Entries are interactive activities that are educational and entertaining, and may involve competition or role playing.
Jury Chair: Bruce Falk
Contracting Officer, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC
HONORABLE MENTION: t.a.g.
Open Museum
Judges said: T.A.G. is, as its acronym suggests, a social interaction game at heart which has the capability of engaging an ever-increasing circle of participants at the same time it encourages deeper engagement with museum collections as a whole. Players are prompted to consider both the visual and conceptual correspondence between individual and among groups of images and then vote on those they find most suitable in an ever-increasing chain of relationships. As such, the game can be engaged at anywhere from a superficial level to a highly intellectual one, and contributors will find themselves prompted to return each time a game round is updated with newly posted comments or entries.
Even for those who do not actively participate as contributors, the simple acts of voting and even passive viewing requires thought about how an ever-growing collection of images interrelates. We believe that this in turn poses some grand questions about museums—what they are, what they collect, and who curates them.
Producers said: The Association Game is an non-verbal educational game for grownups. Everyone is welcome, but the detailed game play is visible only to registered members of Open Museum. Registration is free and open to all at www.openmuseum.org.
We think just watching t.a.g. and rating the images will help improve your visual skills, but actually playing the game will really stretch your neurons.
The game starts with a picture chosen more or less at random from the Open Museum collection. Participants reply with an image that resembles, reminds them of, or is associated with the original image in some way. Viewers vote for the images that they consider the best successor to the original. The highest rated image then becomes the starting image for the next round. The result is a sequence of images each of which is related to the one before. The game ends if the series comes full circle or reaches an otherwise obvious ending point.
There are three rounds a week with an average of 15 images submitted for each round. The game had 1000 visits in April from 2010.
To play the game, visit www.opemuseum.org and choose PLAY from the main menu.
Jurors:
Nancy Pope, Curator, Smithsonian National Postal Museum
Phil Gillman, Interactive Creative Director, Kastner & Partners
Georgina Bath Goodlander, Interpretive Programs Manager, Luce Foundation Center, Smithsonian American Art Museum
Layla Masri, President, Bean Creative
Jay Zaveri, Producer, FutureThought.TV
Vicki Portway, Web Director, Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum
Silvia Lovato, Director, PBS KIDS GO! Interactive
Carol Fiertz, Chief, Outreach Technologies, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
Nathan Smith, Business Development, Wall-to-Wall Studios
