Towards Game-Guided Exploration Systems for Self-Facilitated Exhibitions

Automated exhibition sites require facilitation and mediation beyond signage and text labels to guide and sustain user engagement throughout the visit. Museums and cultural heritage sites have a rich history of experimenting with games and playful experiences to enable curiosity and motivate users to explore and engage with the exhibition content, yet the challenge of selffacilitation in automated sites brings unexplored areas into both existing research and practices. Rapid technological advancements have further developed the digital frontier, placing context aware, mixed reality applications and game systems in the hands of a growing number of users. This offers a renewed interest in investigating facilitation in automated sites mediated through games that utilise emerging technologies. However, this optimistic view is tempered by our limited understanding of how to design exhibition games to support the user in self-facilitated situations. This paper introduces the Game-Guided Exploration Systems framework as a way to think and talk about games and playful experiences for facilitation and mediation in automated exhibitions. The framework is based on gaming schemas extracted from game literature (rules, play and context) supported by perspectives on facilitation and mediation. The paper illustrates this framework, which is derived from investigating existing game systems, theory and through the development of a game system designed to support self-facilitation through play and exploration.