TAGGLING GAME: LEARNING ABOUT CONTEMPORARY ART THROUGH GAME PLAY

Engaging museum visitors through game playing is an approach that has been used extensively by many museums and cultural institutions. Location-based games, facilitated by mobile technologies, have been already implemented in various museums, archaeological, historical, cultural, science, art galleries, etc. However a particularly hard case to implement playful activities with learning potential is that of museums of contemporary art. In this paper we describe "Taggling", a game designed for a Contemporary Art Museum, focusing in particular in the learning patterns observed in groups of visitors of the museum playing the game. Taggling is a kind of card sorting game where players are engaged in untangling a set of tags that describe different artworks so as each tag to be placed in the corresponding artwork. Based on two evaluation sessions, it was discovered that Taggling has the potential to successfully engage the players with the artworks. We consider this an important achievement, given the difficulty of engaging with contemporary art compared to traditional art.