Page 32 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014activities of our libraries and museums by creating experiences based on games is possible and has been demonstrated in the USA with cases such as Find The Future.Find The Future was the name given to a pioneering experience in the library field to revive the interest of the youngest public in the New York Public Library.The library created an experience based on games involving various missions combining the virtual world with its own facilities and inviting people to discover history through a hundred words included in its collection.Find The Future was launched in 2011 as part of the events to mark the library’s centenary with an event called Write All Night that took place in the Stephen A. Schwarzman building itself.It is precisely in a series of books published in the 1980s that we find the creation of these interactive experiences to encourage users to become involved with reading.The series of books Choose Your Own Adventure was created for a young readership and in them the reader can vary the course of the story by making choices that can be simple, sensible, reckless or dangerous, each of which leads to a different outcome.Narrated in the second person, the protagonist is the reader, this series of books captivated a public that was thought disinclined to reading. It was one of the most popular series of books for children and young readers in the 1980s and 1990s. More than 260 million books were sold and they were translated into more than 40 languages.With literature, without technology and with something as simple as being able to construct your own story, it was shown that participative experiences make it possible to develop the behaviour of, and even the habit of reading amongst, a public initially thought to be resistant to the idea.But what will happen if we make use of technology?TECHNOLOGY IN THE CREATION OF EXPERIENCESThe use of games in non‐game settings to stimulate people’s involvement is not really anything new. Neither is it technology, but rather the technique of creating a participative game experience in both contexts.Obviously games appeared in the history of humanity long before the advent of technology and it is true that it is possible to influence people’s behaviour or to educate them through gamesFive hundredplayers exploredthe buildingusing theirlaptopcomputers andmobile phonesto follow cluesabout original works and to collaboratively produce an account of personal histories about the future.The interaction of users in a virtual environment through a game system makes it possible to develop new kinds of behaviourAfter this event was launched, and since then, Find The Future has been played by people visiting the library but who want to do so in a different way, and through an experience that combines the use of their mobile phones.INTERACTIVE EXPERIENCES 1.0A large part of the success of gamification as a tool to encourage people to participate resides in transferring the users’ interaction to a virtual or imaginary environment with the impact of a game.AC/E WHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 3: GAMIFICATION, GENERATING COMMITMENT TO CULTURECURRENT PAGE...32