‘Museum escape’: A game to increase museum visibility

Abstract

A peripheral museum with a nevertheless important collection of ancient items, wished to increase its visibility and digital presence in order to become more known and attract new visitors. Among the different solutions designed and implemented, we also designed a series of games of different kinds (i.e. mini vs complex games) for different purposes, like profiling of potential visitors and advertising the venue in social media. Based on lessons learnt from physical games played at museums of the same type in the same region, we designed and implemented a museum escape game. The game is presented here, to provide implementation details regarding the concept, the game mechanics, the interface design, the technical details, as well as the game art. We conclude with primary user testing and future steps that include plans for creating museum escape games with different technologies, like augmented reality and virtual reality.