Museum Memory (Google Arts & Culture)

Developed in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture and my friend Mary McKenzie, Museum Memory is designed to encourage players to observe and remember a layout of artworks, then recreate the positioning from memory. It’s a playful, silly take on noticing and appreciating curatorial compositions that utilizes the massive collection of artworks within the Google Arts & Culture collection.

In challenging players to carefully observe and remember how a gallery is arranged, Museum Memory hopes to encourage players to not only exercise their memory skills, but also perhaps consider how they might arrange things differently. While the actual situation of having to recreate a destroyed arrangement may feel absurd, the result is that players must acknowledge the grouping, spacing, and perhaps even the reasoning for the pieces’ placement in the first place.

I loved being able to explore how to encourage players to more closely engage with artworks during my time with Google Arts & Culture as a Game Designer In Residence with both Museum Memory and The Art Handler.