Tag Archives: museums

Do “Anthropological Video Games” lead to anthropological learning?

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The New Yorker has a short article about several anthropological video games including “Guess My Race,” “The Cat and the Coup,” and “Sweatshop.”

A cluster of teen-agers gathered around a small table, and passersby could hear them exclaim, “Asian! Yeah, I knew it!” and “Aryan? That seems ridiculous.” They hovered over two iPads in the Grand Gallery of the Museum of Natural History during the Margaret Mead Film Festival, playing a game called “Guess My Race.” It was one of five video games in the Mead Arcade; the others included “The Cat and the Coup,” which traces the downfall of Iran’s first democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, and “Sweatshop,” in which you hire and fire workers for your loathsome factory.

Aiding the swarms of museum patrons who stopped to play were volunteers from Games for Change, a New York City-based nonprofit that encourages the development of what it calls “social-impact games.” (All of the games at the arcade are also available for free through the organization’s Web site.) I sat down at a laptop to try my hand at running a sweatshop. To a bouncy techno soundtrack, the boss floor manager, who keenly evoked Hitler, spewed insults and directions—”Lazybones! How are you today? Shh-h-h-h. I don’t care!”—and the orders started pouring in for shoes, shirts, hats, and bags…

In 1940, Margaret Mead created a card game along with her husband, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson. Called “Democracies and Dictators,” its cards contained instructions such as “Dictator! Crippled Industries: You have put your leading industrialists into concentration camps. (lose a card in 5).” Mead wrote that it was based on “the basic ideas that democracies and dictators play by different rules and work with different values.” She tried to sell the idea to Parker Brothers, but it was never produced for public consumption. The games on display at the Mead Arcade have been markedly more successful. “Sweatshop” had a million plays during its first three months, and “The Cat and the Coup” has received acclaim from gamers around the world—including one German reviewer who wrote that it is “like Monty Python being dropped in a bowl full of Persian kitsch.”…

But if games train players in the rules of culture, what happens when those rules become too complicated to follow, or, perhaps, obsolete? Settling down to play “Guess My Race,” the player looks at photographs of ten faces—no artifacts here, the subjects are familiarly modern. You choose from six possible races that vary widely from one round to the next—descriptions might be nationalities, skin colors, religions, or loaded epithets like “Illegal” or “East Coast.” The player might have to select from options that would seem to be simultaneously plausible (i.e., Asian versus Indonesian, or Black versus Caribbean) with answers that suggest race is self-defined, not regionally or ethnically determined.

And so the gamification of the world continues. I’m not surprised these games are featured at a museum; when recently visiting the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago for the first time in a few years, I was struck by the number of hands-on exhibits and games that allow one or two users to explore some dimension of science. It is interesting to see that these games have had so many downloads – people are either interested in the topics or there are a lot of gamers out there willing to trying a lot of things.

My biggest question about these games is whether players learn the intended lessons. As the article notes, games have been used and proposed for decades to teach players different lessons. We know, for example, that Monopoly is partly about capitalism. It seems to me that the crop of more recent Euro games, from Settlers of Catan on downward, tend to teach about what is needed to grow a community or society. Even new video games like Assassin’s Creed III are related to historical events. However, having played a lot of games over recent years, I wonder how much I’ve actually learned about anything as opposed to enjoyed competing. Is the point of the board game Agricola to teach me that Germans living in the 1600s needed a diverse base of multiple foodstuffs? Did the video game Civilization (II-IV) teach me something meaningful about how civilizations actually develop? I’m not sure.

Also, I have to ask: what would a sociological game look like?

Old New York law says each community must have a historian

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Strange laws that are still on the books are occasionally rediscovered and make headlines. For example, here is an interesting 93 year old law from New York:

Back in 1919, the New York state legislature mandated that every “city, town, or village” must have an official historian. It’s a regulation that’s unique among the 50 states, and basically unenforceable. Towns are not required to pay these record-keepers, who are appointed by a town mayor or manager. Municipalities that fail to find a volunteer are sent a strongly worded letter, but little else can be done.

But this law could tell us a lot about American culture and our quest to preserve and understand our own history:

The phenomenon of local historians came of age in the early days of the Industrial age. As Americans began populating “the frontier,” they struggled to define themselves and their role in the places they called home. “In the late 19th century, you see a local history rush,” says James Grossman, Executive Director of the American Historical Association.

This fascination with ourselves was fueled by commercial firms that drafted early town histories, books that resemble the Who’s Who franchise of today. For a couple of dollars, anyone could contribute a piece about their own place in the history of their town, be it the story of their family, their house, or their autobiography.

It was around this time that city historians also became part-time urban boosters. “Cities began using history as an economic asset,” Grossman says. Many early historians were “people who had relationships with commercial interests, trying to promote city growth.”

A couple of reasons are given here: Americans wanted to understand themselves and there was money to be made in this business of local history. This second reason would fit right in with the growth machine model of urban growth: local boosters, leaders, and businesspeople promote development in order to make more money.

One might wonder how much this boosterism affects the actual reporting and interpretation of history. I suspect it influences things quite a bit. This doesn’t necessarily mean a local historian gets the facts wrong but it is more about how the story is told and what parts of local history are revealed. I have read a lot of local history for research projects and several features of local histories stood out across communities:

1. The local histories are often most interested in big and exciting facts and less about day to day life in the community or how these big changes occurred. We might call this the “peak view” of history – you only see the highest or noteworthy points.

2. Tied to the first observation, these histories tend to report only positives about the community. The histories leave out some of the most formative elements about a community if it doesn’t paint the community in a positive light. For example, I’ve uncovered information about racial prejudice in action in some suburban communities but based on the “official” histories, you would never know there was even any tension.

3. It is suggested later in the article that local historians need some training before they are set loose to collect and tell local history. From what I have seen, many local historians got the job because they wanted it, not because they necessarily had qualifications. This person might have had a particular interest in the community and so had done a lot of research or perhaps they knew a lot of people in the community. This has changed somewhat in recent decades with the rise of museums and degrees regarding operating museums as there are now often “official” keepers of a community’s history.

Displaying human remains at museums

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Museums typically want to display historical items – but certain objects raise more concerns than others. One sociologist has highlighted how museums have reconsidered displaying human remains:

In a book published yesterday, Tiffany Jenkins, a sociologist, highlighted how uneasy museums are becoming when it comes to displaying human remains. Jenkins gave examples including the Museum of London, which removed bones showing the effects of rickets, and Manchester University Museum, which took the head of an iron-age human, Worsley Man, off display; in 2008, it briefly covered its mummies with sheets.

This can be a complicated issue. But I would guess that feelings regarding the display of human remains are a cultural phenomenon which differs from culture to culture. Typical American practices of dealing with remains (burial or cremation) differ from other cultures, both now and historically. And what is valid as museum material also is affected by cultural values and history.