Alex Moseley Interview
I spoke to Dr Alex Moseley – Head of Anglia Learning & Teaching at Anglia Ruskin University, previously Head of Curriculum Enhancement at the University of Leicester. I met Alex when I was doing my Museum Studies Masters at Leicester; the Digital Specialism cohort spent 2 days with Alex learning about Playful thinking and Play and Digital. Alex is involved in national and international thinking around pedagogy and playful learning. We talked about how he got into play and games, about game theory, museums and learning. I hope this converstation will help other emerging museum professionals too. Find out more about Alex and his work.
Sara – Hi Alex. Thank you for talking to me. I contacted you because I’m doing my AMA and one of my goals was to learn more about digital and games in museums. I thought of you when I was thinking of who to talk to – who is interested in this topic. You did 2 days of teaching with us when we were doing our Digital specialism at Leicester. I’m really interested in gaming and digital practice incorporated into museums. I work with older adults and people living with dementia and we use ideas of play and activities to engage people and reminisce together.
So, my questions would be – How did you come across gaming in learning and museums? And how did you figure out that that is what you are interested in?
Alex – I got interested in games from the education side rather than the museum side firstly. I’m an archaeologist and I used to teach first-year history courses. As I was teaching these modules, I realised that these first-year students are a bit like visitors to museums and these courses are like the threshold of the museum. You are suddenly in a space that’s unfamiliar to you and you have to work your way around and learn and understand new things. That is where students are during their first year and they often struggle with traditional university approaches. I got into games through a postcard that was in a Sunday newspaper. It was a puzzle, I solved it, went online to put the solution into the puzzle and it opened up an alternate reality game (Perplex City). They are the sort of games which operate with very easy-to-access media (a newspaper, emails, text messages, simple web pages). It offers easy entry; it’s all about how stories merge between the game and the real world, there is a blur effect. The puzzle card falling out of a newspaper is how the game works, you are doing something in the real world then suddenly the game interferes. And it just got very interesting; the people playing the game were really into the game, they were often solving detailed mathematical or historical questions collectively, as a community. I thought I would try to apply this to my course. This is what started me thinking of applying games to my teaching. I have done more exploring of alternate reality games and how to apply them to learning since then. I found that rewards are really good (when you get to certain levels – it could just be that you gain access to new information or could be a quick and minor reward like a badge) to show you that you are getting to a certain level. Feedback is instantaneous (if you are trying to solve a puzzle it will tell you straight away if it’s right or wrong). Working as part of a community towards the same goal (to solve a problem or puzzle) works really well as well.
At that time, I was also teaching heritage and museums with Ross Parry at the University of Leicester. I found out that one of the ex-Leicester graduates, Georgina Goodlander who then worked at MoMA, had run really impressive alternate reality games there. Also, at the Experimentarium in Copenhagen, they’d run a great alternate reality game in the museum. These inspired me to start work in this alternative reality space. I started getting involved with different museums, thinking through what they are doing, helping in some cases for them to design games based on the alternate reality approaches I have been working on. I started designing alternate reality games myself. I was involved in one for Cancer Research UK, we created an alternate reality game for them. I was also going to museum conferences and that’s when I started using cards and card games. Inspired by that, the Cambridge Museum service created a collectable card game across their different museum sites. They use the principles of playing, the human need to collect and make comparisons and also the idea that people like solving challenges that are quite closely related to their ability. It worked really well for them.
That’s how I got into working with museums. It’s all based on the basic principles starting with assuming that you need to induct people into what you are going to do within a museum space. Games are great because of the way they’re designed commercially. Designers want people to play and play more of their games, to buy the expansions and play the latest version. They are always making sure that the game is fun to play, engages and entertains people. I think learning and education in museums are the same; you need to start easy (like tutorials and games), need to give quick feedback on the progress early on (quick successes, quick answers, quick wins). Then you need to make sure the challenge level goes up through your playing, raising the challenge level over time. There is a really good theory called Flow Theory by Csikszentmihalyi, where the challenge level needs to meet the ability of the person.
I think it’s getting better now, but games in museums used to focus only on kids. I really like that you focus on adult learning with games. I’m working with people living with dementia and we do these little games and activities (not complicated) and it works well with them in our reminiscing sessions. Do you notice that games are becoming more popular with adults? Adults or intergenerational focused?
Yeah, definitely. And that’s my area of focus – games for adults. I draw on children’s ideas of play as that is where play develops. Very few people looked at play for adults, but it’s a growing area of interest. I was involved in a project a few years ago that was about playfulness at very old ages (elderly and retired people). We found that there is more play in those ages than in the 25 to 68 range. They were using things like the Wii for daily exercise, (Wii Board and Wii Fit) and they loved it. They loved doing these things and did it regularly. Increasing over the last 20 years since those early Facebook games and the rise of smartphones started to make casual games more popular. Casual games such as Farmville or Bejeweled (which led to the type of games such as Candy Crush) you can pick up and play for a few minutes in between doing work, a coffee break or on the train etc. These games became much more popular with a wider population. It has also gone up recently due to commuting or the pandemic. A popular pandemic game was Animal Crossing (simple, community feel, easy access, easy to play, little rewards). The popularity of these casual games is their simple access, easy to play, simple graphics, rewarding, and various challenge levels.
We (the playful learning team) did a game experiment at a conference; we designed games for a Digital Learning and Teaching Conference. We tried different levels of casual gaming and play across the conference to see how many people would be engaged with different things. One of them was during the evening meal, we put things on the tables that they could use to create a hat as a team. It was something to do between courses, easy to do, and a collective game. Everyone did this – simple tasks, you had the time to do it and had the materials and a prize for a table; we had 100 percent engagement. Then we had other things – when people registered, they were put in teams and could collect points for their teams by doing different things (positive conference behaviour tasks – asking useful questions, attending presentations, meeting new people). They added these stickers to their team’s giant robot and the robot with the most stickers would win a team prize at the end of the conference. We had about a third of the conference getting involved with this game. The collaborative nature, the easiness of the game and the prize were appealing to people. We also had spot challenges (particular games at specific times) when people had to come at a specific time someplace to do a challenge: far fewer people got involved in these. What we found is that if you make things simple and accessible to everybody, and give people time to do it, everyone will enjoy it, partake in it and get something out of it. As soon as you add any level of complexity that involves a bit more time and thinking or working with others, participation goes down dramatically. We use this in designing future experiences.
If you think about museums, it’s similar, you have people voluntarily coming to the museum or engaging in activities. It’s all about finding those experiences like in that conference. We need to think what’s the easy way or the invitation for them to play; how to make it easy to start; consider their time and skill level to do it. If they do, there might be an option to step up the level we offer. For some people, it will always be just that first step, but others might like a bit more involvement and complexity. This way of thinking is helpful to bring in a wide group of people over time.
Yes, I think so too. If I want to learn more about gaming with adults, where would you point me towards – people or groups or museums? Would you have any recommendations?
Yeah, there are quite a few museums working with games but often they are not very playful. They are interesting places but not necessarily leaders in how to play with people. A book I would really recommend is ‘Museums at Play’ by Museums etc – it’s got about 70 case studies of people who have done all sorts of different things in museums from card games, board games to alternate reality games. It’s a really good opportunity to read about a range of things and different approaches. MCG is the Museum Computer Group; they run play activities and think about play within museums occasionally. Another group I would suggest getting involved with is the Playful Learning Association. Its members include Higher Education practitioners and a lot of Museum Professionals focusing on adult learners. It’s a great place to start to ask questions and connect with others in the network. Both groups are free to join.
There is a growing amount of play literature on both theory and practice. To read, I would recommend the ‘Grasshopper’ by Bernard Suits as a good starting point on Play, and also Bernie De Koven’s book ‘The Well-Played Game’.
Any UK museums that you think are a great example for play?
The Wellcome Collection. They are an adult-focused museum and they have commissioned both digital and also physical games that they run in their exhibition spaces. They are entirely focused on play with adults and use playful design in their galleries too.
What you are doing sounds interesting, would you explain what you do?
I originally wanted to work with learning and children in a museum, but post-pandemic I applied to a range of jobs. In February I got the job I have now, I’m a Community Development Assistant at the Museum of Brands working with lifelong learners and people living with dementia. What’s great about this project is that we go out of the museum and offer Reminiscing Sessions with our memory boxes at Dementia day centres and care homes. We also train people on how we do our sessions so they can get a box and use it with their communities or families. For our sessions, we do an hour and we split it into half object handling, discussion and reminiscing (to see abilities, relationships, group dynamics) and half craft or activity (colouring, designing a brand, quiz, crossword). The activity depends on their interest and their abilities (we decide after the object handling) and they can win a candy by getting the answers right. The ‘design your own brand’ activity is really good because they can just colour if they have more advanced dementia, or just talk about it if they struggle to hold with their hands, but also can be a complex activity where they come up with a name, a design a slogan and think of brands and advertising designs.
I think where gaming and play come into this project is this part of the session; we would like to develop more downloadable resources and more session activities that offer to learn while playing. The museum is perfect for this as it has so much information about our lives (reminiscing, learning about business and design), so could offer the base for new games for both adults and children.
It sounds like a great platform. Something tangible is great to begin with as it starts to get people thinking and making associations. It is also a game as you are designing a brand (as a fun task). Storytelling is also great with older people and people living with dementia, as once you get them started on a particular story and with a visual aid, it starts to bring back memories and make connections.
Yeah, we do storytelling, and the objects are great to start a story or help people come up with something they know well and experienced many times like their daily routine or hot drink preferences etc. Some people are really creative in coming up with a story and following each other’s added storylines.
It sounds like you’re in the right place and job for your interest in play and learning. You just need to think things through, read case studies and bring in some examples into your job. It sounds like you do the easy, accessible first part of play with the object handling to start things off, and then you can layer on with the activities.
It’s great to have this step-by-step way of thinking of play and games to think our activities and ideas through. It can be applied to a variety of things we do. Thank you.
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