the game being to manage your island, the Prado museum now has its own, divided into four thematic areas, in connection with artists or currents, them, very real. A fifth area contains Goya’s famous house, Quinta del Sordo, whose painted walls are reproduced. Players can also scan QR codes to get museum artwork to place on their own islands, and the museum has also thought of those who haven’t. Animal Crossing, by offering them visits… on Youtube.

The association of two regularly opposed worlds, the so-called “popular” world of video games, often wrongly considered as a “young thing” – while the average age of players is 35 years – and the supposedly “elitist” museums, is a growing phenomenon. The goal? Trying to broaden the target audience of a museum, a major issue while the pandemic tends to weaken the links between museums and their visitors. The idea of ​​using Animal Crossing is also linked to the context of confinement: the Angers Museum of Natural Sciences had improvised visits to its island to maintain a link, however tenuous, with visitors.

Various experiments

Already, in 2012, the Louvre paved the way for the alliance between video games and museums, with the replacement of small tactile audio guides by Nintendo 3DS, which offer in addition to the classic function, geolocation in the museum and 3D visuals. of certain works, to discover them from new angles… at the risk of forgetting to look up. Quickly, museums and cultural institutions went further. Some are developing immersive and interactive virtual tours, such as the exhibition Videojuegos, las dos lados de la pantalla, from the Movistar Telephone Foundation in Mexico City, with an original 2D video game.

Others are launching video games as true artistic manifestos, such as the Center Pompidou with his game Prism 7 in 2020. A real reflection is then carried out on what is brought to the player, in terms of understanding of the artistic creation process, with a play on lights and colors in contemporary art. ” It is designed in such a way that it can be of interest to video game enthusiasts but also to people who are not die-hard gamers. It is really a very poetic exploration within the museum, while having quite subtle interactions with a gameplay interesting », Specifies Selma Toprak Denis, deputy director of the public at the Center Pompidou.

Coup de com ‘or new cultural mediation?

The phenomenon is therefore quite widespread, but the real question is whether museums and visitors can find a real interest in it. Here, opinions differ, especially concerning the type of strategy adopted by cultural institutions vis-à-vis video games. ” There are different strategies, and there is not a perfect one: all the institutions are starting to see that they will have to use digital technology, to hybridize, to reach a new audience. », Analyzes Luca Carruba, co-president of the Spanish association Arsgames which promotes and manages transversal citizen projects linked to video games and new technologies.

However, some strategies seem more durable than others. In particular that of the Center Pompidou: “ Prisme 7 at the Center Pompidou is a long-term project, which seems to me to intersect perfectly with the physical restructuring of its space, which should happen in 2024. There is a desire to develop a video game experience to reach a type of hybrid audience mixing on the one hand those who go to the museum and who will be interested in this experience, and on the other a new audience, who normally do not go to the museum. museum but who could be attracted by another type of language, especially in the health context. “

The Center Pompidou has notably developed a cultural mediation project centered around Prisme 7 in the colleges of Île-de-France. National Education thus supported the design of the project. ” The pupils can come and play during their breaks, and we do some work around the works. We have also made available educational sheets for teachers to explain the works that can be achieved by browsing the game and imagine educational developments such as in sport, physics, or plastic art, around this idea of ​​light. and colors », Specifies Selma Toprak Denis.

Conversely, the strategy developed by the Prado Museum with Animal Crossing seems less relevant. Interest in gambling, and even more so in the arrival of museums in this universe, is necessarily limited, in time and in the type of audience that is reached. The initiative therefore borders on the anecdotal for Luca Carruba. ” It’s very spectacular, but it has little effect on the ability to engage with and scale the audience. It is a strategy which targets an already acquired public, which in addition owns or is interested in Animal Crossing, to obtain a rapid profit in terms of image. But they don’t build a new, lasting audience. “

Bring together different audiences

The fact of using the private vector, namely a game license from Nintendo, thus sets aside part of the potential public who love video games… without having a Switch. Admittedly, the Prado museum provides videos of the game. But in this case, why not offer educational videos animated by original graphic designers rather than capture the animations ofAnimal Crossing, necessarily less suitable?

Those curious who do not have a Switch will therefore not be able to fully benefit from this new experience, even though the examples of open access initiatives with only a computer are multiplying. There is Prism 7, of course, but not only. The Science Museum in London is used to this: it has already released a video game to design its own lunar rover, and another for design your robot. Free and available on all phones, the goal is to get young and old to apply a scientific method. ” We tend to put the museum audience on one side, the video game audience on the other… We have to put in place cultural strategies to break down these barriers. (…) It is necessary to set up a constant dialogue with the audiences, to integrate the audiences already existing in these new strategies, without marginalizing and sectorizing each audience according to its point of interest. », Defends Luca Carruba. This requires in particular the greatest possible accessibility.

At a time when talking about ” metaverse »Is a seller, museums therefore try to exist virtually by using video games … at the risk of sometimes missing out on the true potential of these creators of social links.