Three different tasks announce themself in unison: a janitor is quitting due to lack of career progression; a dehumidifier has malfunctioned to disastrous results near a delicate display; a touring exhibition made bank and the school group who saw it were thrilled. Several clicks later, balance is restored, and I am beginning to hope – just hope – that soon, I will be able to think about actual exhibitions again, instead of putting out a steady flow of small but time-sensitive professional fires in my gorgeous but needy museum.
I’m Jini; I’m a curator at ACMI, Australia’s Museum of Screen Culture, where I specialise in video games. Most recently, I curated Honk! Untitled Goose Exhibition, an exhibition about the development and reception of House House’s Untitled Goose Game, and I’m currently working on a major videogame exhibition, which will open in (redacted) (watch this space).
But right now, I am not at work: I’m playing Two Point Museum. Like most arts workers, my work-life balance is absolutely warped, so instead of trying to wrangle exhibition content spreadsheets over the weekend, I thought I’d give myself a bit of a break – and do my job, but in a video game. As a treat.
Enter Two Point Museum: A management simulator where you build and manage museum exhibits. As the museum’s content curator (your formal title), you send helicopters full of experts across the known universe to retrieve exhibits from six different categories: Supernatural, Science, Space, Prehistory, Marine Life, and Botany.
You manage the museum’s budget; hire, fire and train staff; install snack machines, and design exhibitions around your displays to maximise visitors’ Buzz and Knowledge. It’s an ambitious task list – but as a professional curator, whose job definitely includes all of those things, I knew I would be up to the job.
As I committed myself to becoming the greatest video-game-curator-in-a-video-game to ever live – as a way to relax, obviously – I decided to apply the retrospective learning framework that I apply to exhibitions I have worked on: what worked, what didn’t, and what did I learn? Or in this case – what did Two Point Museum get right about how museums operate, what does it get wrong, and what can the game teach me about being a better curator?
Read: Two Point Museum review – A well-polished gem worthy of display
Lesson 0: Making Rock! Untitled Fossil Exhibition
As I embarked on this research project, I wanted to control for variables. I decided to recreate Honk! Untitled Goose Exhibition within Two Point Museum – the first venue in the exhibition’s no doubt long and glorious touring career.
There was a hurdle from the outset: video games are unfortunately not included as an exhibit type. While I would argue that the medium falls neatly into one of Two Point Museum’s existing categories (two, if you’re a Ben Drowned fan), like-for-like objects were hard to come by.
Nevertheless, I persevered: tenacity is a key curatorial skill. Inspired by a three dimensional dinosaur head decoration with the same vibe, if not the same species, as the large goose cutout at the opening of the exhibition, I decided to reskin: Rock! Untitled Fossil Exhibition was born. Replacing each goosey display with a fossil or interactive (more on that later) I more or less recreated the exhibition in-game, and watched a gaggle of digital visitors experience the show anew.
Lesson 1: Curators aren’t all that
The first lesson I learned from curating Rock! Untitled Fossil Exhibition, is that I am not an exhibition designer. My taste, my skill for communication? Solid. My spatial reasoning skills? Abysmal. Deplorable. Bordering on insane. I spent more hours than I care to admit rotating various decals to maximise buzz, my own buzz deteriorating faster than the visitors’ increased. Luckily for me, at my IRL job this is simply not my problem.
The remit of a curator in Two Point Museum is expansive – you exert your will over every employee in the building, from directing assistants to restock the gift shop, to choosing where every security camera is placed. One curator to rule them all, and in the darkness (or lux levels that vary depending on object sensitivity) bind them.
In practice, exhibition-making is a lot more collaborative. At ACMI, an exhibition curator’s job is to figure out what story the exhibition tells, and to secure the objects that tell that story. When you are curating a design exhibition, ‘object’ is often a slightly metaphorical term – it extends beyond standard museum fare like fossils, haunted dolls, and the trapped spirits of those who have passed beyond, to include digitally-born displays.
Fragments of code, animation cycles, screenshots and screen recordings all count as exhibition objects – one of Honk!’s key ‘objects’ was the Slapstick video essay – represented in Rock! Untitled Fossil Exhibition by a poltergeist room – which linked Untitled Goose Game’s comedy design to the history of slapstick film.
But creatively, object selection and storytelling are the only areas where the curator completely holds the reins. After selecting the displays, (and acquiring them via helicopter, Two Point Museum got that absolutely right), the curator’s role is to be the touchpoint for many different teams and creatives at the museum, each of whom contribute profoundly to what the exhibition will be.
Without Eleanor Reinets, the designer of Honk! Untitled Goose Exhibition, exhibition production manager Juliette Hanson, and a litany of AV technicians, visitor experience guides, marketing whizzes, and construction workers, Honk! would never have graduated from being a series of spreadsheets, emails and dreams, into a room full of people acquiring Buzz and Knowledge.
While I’m very flattered by Two Point Museum’s suggestion that curators are functionally the god-kings of the museum world, I’m also relieved that it isn’t true. Curators contribute (at least, we like to think we do) to the exhibition design process, but the designer is the creative force behind each show’s visual identity, layout, and ambience. As you may be able to tell from Rock! Untitled Fossil Exhibition, I can’t even tell my left from my right. Thanks to exhibition designers, I don’t have to learn.
Lesson 2: Interactive displays aren’t for dummies
In Two Point Museum, if you build a workshop and adequately train your janitorial staff, you can develop interactive displays which are thematically linked to your exhibitions. According to the game’s tutorial, this is because children don’t get Buzz or Knowledge from exhibits or info panels – in short, they hate exhibitions on principle, so we have to give them something to do instead. Interactive displays in Two Point Museum are large-scale, playful objects that typically have digital elements – from a seance simulator which bring your ghostly exhibits to (un)life, to a prehistoric playground.
Every ACMI exhibition includes interactive displays, which are designed and fabricated for each exhibition – but they’re not all digital or enormous, and we don’t include them because we think kids are dumb! In my experience, kids are some of the most engaged, inquisitive museum visitors. If you have ever had the honour of listening to a ten year old explain the history of homing pigeons, or the composition of their competitive Pokemon TCG deck, you will know first-hand that kids don’t have to be tricked into learning.
Instead, I think of interactive displays as a way to shift the power dynamic between the museum and the visitor. Where a piece of explanatory wall text might tell you about a concept, an interactive display can let you experience it first-hand. When they’re done well, interactive displays level the playing field between museum and visitor; we’re not handing down information from on high, we’re trying to create an environment where you can experience something new, and draw a conclusion for yourself.
The interactives of Two Point Museum are spectacular – but interactive displays don’t have to be huge and costly to be effective. In Honk! Untitled Goose Exhibition, we included honk buttons throughout the gallery; pressing them, visitors experienced the joy of being a little bit disruptive in a peaceful environment of the gallery, exactly as they would while honking in the game’s village. Concept experienced, rather than explained.
For Rock! Untitled Fossil Exhibition, I substituted the honk buttons for a Realisation Station – which has also had a pretty good uptake, but a honk button doesn’t cost $10k a pop, so I’m satisfied with my original choice.
What might count as an interactive display is also more diverse than the game suggests. The Cardiff Museum has a really great example of a very simple, analogue interactive next to some marble vases (image via reddit):
Much more engaging than a placard saying “DO NOT TOUCH, YOU PLEBEIAN” – right? Final takeaway: interactive displays are essential ingredients in museum exhibits, but they’re more varied than Two Point Museum would have you believe – and implemented for less condescending reasons!
Lesson 3: Snacking in the museum is a beautiful dream that can never be
It’s a difficult time to work in the arts; with the cost of living on the rise, visitors are understandably hesitant to fork out for a ticket to an exhibition. Rock! Untitled Fossil Exhibition solves this problem with a generous spread of Cheesy Gubbins machines. A trail of snack machines wind between different displays, selling treats on the go to hungry visitors, for slightly less generous prices.
This has been a roaring success; tummies, bins, and coin slots fill at a rapid clip, handily funding my next helicopter ride to the netherworld, retrieving ghosts for the next blockbuster exhibition. Classic curator stuff. Despite the economic conditions the cultural sector finds itself grappling with, unfortunately this is not a trick I can take back to my day job.
Something you learn early when you start to work at a museum is that basically everything is desperate to break at every moment. Entropy is real as hell, and it is a museum’s (second) worst enemy; paper fades when exposed to light; the seams and textiles of a costume start to pull if they are hung or presented on mannequins for too long. Plastic is the worst; as plastic deteriorates, it releases gasses that speeds up the process of its own demise. The only way around it is to crack open the display case every few months to let the gas out.
If entropy is my second worst enemy, public (museum) enemy number one is bugs. I worked on a costume last year where our exhibition registrar noticed moths in a warehouse while she was picking up the costumes – her immediate response was to put them in deep freeze for ten weeks. That’s not a metaphor; she literally froze the costumes for two months. Bugs are serious business; they can get into electronics, and eat through the textiles, paper, and wood, destroying display cases and objects alike.
Purely from an conservation perspective, there is no ideal way to do an exhibition; it would be best practice to keep everything in a temperature controlled, pitch-black vault. Luckily, our conservators graciously make concessions for the public good – but I’m not about to push my luck. As long as crumbs and bugs are allies, vending machines, cafeterias and coffee carts have to stay in their lane. Consummate snacker though I am, the rules forbidding eating in museums exist for a reason.
Lesson 4: Damn, exhibitions actually are just about buzz and knowledge, at the end of the day
When I started playing, I was amused but mortified by Two Point Museum’s reduction of the museum experience to only two metrics – surely there’s something ineffable, critical, even spiritual, that a good exhibition can impart, beyond Buzz and Knowledge? But the longer I played, the more I came around to this framework.
I guess it’s just a matter of lexicon – Walter Benjamin called it aura, Two Point Museum calls it Buzz. Fundamentally, museum workers want visitors to feel excited to be in the room, and intellectually and creatively nourished by being there. Buzz and Knowledge just about sums it up – and the game is a good reminder that they are not generated by displays alone.
Curators can typically be defensive when any part of the exhibition’s footprint is given over to things other than the displays themselves; we are professional cool-thing-choosers, of course we want all that space for all our cool things! But as Two Point Museum makes clear, it’s hard to really feel the buzz if you desperately need a wee, or you can’t find the exhibition in the first place.
While I might avoid the term buzz in my workplace for the sake of my colleague’s mental health, I’ll keep in mind that decor, clear signage, and appropriate proximity to coffee, contribute to the joy of an exhibition as much as the artefacts themselves, and it’s not the end of the world if you need to cut a display or two to make room.
Closing remarks
As the curator of both Honk! Untitled Goose Exhibition and Rock! Untitled Fossil Exhibition, I’m pleased to say that I love both my real job and my videogame job. If you are a Two Point Museum fan and considering a career as a curator, expect a little less creative control, a lot more collaboration, and a LOT more spreadsheets.
But while both Two Point Museum curation and IRL curation can be pretty admin-heavy at times, the experience of watching people engage with your work playfully, curiously and sincerely, just never gets old. Whether that’s an intergalactic amphibian visitor seeing a preserved frogborne nursery for the first time, or a kid explaining to her parents how to use a game controller, the buzz is off the charts.
In terms of takeaways for my professional practice, playing Two Point Museum was appropriately humbling – I can’t quite stay on top of my admin in the game or in real life, but most things still seemed to chug along regardless. It also reinforced my respect for our marketing, design, and visitor experience teams – something every curator could use.
But most of all, I think it’s time for ACMI to invest in a second helipad. The initial outlay is nothing to sneeze at, but doubling your exhibit retrieval capacity makes it so much easier to get your horde of cool things into the building. And at the end of the day… despite the many lessons Two Point Museum taught me… That’s really what being a curator is all about.
