You are herebest practice
best practice
Levelling Up: Towards Best Practice in Evaluating Museum Games
Danny Birchall and Martha Henson Wellcome Trust; Alexandra Burch and Daniel Evans, Science Museum, UK; Kate Haley Goldman, National Center for Interactive Learning at the Space Science Center, USA
Abstract
Museums make games because games can provide compelling educational engagement with museum themes and content, and the market for games is enormous. Truly understanding whether games are achieving your goals requires evaluation. In this paper, we identify the kind of games that museums make and use case studies of our own casual games to look at the benefits and means of evaluation. Beginning by identifying different kinds of evaluation within the broad framework of formative and summative practices, we suggest ways to plan an evaluation strategy and set objectives for your game. We then look in detail at evaluation methods: paper and wireframe testing, play-testing, soft launching, Google Analytics, surveys, and analysing responses “in the wild.” While we draw on our own experience for examples of best practice, we recognize that this is an area in which everyone has a lot to learn, and we conclude by suggesting some tactics for sharing knowledge across the museums’ sector.
Levelling up: Towards best practice in evaluating museum games
Games, and game-like experiences, are becoming increasingly important to museums seeking to engage new audiences and to provide deeper engagement with existing audiences. Demonstrating the value of commissioning and producing games as a core activity of museums is imperative.
How to Evaluate Online Success – New action research with 24 institutions
How to measure and define the success of cultural websites and online services is a problem common to all parts of the cultural sector – museums, archives, galleries, arts organisations, libraries, publishers. Worse, funding agencies and government departments lack the expertise to offer guidelines or set standards.