I had a great time in York on Tuesday evenings. It was a lovely audience with plenty of comments and questions afterwards. And it was international with people watching from the States (and maybe elsewhere) via Google Hangouts. And then afterwards on to the pub, where the conversation continued with the likes of Nigel Walter, Don Henson (member of the National Trust’s learning panel) and gamingarcheo herself Tara Copplestone, over delicious pints of Thwaits Nutty Black. (The bit in the pub wasn’t livestreamed.)
The advantage of being on Google Hangouts is that all my stumbles, stutters leafing through notes, umms and errs and slideshow reversals are recorded for ever on YouTube’s massive server farms. If you missed it, you can enjoy it now:
The sound is out for the first minute but fear not, it’s not delivered entirely in the medium of mime. This is (approximately) what I said between Sara’s introduction and when the sound kicks in:
I’m going to keep this story simple, and tell it in three parts – the beginning, the middle and the end. In the beginning I’m going to explain why heritage professionals should be interested in digital computer games.In the second part, I’m going to explain why they shouldn’t. And finally I’m going to explore the state of madness to which this dichotomy has driven me.
The Interpretation Game 
[…] course, over the last couple of weeks, as I’ve been further developing the responsive interpretation experiment I’d like to do, I’ve realized that it is in its own small way, all about […]
[…] A phone regularly sends out a little signal that says “I’m this phone and I’m here.” Recent developments in Bluetooth LE only add granularity to that message. It only take’s the visitor’s consent and the site’s IT infrastructure to turn the signal into “I’m this visitor, and this is where I’ve been.” And that information enables the site to be far more responsive, relevant, to understand the visitor’s interests, to make connections with what they’ve already seen, to tell better stories. […]
[…] it might even form the basis for a more responsive museum environment, as I described when I was last at York. But we’ll leave that idea until Heritage Jam […]
[…] A phone regularly sends out a little signal that says “I’m this phone and I’m here.” Recent developments in Bluetooth LE only add granularity to that message. It only take’s the visitor’s consent and the site’s IT infrastructure to turn the signal into “I’m this visitor, and this is where I’ve been.” And that information enables the site to be far more responsive, relevant, to understand the visitor’s interests, to make connections with what they’ve already seen, to tell better stories. […]