Building Museum Games

ID: WMA2026_567

Track:

Drawing from FableVision Studios' Director of G.L.A.M. Innovation Kellian Adams Pletcher’s book “Building Museum Games” as a framework, this workshop will bridge the gap between museum professionals and game designers, providing strategies for creating engaging digital, analog, and digital/physical games for museums. Through a series of examples, templates, and activities, participants will learn a structured process of game design for public cultural spaces.

Session Information

Format: Half-day workshop (9:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.)

Uniqueness: Learn about museum game design from Kellian Adams Pletcher, creator of over 300 museum games, professional game designer, and the author of ‘Building Museum Games.’

Objectives:

Participants in this workshop will have a strong understanding of the landscape of games within the museum space. We will include some of the most impactful legacy games for museums as well as some of the most recent innovations in public games and play. 

Attendees will be able to:

• Identify goals, resources and restrictions that shape what kind of games and interactive content they have the ability to produce
• Understand more about the game production process including wireframes, playmaps and game design documentation 
• Work with fellow museum professionals to design a unique game for their institution!

We’ll touch on how to navigate departments and staff hierarchies, opportunities for games and play in museums, and sources of funding. We’ll work in groups to think about a museum’s unique design parameters. Participants should leave this workshop with an understanding of game design as well as a prototype idea for their own game.

Engagement: This workshop will begin with a survey of museum games, their types, and structures. We’ll form groups and work on how to identify design parameters, and then we’ll start to specify parameters within the institutions that the participants represent. We’ll imagine what kinds of games might fit these design parameters through creating our own games, and brainstorm what resources institutions would need to implement them. We’ll need tables, a projector and notecards.

Relationship to Theme:

Audience

Audiences: Events Planning Other Technology 

Professional Level: All levels 

Scalability: A key component of this workshop is learning how to identify your museum’s unique design parameters. The goal is to design something that can actually be built within the existing resources of your institution. This means that large museums might identify opportunities with larger budgets or spaces while smaller museums will find creative ways to capitalize on their close-knit communities or localized collections.

Participants