Comparing a Serious Game for Promoting Museum Visitors’ Engagement and the Traditional Guided Museum Visit
摘要
Aventura Marina is a serious game designed to promote visitor engagement with the Sea Hall exhibition at the Caracol Museum of Sciences, a Mexican museum in northwest Mexico. To create Aventura Marina, we followed a user-centered design approach based on the design thinking methodology, encompassing five stages: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and evaluate. We went through three iterations of the Design Thinking Methodology. This book chapter presents the third iteration of Aventura Marina. We conducted an evaluation study to examine how Aventura Marina can promote museum visitor engagement compared to a traditional guided museum visit. We employed a between-subjects research design; ten museum visitors experienced the Sea Hall Exhibition through a guided visit (control group/no technology), while another ten visitors engaged with the Sea Hall Exhibition using the Aventura Marina game (experimental group). We assessed engagement through the Museum Experience Scale (MES), a pre-post-visit questionnaire covering themes included in the Sea Hall exhibition, and a brief exit interview. We also evaluated the game experience using the Game Experience Questionnaire (GEQ) for the experimental group. Although the results did not indicate a statistically significant difference between the two conditions, the results of the qualitative analysis revealed intriguing findings regarding how serious games can promote the visitor experience in museums.