Video Games – The Great Connector: behind the scenes on (one of) my proudest achievements

Those who know my work over these past three decades know that my professional work contains multitudes: youth development, racial and gender equity, informal learning, digital learning, games-based learning, experience design, museum design, writing, and evidence-based decision making.

I am so grateful that my work usually addresses at least one of these interests. Sometimes, when I am lucky, my work addresses more than one. My most recent project – doing research for, building a team to create, then project leading the development of Video Games: The Great Connector – spoke to ALL of my interests, at once! What a dream project. When it launched this weekend I was struck by how much it represents so much of the work I want to do in the world, as well as HOW I want to do that work. And I couldn’t be more proud of how it all turned out.

In this post I wanted to go behind the scenes to share some of the key decisions and pivot points that brought this exhibit to life. But first, to ground it, I’ll describe the end of the story, the exhibit itself.

THE EXHIBIT

Let’s start at the end. A few minutes before we opened to the public, I took this quick video (now speed up) to narrate an overview.

If you prefer to read the overview: Video Games: The Great Connector is a new pop-up exhibit in Harlem that centers youth and their experience of games while focusing on the topic of connections and the theme of racial equity and making game design practices visible. It is running from Feb 3 – Mar 30, 2024. Timed-tickets to 90 minute sessions are free.

It’s designed in three section: Connecting with Self asks visitors: How do you use games to be who you want to be in the world? It begins by exploring game characters – both those made by game designers and ones created by players through tools provided. It maps a path towards inclusion within character building tools and a wall of characters designed by NYC teens and visitors. It asks: What choices do YOU make when creating your own avatar?

Moving from identity formation to skill building, the second half of Connecting with Self asks: What are you trying to learn through the games you play? It uses holograms, video interviews, panels, and games to explore how youth use games to develop new knowledge and skill and how all well-designed games contain good learning principles.

Connecting with self ends with asking: How do you use video games to manage your emotions? Using fridge magnets, of course, to encourage discussion. There is also a section of how youth navigate game spaces through speedrunning.

The second section, Connecting with Community, asks: How do games connect you with others and the world around you.

It features games curated by Games For Change, a game simulation of the social places we play with others, and an interactive map of NYC’s game communities. Its centerpiece game highlights how game can be designed to build social connections.

Finally, Connecting with Future asks: How can your interests lead you into a career in the gaming industry? It features games that are still unreleased, with games designers appearing weekly in the exhibit, videos featuring local game experts sharing how diverse interests from their youth led them into the field, and offers a career aptitude test that suggests a personalized pathway. Visitors are then invited to embody that role at one of many selfie stations, creating a photo at a NYC-based game collective, decorated with stickers that signal your imagined role there.

Say hi to Mile Morales from the Spiderman 2 video game and then, before you leave, take a photo with the giant switch.

FIRST PIVOT: FROM EXHIBIT TO RESEARCH

My involvement with this project began in December 2020, just a few months into the pandemic. When I was at AMNH, I worked closely with Susan Perkins, a Museum scientist, to develop board and digital games around exhibit content. When she left to become the Dean of Science at the City College of New York (CCNY), I was not surprised when she introduced me to other CCNY-affiliated people who were also interested in the power of games to engage youth.

These individuals were Stan Altman and Brian Schwartz. Together, they founded SAENY and their Harlem Gallery of Science. Associated with the CUNY system, they created projects to bring Black and Latinx youth into engineering studies within the public college system. One approach had been through creating local, pop-up exhibits. Previously, they told me, they had done one on the science of music and the science of basketball.

Now, they wanted me to know, they were ready for their next one: the science of games.

This is when the first pivot occurred. First, I helped them to understand that an in-person exhibit might not be the best model for reaching NYC school students during the height of the pandemic. Second, I helped them to understand that before taking on such a project, they should inform it with a research project that delved into the knowledge and experience of their intended audiences: NYC youth (both high school and college) and their teachers.

So, they hired me. Over the next six months I did research. Interviews. Surveys. Focus groups. I worked with Genesis Espinal, a college student at CCNY who was also a graduate of Urban Arts gaming programs, to run a youth program (over Discord), once a week for four weeks, with youth at Urban Arts.

The first line of inquiry was to understand the relationship between video and tabletop games and area high school students (West Harlem, Upper Manhattan, and the South Bronx). Games of interest include both tabletop (e.g. Chess, dominos, Uno, Yu-Gi-Oh) and digital (e.g. Fortnite, Minecraft) games.

The second line of inquiry was to understand how to connect youth interest with CCNY opportunities while advancing CCNY’s ability to leverage gaming opportunities. These could be seen as two sides of the same coin – what youth need to gravitate towards CCNY and what CCNY needs to have in place to keep them there once they arrive.

The third line of inquiry was to advance game-related programming at the Harlem Gallery of Science.

In the end, the frame had been shifted: from engineering to all academic topics, and from what games could do for youth (inspire them to go to college) to what youth actively do with games (shaping their identity and advancing towards career goals).

SECOND PIVOT: FROM RESEARCH TO GAMING PATHWAY

What also shifted was the next step: from an exhibit on games to a new pathway for NYC’s Black and Latinx youth to enter the gaming industry through a new partnership between high school programs (organized by Urban Arts), CUNY schools (centered at CCNY), and NYC’s AAA and indie gaming developers. Millions of dollars came in to fund Gaming Pathways, a new public option for a career in gaming. I stayed involved in multiple ways, such as producing monthly events and developing the communications strategy.

THIRD PIVOT: FROM PATHWAYS TO EXHIBIT

Fast forward to December 2022, two years after I first got involved with Harlem Gallery of Science. The Gaming Pathways was up and running. Schools had returned to making in-person field trips. Maybe it was time to revisit the idea of an exhibit on games.

I put my hat in the ring and asked to build a team to take on this modest but audacious project. Game on!

As a raised-upper middle class, cis-gender male, white Jew, I knew I did not want to lead a project in Harlem, for Black and Latinx teens, about their relationship with video games, if I could not do it with a diverse team that was skilled, talented, and could understand in ways I never could the needs and perspective of our audience and the exhibit topic.

The first person I reached out to was Nick Martinez, whom I worked with for six years at AMNH. Professionally, he ran the youth mentorship programs at the Museum in which high school and college students interacted with the public; that regular and deep connection with today’s teens was invaluable. We had also worked together on many projects so I knew he could both keep up with my crazy ideas and unexpected iterations while not hesitating to share his own ideas and let me know when mine were off. And personally, he loves video games. Together we would build the rest of the team.

I had volunteered as a reviewer at the annual showcase for the students in the Fashion Institute of Technology’s museum design program, where I learned about Marlyka Williams. Impressed by her work, we invited her to join the team. Nick knew of an exhibit designer, and he came on board to lead the design team, with Lyka’s support. Finally, Ashlyn Sparrow is the Senior Research Associate at the Weston Game Lab at University of Chicago. I had invited her to present with me at conferences – showing how her work with teens and ours in NYC through Gaming Pathways provided models for universities to engage local youth with games. At first she came on as a special advisor, but there was no holding her back. Before long she joined Nick and I as the third curator.

Once the team was organized, we needed a process. There was only enough funding to produce an interpretive plan along with assets for promoting it to raise the closing funds. We decided to created visitor personas, do comp research (analyzing all relevant game exhibits over the past few decades), and create three advisories to guide our ideations. One was composed of local high school students, one of local community leaders, and one of local gaming experts (in game design, academic gaming programs, and such).

In March of 2023, with the team and plan in place, we had six months to develop the interpretive plan.

FOURTH PIVOT: FOCUSING THE EXHIBIT

Working on our personas and video game exhibit comps, we developed many ideas. Working with the three advisories, we refined those ideas.

Together we developed exhibit goals and design values. When it came to topics, four themes emerged:

• How games are used by players to form a wide array of connections (which we called The Great Connector; remarkably, the term stuck and became the name of the exhibit, requiring no further revisions).
• Making visible the invisible design of video games
• Gaming culture and identity formation was another topic, as was social advocacy through game design.

Ultimately, among the four, what interested the teen advisors the most was the topic of connections, with the theme of invisible design and racial equity threaded throughout. The two adult advisories decided to follow the lead of the youth, helped us to refine the idea and bring in new resources, and we were off and running.

We split the exhibit into its three sections (three types of connections), ideated museum experiences that would be compelling to youth, and, in the end, delivered an interpretive plan that excited the Harlem Gallery of Science.

During all this time we found a great host for the exhibit, The Harlem School of the Arts. Founded in 1964, this historic institution was both a fantastic location (blocks away from the CCNY campus and an express subway station) and the perfect institution (an after school arts organization interested in expanding into game design). A contract was signed with a February 3rd opening date.

The clock was ticking.

Now all they had to happen was for the Harlem Gallery of Science to raise the funds, and with enough time left for us to still build it.

FIFTH PIVOT: BUILD IT

Within a week of delivering the interpretative plan, the funds were in! We now had around 20 weeks to get from concept documents to fully realized, installed, and staffed exhibit. This period was full of many small pivots as ideas hit reality. The reality of budget – could we afford it? The realities of time – could we produce, or get a signed agreement, or develop that relationship in time? The realities of physics – could this idea actually fit in the space and still function? And the realities of iterative design – how many iterations can we run through before landing on a satisfying solution for each design challenge?

We had to get image permission from game fan artists and gaming museums, collect images from NYC youth, engage partners to curate and design sections, collect games and art assets from partnering designers, produce original interviews and edit them into exhibit videos (with HGS’ Brenna Robinson), and develop branding guidelines completed with logo and typeface designs. Throughout it all, we had to keep the client engaged, informed, and incorporate their feedback. We used Asana to coordinate 13 different workstreams as we moved fast and cheap.

Ash, Nick, and I each brought in different existing connections and networks that, together, defined the topography of the exhibit. Nick, for example, had the connection that led us to our host, The Harlem School of the Arts; Ash’s own work became the basis of the Player Characters: Behind the Design exhibit. I will leave it to them, should they choose, to share more about their own personal archeology. What follows is a map of how my personal history was translated into the exhibit (to make visible this often invisible aspect of exhibit design). Here are a few examples:

• Linguistic James Paul Gee revolutionized contemporary gaming studies. He is both a mentor and a friend. His work has been instrumental in my understanding of the potential of video games for social impact and learning for nearly two decades. It was an honor to get to bring his theories into the exhibit in the How Good Games Teach section.
• Gee inspired the GEE! Awards, run by my good friend David Gagnon to bring attention to Gee’s theories. Twice I have been a judge for their annual competition (and once reviewed a collection with Nick Martinez) so it was great to work with the Awards to identify past winners and contenders to include in our new exhibit, using it to put attention on these fantastic examples of good learning embedded within good game design.
• Many of the prompts in the exhibit, and their related activities, come directly from the educational experiences developed for and with our youth advisory at Urban Arts in the spring of 2021. How do you use games to be who you want to be in the world? How do you use video games to manage your emotions? This approach of centering youth (not “What do game do to you?” but rather “What do you do with games?”) first began there, eventually becoming the voice of the exhibit. The wording itself of these prompts was iterated from interview to interview in 2021 until we got it right — and then reused within the exhibit. Many of the exhibit activities – like the fridge magnets and avatar drawings – grew from the type of learning experiences we designed with and for that 2021 youth advisory that I led with Genesis.
• Games For Change drew from its own Awards to curate one section of the exhibit. I co-founded G4C twenty years ago (and won the first one in 2006). ‘Nuff said.
• We developed the idea of the Unreleased Games Arcade last year (we being Nick Fortugno, Meredith Summs, and myself) as part of my work developing events within Gaming Pathways. It was a two-hour festival of unreleased games where high school students played and provided feedback to local game designers. Nick, Ashlyn and I were excited to explore how to bring that to the exhibit itself – not just the games but the designers as well. Ashlyn led this part, along with HGS’ Masaya Heywood, recruiting local designers whose work will move through the exhibit, one week at a time, with new game designers on site every Saturday to connect with and mentor the visitors.
• We knew we wanted to teach visitors about the skills needed to enter specific areas of the gaming industry, but we lacked a model. At the Games For Change Festival last year a presenter from Canada shared an interactive model that looked perfect. I contacted him and he told me the name of the academics who developed it in Finland. I contacted them and they said it’s in an open sourced tool (Kumo) and we could do what we wanted with it. We then worked with two graduate students at CCNY (Cecilia Gamo and Suchi Sherpa – both in the Master’s in Branding + Integrated Communications program) to give them an opportunity to adapt that for the exhibit. Working under Ashlyn, they pivoted from KUMO to Typeform, themed it around a kitchen with recipes, and created the current exhibit. To refine the skill tree for our needs, we worked with the leads of gaming studies at both Hostos community college and CCNY to ensure the academic recommendations we’d present to visitors could be achieved through public colleges in NYC.
• For the Game Dev Cosplay selfie station we were never satisfied with the image of the game design studio we intended to hang as a backdrop on the wall. Within just a few days, I was able to reach out to Yiyi Zhang of GUMBO, a game design collective in Brooklyn, who went out of her way to take new photos that ended up fitting perfectly into the exhibit.

When I now look around the room, as a result, I see not only beautifully designed experiences but the vast social web connecting people and organizations that made it all possible (in such a short time, and on a modest budget).

Launch

We opened the exhibit on a Friday night, February 2nd, with an opening reception. Attendees heard from the podium about the importance of games and learning from such distinguish speakers as Pat Kaufman (Commissioner, NYC Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment), Mark Levine (Manhattan Borough President), Provost Tony Liss (City College of New York), and Michael Flanigan (Senior Associate, Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce). Sylvia Aguinaga also spoke, a game designer whose work is featured in the exhibit, having flown in from Los Angeles. Other people came in from Chicago, and Seattle, and Detroit, and Pittsburgh, determined not to miss the opening.  

In the weeks prior, we had frantically worked to both install the exhibit in time (with the heroic and skilled efforts of sadrud-Din shah) but also respond to the expected unexpected last minute challenges (a key team member getting sick a week before launch, installed panels crashing to the floor damaged hours before the opening, etc.)

When the speeches concluded, the guests filtered into the exhibit. The day prior, the exhibit still not fully installed, we welcomed around 3 dozen high school students to experience the space and provide feedback. It was our last chance before opening to get direct feedback from our primary audience about what was – and was not – working. Now people with name tags holding drinks were socializing, watching videos, reading panels, taking selfies, and playing games.

Thirty minutes passed the designated closing time we had to kick everyone out. The docents (CUNY college students) who we trained the day before to manage the exhibit, for their first time, turned off the exhibit and prepared it for the public opening the next day. Throughout I was holding the remote that controls the three overhead projectors sending games to the three center screens. At the end of the night, before we turned off the lights, I handed that remote over to Matthew Lopez from HGS who is part of their team overseeing the docents.

“This is a baton,” I said. “I am passing it on to you.”