I went to SFMOMA today to play their ArtGameLab games that I mentioned a couple of days ago.
Though I only actually played the Bedcannon Game, a fun scavenger hunt in the permanent gallery plus a hide-in-plain-sight installation and a pretty darned cool thing at the end that dispenses a prize. Android programmers may get excited at one point. It was an excuse to move through the museum with focus and purpose. (Though I didn't make the same mistake that I did at the Brooklyn Museum Game. After playing this game, I took time to wander around the museum in a relaxed museum-browsing way, not in a blindered gaming way. And at the end, I found Waldo! Which just goes to show something.)
Super Going also had some material in the ArtGameLab. It was cool, but didn't seem like as much fun as the online version of their game. So if I was first encountering them at SFMOMA, I might have been excited. But since I've already had a chance to try it out, I thought "A museum ain't such a great place to be creative" and moved on. (When I wrote about Super Going before, it probably sounded bleak and empty. But it's not! I took on one of the "dares". And though I don't know other people on the service, there's a community there. And someone awarded me some points, I leveled up, I had the whole gamified thing going on there for a bit. Which can be satisfying.)
There was one activity that just seemed like a stinker and two that seemed more fun to read about than to participate in. Of those, one was a sort of Art Jargon bingo by Sudhu Temari and Benjamin Carpenter. But you couldn't just mark squares if you heard someone using an art jargon term. You had to carry out a sort of mime gesture for that piece of jargon. The other was a kind of Interpretive Text Mad Libs. That might have been fun if I'd come to the museum with someone else. But as it was, I would have been filling in the Mad Lib while being able to see what I was filling in. That seemed like cheating; worse, it seemed like it would lead to something not-funny.
Anyhow, I recommend the Bedcannon game; and if the other games sound promising to you, then you might like them, too.
