Introduction
Have we MET is daily, in-person scavenger game about art highlights offered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. It uses a guessing-base game mechanic drawing directly from the MET's Art Collection API, and provides personalization by saving found artwork to a personal gallery.
Motivation
We wanted to provide those who are unseasoned in art history, but have a curiosity or appreciation for the arts, with a structured experience centered around an objective. We structured this motivation around two primary goals:
-
By creating a gamified experience, we hoped to encourage patrons to physically explore the museum's layout. We wanted to give them a tangible reason to wander into underexplored wings, ultimately helping them become familiar with where different departments and galleries are located and what they have to offer.
-
Beyond navigating the physical space, the game encourages players and patrons to expand their general knowledge and learn art history. By interacting with the clues and artwork, users naturally learn to recognize specific art motifs, materials, movements, regions, and time periods across various works.
Inspiration
Catfishing.net
Catfishing.net is a daily, trivia game where players must name a set of 10 Wikipedia articles based on their list of categories. The game is a challenging test of general knowledge and a source of new Wikipedia discoveries.
From this game, we were heavily inspired by the calendar view of the game archive. Users are able to re-visit past games via this archive and see whether they guessed it right or not. We also appreciated how, in the spirit of discovering new articles, the game would show a brief excerpt of and link to every Wikipedia article.
Wordle-type games
From incremental reveal games, like the New York Time's Wordle or Bandle or Framed.wtf, we borrowed the game mechanic of gradually revealing more clues with each incorrect guess to help the player zero in on the answer. We also really like how users are able to share their results to other players without revealing the answer.
The MET website
Of course we were also inspired by the design language of the official MET website. We wanted to imitate the minimalist style, layout and color scheme for the app. The gallery where users can view the art objects they've successfully "met" has a similar layout to the MET's search page.
Features
Playing the daily game
For each daily game, users will see a pixelated image of the featured art object they are tasked to find. The goal is to find the art object and correctly guess its name in the fewest number of attempts possible. Each incorrect attempt will reveal a hint, whether it’s the Department, Gallery Number, Artist Bio, or Year of the art object. We encourage players to play in-person and look for the objects themselves.
When the player has finished a game (whether they won or lost), they can share their scores with others and learn more about the art piece on the MET website via a direct link.
Archive
Players are able to view and play previous games in a calendar view. They are able to view the status and progress of each game (not started denoted by an empty circle, in progress denoted by a low-opactiy circle, won denoted by a filled in circle, or lost denoted by an X). Clicking on an entry in the archive will take the user to the game from that day.
Gallery
Each art object the user has successfully named (or “met”) will be displayed in a personal Gallery for their viewing. They can see when they completed the game and in how many tries. From the gallery, they are able to visit the game and also open the entry in the MET website.
