SimKnowledge: What Museums Can Learn from Video Games

Abstract

New media technologies – from photography and film to virtual reality and websites, interactive exhibits, and spectacular imagery – have prompted anxieties about the status of knowledge and education in museums since the late nineteenth century. Computer and video games appear to be only the latest entrant to the museum that promises new forms of engagement for (particularly young) visitors but at the expense of a grip on knowledge and meaning. This chapter argues that video games are useful to science museums and centers in a number of ways, but most significantly through their popularization of computer simulation and modeling. Drawing on debates around the nature of knowledge in digital visual culture more generally, the chapter explores the implications for this simulation for museums and asks new questions about the nature of knowledge in a digital popular culture. What questions do the speculative, emergent, and inherently playful operations of computer simulation ask of scientific knowledge today?