Game Lab Mini-Exhibition

Currently at Exploratorium

Game Lab is a mini-exhibition at the Exploratorium in San Francisco about cooperation that offers visitors a set of engaging educational group experiences. Data is tracked about how visitors play (with consent) and is then given to scientists for research.

Game Lab was the designed outcome of a larger project officially entitled: Exhibit-Based Public Participation in Social Science Research. This work is supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant No. 1811043) in collaboration with university research scientists.

GOAL:
The overall goal was to track visitors' data as they played two different group games about cooperation. The data needed to be stored in a database and accessible to collaborating scientists. Visitors can also learn how they played compared to others, and why scientists study their data.

PROCESS:
The phase of work for me was to unify an experience that already had several prototyped parts. The games had previously been created and there was a way to visualize the data they collected. Now, we needed to collect demographics and assign RFID tags to visitors. Work the RFID tag swiping into the games to track player actions, and store all the data across the network.

I collaborated with the co-workers who originally created these games to engineer the physical RFID tag readers into the games' code. I focused on the new elements: a kiosk to distribute tags and collect demos, an exit kiosk that shows the data visualization and the database network. Gameplay data and visitor demographics data come together at the final interactive data vizualization kiosk where visitors can see how they played compares to others.

OUTCOME:
With its own corner of the museum, GameLab visitors start at the first inviting kiosk where tags are distributed and the visitor is walked through a series of questions collecting zip code, age, consent, etc. Proceeding to game play, each visitor action is tracked, at two different group play exhibits called Survival Game and Freeloader. The games are designed to illuminate players' willingness to share and cooperate among team members.