Earlier this year I started playing A Monster’s Expedition, a puzzle game wherein you play as a monster exploring a museum of humans and human artifacts. Your character encounters a variety of knick knacks which are easily recognized by players but are mysterious to the monsters. Each has a little readable sign which (mis)interprets the object for the monster visitor. For example, you might find a beach ball described as an egg from the inflatable flamingo species. The game pokes fun at the guesswork involved in museum research and how curators may claim to understand things which they do not. A Monster’s Expedition also demonstrates how a cultural outsider can be highly judgmental of the culture they claim expertise over. For example, the game begins by explaining that it is based on human museums which were shockingly indoors, but obviously monsters have much more practical outdoor exhibits. The game includes the joke that monsters believe they may have been indoors as an attempt to hide the stolen artifacts contained within them. A monster’s expedition points out this flaw of museums but (to my knowledge) never discusses where the monsters acquired their artifacts.
This judgmental start to the museum persists throughout the game and colors the experience. While these staples of bad curatorship are mostly used comedically in the game. They highlight a very real issue in museum scholarship and the public perception of museums as racist, out of date, and more concerned with projecting confidence and correctness than admitting ambiguity and searching for truth. I am not yet done the game so I cannot say whether A Monster’s Expedition will examine or critique these issues in more depth, but the game has started me thinking about these issues. It also got me thinking about the depiction of museums in other video games. The first game to jump into my mind was Animal Crossing: New Horizon, in which players can donate bugs, fish, fossils, and art that they find to a museum. The museum is one of the key attractions on players’ islands, as one of the few buildings aside from shops and houses. When you first donate any item to the museum, the curator, an owl named Blathers, will tell you a little bit about it. For example when presented with one of the games most common fish, the sea bass he says:
“Sea bass is a name given to a variety of different species of saltwater fish. They are a varied bunch with some as small as four inches and some as staggeringly ginormous as eight feet! ‘Sea bass’ is a bit pedestrian though. Many species have better names, such as ‘redbanded perch.’ Or the delightfully whimsical dusky grouper! Or the potato cod! WILL NO ONE THINK OF THE PINK MAOMAO?!”
Or with a little Blathers flair (and fear of bugs):
“Putrid pondskaters! They walk on water, you know…which is most preposterous! It is a trick they perform by secreting oil onto the hairs of their feet. To which I say BLEEECH! And one must wonder… What will they do next? Walk on air? Walk through walls? Perish the thought…”
These genuinely educational and amusing tidbits are perhaps the most interesting pieces of the Animal Crossing museum for me as a museum studies student; a moment when you learn a little more about our fellow creatures on this planet and may experience wonder at their miraculous existence. When the game first came out towards the beginning of the pandemic my then partner and I were long distance and facing the possibility of not seeing each other for months due to travel restrictions. We made up for this with dates at the Animal Crossing museum, showing off our collections as we caught more and more creatures to fill the museum with. A beautifully designed butterfly pavilion features cartoon flowers and multicolored butterflies fluttering around the screen with beautiful graphics. We ran through the fossil collection which serves as a relatively accurate evolutionary timeline from early sea creatures and plants, to dinosaurs, to mammals. The museum is well enough designed to be engaging and educational through the medium of the game. It even features an interactive component where players can place their character in the evolutionary place of humans (branching off next to an Australopithecus skull) and a light will turn on overhead.
The museum incentivizes visiting and donating, arguably doing more to be a participatory museum than many real ones. Players can feel a real sense of pride in watching their finds show up on display. Plenty of recent literature on museum studies touches on the need for museums to include communities in their organization. Features such as interactive exhibits, community maker spaces, transparency, and accountability towards the public are all key.
The contrast between the museum in these two games is stark. A Monster’s Expedition highlights a museum model where a passive visitor is told lies in a sufficiently authoritative voice and leaves with little benefit. Animal Crossing shows the museum which is fully integrated within its community, highlighting local wildlife caught by the local community. While real museums cannot collect every minutiae from every guest the way the Animal Crossing museum can as it exists outside of physical space and has a copy in every game for every player, they should not discount the very real benefits of allowing visitors into the space as active collaborators.
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