New column in Metropolis M: Museum Manager 2011

Inspired by the computer game Football Manager, in which you are the trainer of a top football club, Juha van ’t Zelfde dreams of the game Museum Manager, in which you get to run a top museum.

Museum Manager 2010, the precursor of Museum Manager 2011

It will have been in 1995 that I managed to get my hands on my first copy of Championship Manager 2. CM2 was a computer game in which you could be manager of any of the big (and small) teams in the English, Spanish and Italian football competitions. The first edition appeared in 1992, and by the time its name was changed to Football Manager (FM) in 2005, the game had grown to become the ultimate sport management game, with football competitions and associated players from every continent.

You begin the game by creating a profile and selecting a team from one of the world’s many football leagues. Let us, for example, take FC Barcelona, the most successful team in 2009, with such famous players as Lionel Messi, Thierry Henry and Zlatan Ibrahimovic. When you make up your profile, you are asked to do more than just fill in your name and age. You also make a choice about how you join the team as a manager: as a former worldclass player (a Rijkaard type), a successful manager (a Van Gaal type), or as an unknown rookie with no experience at all (a Van ’t Zelfde type). Let us begin as an unknown trainer: Juha van ’t Zelfde, 30 years old, half Dutch, half Finnish.

The next step is that you are welcomed to the team by Chairman Joan Laporta, Johan Cruijff’s famous friend. On behalf of the Board, Laporta expresses their faith in your appointment and their expectation that you will make their team the champions. With the likes of Messi, Henry and Ibrahimovic in your selection, this of course has to be possible, but should you need a little extra support, you have a transfer budget of €15 million at your disposal. Barcelona has a stadium that seats 98,000 spectators, world-class training facilities, state-of-the-art training for young players and a total budget of €664 million. You also have a staff, including an assistant-manager, coaches, youth coaches, physios and scouts. In short, everything is just as it is in real life, and you feel responsible for the future of the team.

What makes the experience of playing FM so exceptional is the dizzying array of statistics and data that come your way. Players have more than 30 different characteristics, divided into technical, mental and physical qualities that are valued by a number from 1 to 20. The lightweight World Footballer of the Year, Lionel Messi, for example, scores 20 for flair and technique, but only 9 for strength and 10 for aggressiveness. The managers, trainers and scouts also have statistics to chart their qualities. All of these figures fluctuate. They can go up or down, depending on how you deal with the players, how you employ your staff, the shape you give to the training, which tactics you use in the games, whether you win the games, how you respond to the press and how the public responds to you. If you improve, the players improve, and vice versa. The result of all this is that you really get the feeling that you are leading the team, that your choices are deciding factors in the club’s success.

After this, football is never the same again. The first time you go watch a real football game, you see it all through the eyes of an FM manager. Worse, you want the real managers to play FM as well, so that they too can make their clubs better.
When I recently played Football Manager 2010, it occurred to me how wonderful it would be to translate this to the museum world, so that you could become manager of the Tate Modern, or to bring it closer to home, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Alexander Ribbink would welcome you, express his faith in you and entrust the collection, the museum building and the staff to you. At the same time, he would make a budget available that you could use as you see fit. Suddenly, you would have to choose between purchasing a new work by Olafur Eliasson, appointing a new head of marketing, or developing the museum’s strategy in the field of Internet and new media. That new work of Eliasson’s is expensive, but it would bring in new visitors and generate a lot of international attention. A new head of marketing could mean an in-depth investment for the organization and make all of the museum’s departments more transparent. The online strategy would make the museum more approachable and accessible, but it would consume a great deal of time and require considerable external (and expensive) expertise.

Just as in FM, Museum Manager – which is of course what this game would be called – would let you begin with a smaller organisation and work your way up to the higher ‘divisions’. In the footsteps of Willem Sandberg, you could make the Stedelijk a unique museum with an exceptional collection that is squarely in the middle of society and actively seek collaborations with other disciplines. This would have consequences for relationships with the city, sponsors and other partners. If you are a success, New York’s MoMA will ask you to become manager of their museum, just as happens in the football world. Suddenly, you are in charge of an immense collection and astronomical budgets and have an international network of experts at your fingertips. But you are expected to produce results. Can you handle the pressure?

I cannot wait to play Museum Manager. Then, the first time I go back to visit a museum, I will observe it through the eyes of an MM manager. Moreover, I will want real museum managers to play MM, so they too can improve their museums.

Juha van ’t Zelfde is half Finnish, half DJ and half co-founder of Non-fiction, VURB and Viral Radio.

This article has been published in Dutch art magazine Metropolis M. It was translated from Dutch by Mari Shields. Follow Metropolis M on Twitter.

By Juha — Posted April 16, 2010 — 4,480 Comments

Museum Manager 2010

It must have been 1995 when I picked up my first copy of Championship Manager 2, the football management computer game. Much like games like Simcity and Flight Simulator, it proved to be a highly addictive and incredibly challenging simulation game. Being the manager of a club like Barcelona, Manchester United or AC Milan, you had great responsibilities: building up a balanced squad, improving training grounds with the money earned at the gates, and focussing on youth development when finances were tight. As the years passed by, the game went from buying Roberto Baggio and Marco van Basten to employing specialist coaches and scouts to better the club and motivate players to give it all. AI – as avid players lovingly call the game engine – adds incredible things to the game play, making it in my case much more fun to do than watching 90 minutes in a stadium or on the television.

Having recently rediscovered my interest (and addiction) for this immensely popular game (that has been renamed Football Manager), I started thinking about the possibility of translating the game directly to the museum domain. And thus the idea of Museum Manager 2010 was born. Wouldn’t it be great to become the manager of Tate or MoMA (or maybe the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris?) and think about a strategy to move the museum forward, just like you do with all the other simulation games like Football Manager and Simcity? Hiring the right curator for a new exhibition, or buying that masterpiece that will draw a crowd but forces you to invest in safety and maintenance that will drain your budget? Expanding overseas like the Guggenheim and Louvre, or forming a network with other small museums around the planet?

I would definitely play this game (and become addicted). Could this be an interesting approach to open up museums and learn from our current and future audiences? Could a game be a museum? Could a museum be a game? I hope to find out more while writing this article for the next Metropolis M next month.

(Disclaimer: I used the SEGA logo without their permission. Please don’t shoot me.)

By Juha — Posted January 5, 2010 — 10,004 Comments

New article in Metropolis M: Ubiquitous museum

Crisis in Darfur, a mapping initiative by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Crisis in Darfur, a mapping initiative by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

According to Wikipedia, the term ‘ubiquitous computing’ dates from 1988 and was first used by the American, Mark Weisner, when he was chief technologist at Xerox’s legendary Palo Alto Research Center. Ubiquitous computing refers to the omnipresence of the computer, a phenomenon now moved well beyond the desktop and fully incorporated into our portable functional objects. The best-known example is probably the iPhone, which has revolutionized the cellular telephone, altering it into a convenient little computer capable of ‘doing everything’. We can also think of the onboard automobile computers that keep track of tire pressure, fuel levels and the routes being driven. Computers that tell us what we should purchase have, of course, been a reality for some time (such as the Tamagotchi electronic pets, dating from 1996). We are, however, not so far advanced that we use our iPhones to communicate with our refrigerators, let alone our stomachs (something that those who call themselves transhumanists are all too happy to predict).

What we increasingly understand, however, is how we can make use of this technological development to make our collective heritage more visible and accessible. A few years ago, in the United States, the Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington began employing Google Earth and Google Maps to better inform their visitors of the history of the Holocaust and chart current-day threats of genocide, such as in Darfur, in Sudan. On the museum’s website, you can look through the lens of the museum as you travel Google Earth for an overview of international crisis spots. This project moreover came about in collaboration with the United Nations, Amnesty International and the international photography associations, making it more topical and up to date.

Another example of an institution using the Internet to reach beyond its walls is the Prado, in Madrid. The Prado also uses Google Earth as an instrument, but in contrast to the Holocaust Museum, it does not use the museum to zoom in on the world, but uses the world to zoom in on the museum. Google Earth is making it possible to look at works by Velazquez, Rubens and Rembrandt at a resolution of 4 billion pixels, or 14,000 MB (!), and to zoom in on details of masterpieces in ways that would never be possible in the museum itself.

In Amsterdam, a group of software developers have spent several months working with Narb, an iPhone application that allows museum visitors to take photographs and provide commentaries to the works they are viewing. This can then be shared via different social networks. It is relatively simple to create a personal route for yourself, or for someone else, and to share and compare it with friends and strangers. The advantages for the museums are manifold: works of art move beyond the walls of the institution, in more personal contexts, and are coupled with other works from different museums (not just locally or nationally, but soon, also internationally). A less evident, but socially and economically very interesting and pertinent advantage of this is that Narb allows museum visitors to express their own opinions about the works of art. The ‘app’ was introduced at the recent Rotterdam Museum Night and is now being further developed for a number of museums and art fairs. Its developers hope to be able to activate museums and involve them in the project, further enriching the database and making it more attractive for visitors and institutions alike.

These are only three examples of an expanding domain of new developments in the land of the museums. Each year, academics, developers and marketing experts meet at the Museums and the Web symposium in North America, to discuss the latest state of affairs, compare products and most of all, in the breaks between seminars and lectures, daydream about endless ‘museo-spheres’ with no walls, no opening hours and no entry fees.

This ubiquitous museum is coming ever closer. It will make it possible for museums, archival institutes and monuments to establish themselves as important links within the interwoven fabric of the Internet. A museum can be everywhere at all times, on your iPhone at the bus stop, in your hotel room in a foreign city, in that extra hour at home, sitting on your balcony. This is a world in which you can immerse yourself, an historical dimension that you can call on at will, a search engine with all the original documents that you could possibly ask for. It would be wonderful. For those who are horrified by the idea, who envision empty auditoriums, have no fear. This scenario is simply an extension of existing practice and will be found outside, around the museum, not in place of the museum. It offers alternative access to the ultimate encounter with the actual objects. It is a bit like the navigation system that assists you when you are driving a car. It could hardly be a bad move on the part of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum if they were to appoint the former CEO of Tom Tom as their new Chairman of the Board of Trustees.

This article was published in Metropolis M of June/July 2009.

By Juha — Posted June 9, 2009 — 2,528 Comments