Exhibitions and Engagement

An exhibition, in the broad sense, is an arranged presentation and display of a selection of items, examples of exhibitions would be galleries and museums. However, with the spread of smartphones which can often distract some people when they’re not engaged with their surroundings, weather it is because nothing grabs their attention or mere personal disinterest.

There are several factors that can get interested people into going to exhibitions:

Interactivity

When someone obverses a work passively, their brain is generally less active and doesn’t take in much information but when they are interacting with a work, their brain is more active and takes in much more information.

            Interactivity varies between different forms of media; music has you listen to a song (which can be done actively or passively by whether you decide to pay attention to the aspects of like lyrics or the rhythm). Books require you to make an effort to read it so that your brain is at least moderately active. Films, depending on the genre, require varying degrees of passive and active viewing; for example, a superhero movie requires you to be passive in regards to suspending their disbelief in order to enjoy the film, but a documentary would need you to watch the film actively to absorb the information presented in it.

            Video games have the highest level of interactivity among all forms of media as you interact directly with the world and characters within the game. As with films, the level of interaction differs depending the genre, in Roleplaying Games (such as The Elder Scrolls series) it can as deep as creating your character’s physical appearance and choosing what they say to other characters, or in a game like The Stanley Parable it can be as simple as walking and occasionally pressing a button.

Accessibility

There are two types of accessibility; physical accessibility and knowledge accessibility. Physical accessibility means people are more likely to attend an event, such as exhibitions, if it is at a convenient location and they have practical means to get there. However this can be bypassed if the event organisers provide other methods for people to experience it, for example, livestreaming the event online.

            Knowledge accessibility is based around a person’s existing knowledge of a work and whether they need to know a bit of information about work or the creator, for example, a gallery advertises a special exhibit about Van Gogh, someone who knows about Van Gogh and his work might be interested in going to the event, where as someone who doesn’t know about Van Gogh may be less interested in going. A way to negate this is by providing information about works, their creators and, in some cases, their historic context not just in the exhibits themselves but also on any advertising for said exhibits.

Relevance

Relevance can affect a work’s appeal to the public or to specific people. A work’s importance can vary depending on the state of the our world, for example, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech still has relevant today as there is still a serious racism in the modern world.

More recent examples would be the many works based on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, ranging from books, films and TV series as the Troubles had an extremely large on people’s lives and its legacy is still felt today.

Video Games – A New Form of Exhibitions

Video games can be used a new platform of exhibitions, as mentioned above, they have a high interactivity which means the person playing them will take in more of the information presented to them. Exhibits can be converted into video game forms in interesting ways. A museum is a collection of items of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific significance; the intention of exhibiting these items is to educate the viewer about them. In the media of video games, the viewers can be taught in a more creative way by recreating the environments related to certain items, for example, instead of someone looking at Stone Age tools in a display case, a person can explore a virtually recreated Stone Age village in a game, seeing how historians believe people lived back then, the person playing would be able to would be watch villagers use tools and interact with them on some level. This can applied to different time periods and at different parts of the world.

            Examples of these types of games already exist, mostly in the form of educational games such as The Oregon Trail which is based the historical event of the same name.

However, games that don’t come under the category of being educational can still encourage people to learn about historical, cultural, political and other subjects through tangential learning: