21st Century Skills, Museum Literacy, and Enjoyment in Museums: An exploratory summative evaluation of PHEON at the Smithsonian American Art Museum

The Luce Foundation Center (LFC) of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (hereafter, American Art or the Museum) ran an alternate reality game (ARG) titled PHEON (http://pheon.org/, http://apps.facebook.com/playpheon/register/) from September 2010 through August 2011. The game built upon the success of the Museum's previous ARG, Ghosts of a Chance (GOAC; http://ghostsofachance.com/; Goodlander, 2009), and was intended to increase familiarity with the Museum's collections, programs, and resources; highlight connections between the Museum and its collections with peoples' lives; and attract new audiences. There were two versions of the game. One version could be played online through a Facebook application. The other was an adaptation of the Facebook game for use in the Museum as a multimedia scavenger hunt. This report focuses on the in-museum version of the game. To play PHEON in the Museum, visitors arrived on selected days throughout the year or set up a private appointment. Players received a game card of clues and used a text messaging system with their personal mobile devices to complete the missions throughout the Museum. Despite an established audience of GOAC players, PHEON struggled to attract participants. The in-museum game enjoyed reasonable attendance, with 802 people participating in 29 events over the year (this number includes public events and private events by appointment up through the months of the evaluation). These numbers were significantly lower than the ones seen during GOAC, which boasted 2,760 participants over two years and 1,444 players in the first twelve months of the game. This report presents findings from an exploratory summative evaluation of the in-museum version of PHEON conducted from May to August 2011. This study used a combination of qualitative observations and follow-up interviews (k=15 groups) in the Museum along with a web-based questionnaire (n=36) for individuals who played the game prior to the evaluation period. Participants reported and were observed exhibiting a number of positive outcomes including 21st century skills, museum literacy, and overall satisfaction and enjoyment. The appendix of this report includes the observation protocol and survey used in the study.