Walking into a museum, what is your likelihood to go straight to the console and make a donation? The chance is pretty slight. Research in museum fundraising studies has shown that donation does not come naturally, rather it needs to be nurtured. No matter how large or how small the donation is, it requires the institution’s long time commitment to building relationships with the donors. Museums around the world pull out all the stops to solicit donations, from holding fashion galas to special tours from curators and directors. For instance, Tate Modern the national modern art gallery in the U.K. has designed a multi-leveled annual membership program that provides a wide range of special activities for different levels, from special culture tours to artist studio visits. 

• Young Patron (aged 18-40) (It is interesting to call a 40 years old successful businessman “young”. I guess you can tell how the museum is facing the aging problem)  
  • Annual fee £1,200 (fully tax deductible)
  • being part of a sociable group with a contemporary focus
• Silver Patron 
  • Annual fee £1,500 (fully tax deductible)
  • explore the UK’s diverse cultural landscape from the historical to the contemporary
• Gold Patron
  • Annual fee £6,000 (fully tax deductible)
  • get to know the London and European art scenes with insights from Tate’s directors and curators
• Platinum Patron
  • Annual fee £12,000 (fully tax deductible)
  • premier access to Tate’s directors and curators, high-profile artists, leading collectors, and art specialists in the UK and internationally

According to the published list of patron names, the length of the list remains stable in the past decades. When the development of personal relationships is required in every case, the growth is strictly limited by the capacity of staff in the museum development department. Being one of the most reputable art museums in the world, Tate modern worries little about not attracting enough funds for operation. However, thousands of much smaller museum does. Many struggles to source locally and the donor groups are facing elderly problems. Solicitation donation is a social business and a patron base lie at the core of it. Many museum’s core donation groups are growing old with the museum and there’s no young blood flowing in. The entire art world is facing similar pressure. Strong art buyers are still real estate tycoons and rich bankers. However, technology companies are rising to become the most lucrative business and money flows to young tech start-up entrepreneurs. From historical data, we can tell they are not followers of the traditional art patron path. Museum’s traditional fundraising solicitation method is doing very little for the new middle class.

The digitalized platform can scale this social business with marginal costs lower than ever before. Experiences from the fast-growing gaming industry can be applied to museum patron programs as well. The young generation could find their sense of belonging, community, and accomplishment in a game. The museum can utilize their behavior habit to design patron experiences more appealing to the younger generation. Coachella and LV’s transformation to the gamified online rewarding programs are two successful examples of attracting young, rich, and vibrant audiences, those museums should target as well.  

Coachella, an annual music and arts festival held in Colorado Desert started in 1999, realized growth from 250,000 attendance in 2017 to 750,000 attendance in 2022. About 25% of attendees had a household income of $100,000 and 68% of them were aged between 15-29. The ticket price ranges from $400 to $9,800. Compared to the museum donors, the contributor group of Coachella is no less rich and much younger. One of the key elements of keeping vibrant is communicated in young people’s language, such as being a harbinger to adopt gamification interaction to boost engagement. In 2019, Coachella introduced Coachella Coin, an interactive game on the festival’s smartphone app. The game provides an in-depth scavenger hunt, a special world map, and virtual currencies that could be exchanged for a ride on the Ferris wheel, blankets, scarfs, pins, and drinks. By making the festival and video game experiences overlap, Coachella augmented reality into a real-life video game.

In 2022, Coachella leveled up and went all-in with augmented reality, gamification, and NFTs. The festival offered every paying attendee a free In Bloom NFT that will grow and unlock special benefits, such as VIP upgrades, 2023 weekend passes, Goldenvoice concert tickets, and Ferris wheel rides. Besides ticketing purposes, there are different collections of NFTs one can purchase to be redeemed for tangible items. The Sights and Sounds Collection featured 10 photos that came with exclusive soundscapes from the polo field and were limited to 10,000 NFTs that sold for $60 each. The Desert Reflections Collection created by artist Emek could be redeemed for a physical photo book of the festival and was limited to 1,000 NFT for $180 each. The most expensive NFTs were part of the Coachella Keys Collection grating lifetime passes to Coachella in April every year and were limited to 10 NFTs. Each sold in the six figures, with a total coming to $1,474,000. All of the NFTs were sold out shortly after going on sale. 

Another case is LV’s 2 million downloads NFT Game, celebrating its 200 year anniversary. The game starts with the Louis Vuitton family story and introduces participants to the legend and history of the brand. The avatar character, Vivienne, gives the audience a request to collect NFT postcards and travel to different locations in glamorous cities such as Paris, London, Los Angeles, and more. The game has stirred a lot of response and community engagement all over the world, especially with the brand followers and customers. This experiential digital game differentiates from traditional magazine advertisements in ways that it tells the story in young consumers’ language. LV is not the only luxury brand adopting gamified digital experience. Italian label Cucci embedded its iconography into consumers’ memories through a gamification effort found within its mobile application. Players were tasked with memorizing new brand motifs as they customized a digital Dionysus handbag, spurring product awareness. Teaching heritage through gaming is effective and can apply to museum studies. 

Here I present a new business model for gamified patron program for museums: 

Customer Segments

This program is designed for museums to target individual donors. So the two customer segments are museums and donors. Target museums are those willing to gain more funding from individual donors, expand their donor pool to the younger generation, and boost the efficiency of their marketing effort. Donors are entirely attached to institutions and managed by the museum.

Value Proposition

1. Donors: By establishing clear goals and quests, gamified patron programs can help donors gain a sense of accomplishment throw contributing to the museum. Secondly, a reward system can create a positive feedback loop to allow donors to take more initiatives in being part of the museum community and make themselves widely known to the art world. Thirdly, the community created by the online system can give non-local donors into the same conversation and take a more active part and more sense of ownership over the money they donated. Fourthly, information could be tailored to be more exclusive and direct than monthly donor emails. More diverse community special benefits could be executed as well. 
2. Museum: Applying a digitalized patron system could reduce the average cost of soliciting each donation, especially for small donors. Currently, staff in the development team could hardly focus a lot of time on small donors. 80% of the donation very likely comes from 20% of the top donors. It is a good strategy to give up the 80% small donors and more on the 20% big donors, because no matter the size, the effort to solicit each donation has no big difference. By embracing gamified patron program, staff can still focus on building a personal relationship with the big donor and let the digitalized system works with the small donors. This digital system could help museums gain more behavioral data on their targets and apply machine learning models to predict and more accurate response to their needs. This decentralization of data empowers museums with more control of ver their targets and improves performance. Thus, a larger customer group can be reached and more funding to gain. 

Key activities

Moving hierarchy of different levels of donation online with addition to quest, points, reward, and community. Setting a goal and a storyline that ties to the interest of donors and museum exhibitions. This could make boring knowledge fun to learn. Moreover, introduce players to customized avatars and encourage them to present themselves in the community. Different levels of customers will have different activity loops. One of the most important elements is the sense of community. Through learning the behavior of donors should the system classify them into different groups and feel they are surrounded by those they respect and feel comfortable talking to. Inside the community, museums can insert evaluative tools to gain more feedback and give patrons more sense of participation. Moreover, user-generated content can free conversation between artists and the market as well. This sense of community can only be established through a digitalized and gamified patron program and machine learning of data. 

Conclusion

It is urgent for museums to seize those opportunities and kick start a double growth curve in the art market. Online exhibitions attract little audience due to the lack of special occasions. Currently, most patron connection starts locally. One finds information about an interesting exhibition and walks into the museum, leaving your email address when buying a ticket online. Several days later, one receives an email about the new exhibition and another one. And the next year, one receives a solicitation email asking for a donation for a special program and that email goes straight to the trash bin. The experience and the return of donation are not very appealing. Through a gamified membership program, the museum can build a community through much richer interaction.

It’s time to move. 

Bibliography

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To put it simply, nonfungible tokens (NFTs), are assets one can buy on the blockchain. In the arts administration space, the debate about the role of NFTs in our scope is alive and well. On one hand, there is the argument that NFTs are a new frontier for entrepreneurial artists because they allow for a decentralized avenue for art marketing and sales. The blockchain, in theory, is an extremely well structured platform for artists’ sales because it is managed by smart contracts, which allow artists, if savvy enough, to receive royalties from all future sales. Smart contracts are simply lines of code that program currency and legal transfers in relation to each NFT sale. They elegantly ensure integrity for artists’ rewards by removing any middlemen between them and what they deserve in exchange for their work. 

It is shockingly easy to “mint” an NFT, and by Web3 dictionary standards, minting means converting a digital asset, like a unique drawing, into a marketable item on the blockchain. This is another reason why we are hearing about NFTs in the arts sector. Popular NFT marketplaces like OpenSea use what’s called a “lazy minting” process that lets artists drop their digital goods off for purchase on their platform at no cost. OpenSea then puts the cost of their service on the NFT buyer, charging them an additional 2.5% of the NFT’s market price. This is similar to what a small business may do to their customers using credit cards when they charge an extra processing fee. 

As seen in the image above, NFT trading volume on OpenSea rose from the winter of 2021 to the beginning of 2022, peaked in January of 2022, and began to decline into the rest of the year, while the public’s interest in NFTs followed a similar trajectory. If the NFT market is structured to benefit artists, one could argue that this is a prime time for more artists to improve their NFT-selling strategies and increase this volume. However, there are two sides to every story, and the NFT market is not as easy to navigate in practice as in theory. There are many complexities involved in building a successful NFT brand. For example, setting up a strong smart contract involves collaboration between an artist, a development team, and ideally a lawyer. Lawyers can be crucial in advising smart contract line items for artists like the ability to sell their NFTs off of the blockchain and receive rewards in perpetuity for future sales. Essentially, digital artists have a lot to learn before entering the NFT market, and it will take a plethora of resources for them to create sustainable and smart personas on the blockchain. 

The promise of a decentralized marketplace and autonomy over commercializing art has drawn over 10,000 collections of NFTs to OpenSea. This has created a massive NFT supply, yet not all of the artists who lazy mint on the platform are well equipped with the skills to stand out in the market. This brings up a couple of questions worth exploring. What types of artists can and do succeed in the NFT market in 2022? What type of person is buying NFTs in the current market, and why? As it turns out, the average popular NFT consumer is paying a high price for this digital asset, and they are buying because of factors beyond the NFT’s art itself. A look into OpenSea’s current top 50 most successful NFT art collections will illuminate this. 

Successful NFT Collections – OpenSea Captains

To understand what a “successful” NFT collection looks like on OpenSea, we can examine which collections have earned the highest “volume”, or largest sum, of cryptocurrency to date in Ethereum (ETH.) As of the spring of 2022, the statistics for the top 50 NFT collection sales are as follows. This data was scraped from OpenSea’s Developer API, and the below averages are per collection out of the top 50.

These values show that the range NFT prices in successful OpenSea collections is vast, but that ultimately, popular purchases are concentrated in the multi-thousand-dollar range. Since we have defined successful NFT collections here in terms of their accumulated wealth, we can say that the wealthy portion of the NFT market is making their gains through contributions from individuals who can afford to spend large sums on each individual NFT. One of the most expensive NFTs ever sold was Everydays: The First 5000 Days by the artist Beeple at 69.3 million dollars. So, there are collectors in the market who are so interested that they will even spend millions. From looking further into OpenSea’s popular collections, it is apparent that they have anywhere from 52 to 212,072 individual owners contributing to their sales. This range shares that there are hundreds of thousands of individuals who want a piece of the NFT market as well. For artists’ sake, arts managers should understand this type of collector, who they are, and why they buy.

As one high-value NFT owner stated, his NFT is a status-symbol and one of his most prized possessions. Some large companies like Adidas and Taco Bell have started casually experimenting with NFT purchases to convert them to physical artwork and Web3 real-estate as well. Another reason that big companies and individuals alike invest in NFTs is that these digital items come with extra benefits beyond the ownership of art on the blockchain. In fact, it’s debatable as to whether artistic value is even of consideration for buyers. A dive into NFT benefits and gamification can explain this further. 

NFT Benefit Models to Watch

Play-To-Earn

Video-gamers can now sell NFTs in virtual universes and make actual money, hence there is an incentive to play games with blockchain components to make a tangible profit. Gone are the days of art for art appreciation’s sake with NFTs when this new “play-to-earn” gaming model is readily available. However, there are some positive outcomes of the advent of the play-to-earn model. For example, trading NFTs is a major component of playing games on the blockchain. This means that smart contracts behind the scenes in the games give participants partial ownership of the game, and in some rare cases, a say in its future development. 

Axie Infinity is widely known as one of the most popular play-to-earn games on the market, and it refers to itself as a “player-owned economy” because it is taking revolutionary steps to give control over its future development to its players. The game has a public, multi-year development roadmap for how they plan to incorporate players’ interests into game development. Their desired communal structure for player power is described below. From sales within the game’s NFT marketplace, players can earn “AXS” currency, of which a portion gets added to the game’s “Community Treasury.” The amount of AXS a player accumulates in the Treasury dictates their stake in future development decisions and ultimately provides them with additional rewards. In theory, this structure creates a democratic and meritocratic culture within the Axie Infinity Game Universe that entices users to play by giving them the chance at voting power over its future.

The Avatar Movement

Imagine getting to start from scratch again when creating your digital identity and online presence. It has been decades now since we have been able to do this, and the thought sounds exciting and foreign given the seemed permanence of everything we’ve posted online. However, the Avatar Movement uses “algorithmically generated” NFTs to give buyers a chance at a unique identity in the digital world’s next universe: the metaverse.

The digital artist of a specific avatar collection can create a list of possible features for persona NFTs, give them empowering descriptions, and then combine them to create unique characters that give buyers the chance to adopt a new online identity. Sotheby’s Auction House hosted an NFT avatar collection auction called Queens+Kings in 2021, and some of the avatars from this event are now on OpenSea where collectors can re-mint and rearrange them to create new identities at each sale. Beyond providing creative metaverse identities, NFT avatars are also appealing assets because they can generate passive income for their human owners in the metaverse. They can even have their own agents like some celebrity avatars have had for years now. If the metaverse grows in popularity, the Avatar Movement should grow in tandem as the public joins the bandwagon in making new identities for themselves in the digital frontier.

Exclusivity

Another draw of buying NFTs in the current market is that they typically come with an invitation into an exclusive community. For example, Sotheby’s first NFT auction sold avatars that mimicked players from the Liverpool FC  team, and in return for their purchase gave collectors “access to a members-only LFC Discord community chat channel, virtual hang-outs, competitions, guest appearances, updates from the LFC Foundation, and LFC retail discounts.” Luxury brands are also taking advantage of NFT collections as alternative revenue streams. Louis Vuitton gamified their company’s history by creating an environment where shoppers can learn about the brand’s origins while receiving luxury NFT drops as random rewards. According to crypto.news, “blockchain-based gaming will completely eclipse the entire gaming industry.” It seems as well that block-chain-based NFT sales and gamification will disrupt industries from football to fashion by creating new exclusive benefits for fans.

Miscellaneous

Time-Sensitive and Outcome-Based NFTs

Time-sensitive and outcome-based NFTs – Artists can program NFT purchases to host an element of surprise by revealing their art based on a time or event like the result of the 2020 election.  Coachella 2022 decided to go with a flower theme for their ticket-holder NFTs, and these items were programmed to appear as seeds until the festival began and they grew into different types of flowers, each denoting a unique exclusive deal.

Raffles/Other Surprise Elements

The BitCoin Angel project did well in the NFT market partially because it sold smaller pieces from artist Trevor Jones for a chance at 1/1 ownership of one of his original works. This project turned Jones from a struggling artist into a multimillionaire in a single day.

Takeaways for the Arts Community

One beautiful aspect of the arts is that they prevail through, and react to, the changing world around them. The NFT market and the metaverse space is the next economic frontier for art to infiltrate and revolutionize, but this market is both promising and elitist. Therefore, it’s worth paying attention to as artists and managers alike. To stay abridged to the market, it will be important that the arts and culture sector monitor its trends.

With the rise in play-to-earn gaming and metaverse developments, now is an apt time for artists and arts managers to research and educate each other on minting, smart contracts, and collection gamification best practices. Before entering the market, it is also vital to research both prominent NFT development teams and legal resources to plan for a value-centric and secure benefit strategy and launch. There have been many copyright issues around NFT sales and confusion over what a buyer can do with their NFT once they purchase it. Each of these issues warrants its own in-depth study, and the examples of successful NFT collections above are only the tip of the iceberg in cases for the NFT market’s potential moving forward. This NFT phenomenon may be about more than just buying and selling digital art, but it is surely a robust and decentralized outlet for artists, nonetheless. The NFT market is a playground, colorful and treacherous, for entrepreneurial artists and innovative arts institutions. 

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Gamification, in the most well-known and basic definition, is “the process of adding games or game-like elements to something (such as a task) so as to encourage participation” The definition of gamification may vary between people and situations, but the core is to utilize concepts from game development to solve problems in other fields. 

Though The term gamification was created by Nick Pelling, a British computer programmer and inventor, in 2003, people started exploiting the concept of gamification during the 19th century. A grocery company called the Sperry and Hutchinson Co. motivates its customers to consume by substituting money with the S&H Green Stamps. This case is the ever first gamification approach in the world. One hundred years later, key opinions leaders such as Jesse Schell and Jane McGonigal brought gamification to the public. From then on, people started thinking about “ the potential of gamification and its use in several aspects of our life” 

Nowadays, gamification is widely used in different industries such as catering, education, e-commerce, and of course, Arts by adding minor interactive gameplay on the website or application. Organizations, no matter for-profit or non-profits, are all persistently searching best way of optimization and believe that gamification may be applicable at some aspects of their businesses.

Why is gamification such a hit in the art world?

Art professionals and organizations have always held a strong interest in gamification even before the born of the word “gamification.” Besides, compared with other industries such as healthcare, the art world seems to have a special obsession with gamification. So why does this happen? 

The first thing is that arts and games are intrinsically related and undividable. Though whether the game itself is a kind of art is a question with polarized answers, the relationship between arts and games is undoubtedly close. Some of us may hear about the classic Role Play Game Assasin’s Creed by Ubisoft was chosen as a resource to help restore the burned Notre Dame de Paris. An artist from the Ubisoft game told the media that the game development team “has spent years literally fussing over the details of the building. She pored over photos to get the architecture just right and worked with texture artists to make sure that each brick was as it should be”.

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Alongside transferring art concepts to the game, arts organizations also appreciate games. The Victoria & Albert Museum collected the pixel-style casual game “Flappy Bird” and curated an exhibition. The process of art creation is actually a process of creating Intellectual Property, and IP is a just need in the gaming industry. On the other hand, the art world is always seeking a more inclusive, interactive exhibition mediation to broaden the boundaries of artistic creation. Game, which has an infinite capacity of presenting creativities, is an ideal vehicle for arts.

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Furthermore, Arts managers have always been looking for a better way to engage their audiences positively, and interaction is the core driver of engagements. Non-profits are willing to influence the public to do one of the two things:  to participate in a new activity that the audience would have avoided or not known about in the past; or to make changes to daily behaviors over a long period of time. In the first scenario, gamify cryptic art pieces makes art more understandable and less static. Meanwhile, as games are convenient to spread in the digital world and popular among people from many demographics, the target audiences could be more diverse. For the second scenario, games’ additional educational features could help. Unlike traditional arts education approaches, gamification makes arts education more effective than ever. In conventional art education practices, educators are used to presenting an art piece or concept as a whole to the students, which can result in misunderstandings and boards. However, while gamifying arts, we need to break down the original art production into artistic elements and then re-assemble them, and then players will accept the information step-by-step when playing the game. This is absolutely a rather exciting process. 

Another critical point is that game development, especially casual game development, is financially affordable for nonprofit arts organizations. Several accessible game engines such as Unity and Unreal eliminate the technical barriers, and the raising promotion channels like Google Ads and Facebook Ads make the publishing process straightforward. And even Unity itself is a popular ads channel in the game world. Take mobile casual games as an example. Usually, a hyper-casual game development team only requires 1-2 game developers and one graphic designer and may cost about $20,000. The core of game development is no fancy technology. It is more about creativity. Overall, for medium- and large arts organizations, building a game development team or hiring a gamification agency is an affordable way.

On the other hand, gamification might help nonprofits explore a new way of monetization. The gaming industry has always been lucrative with minimal entry barriers. According to mobile data and analytics provider App Annie, mobile games are on track to surpass $120 billion in spending in 2021, growing 20% over $100 billion in 2020. By gamify art collections, arts organizations may have a chance to generate revenue from the game and sustain a mission for social good. The gaming industry needs creativity, and the art world always seeks living resources. It seems like they are the best fit.

Last but not least, the unavoidable Covid-19. Pandemic restricts physical experience, but raising technologies such as Metaverse, VR/AR/XR makes the digital experience more genuine and even beyond reality. Gamification is an excellent way to present arts on digital equipment. I will further discuss this in the last part of the article.  

Gamification in Digital Arts Programming: Production-based and Organization-based

When implementing gamification in the real world, arts enterprises usually have two choices. The first choice is to gamify art collections. The Palace Museum in China has made several temptations on this. In 2018, The Palace Museum collaborated with NetEase, a top-tier technology company famous for game development and publishing, published a traditional Chinese art style Puzzle Role Play Game “Ink · Mountains and Mystery”. The game is inspired by one of the ten most precious Chinese traditional paintings, the “Thousands of miles of mountains and rivers”, which is The Palace Museum’s collection. The painting is a blue-green landscape silk painting finished in the Ming dynasty and has been appreciated for its vivid, imaginary color usage. Fortunately, the game flawlessly rebuilt the magnificent images utilizing 3D engines and gave a beautiful story to the original painting. At the end of 2018, the game had acquired more than 120 thousand downloads and effectively promoted traditional Chinese painting to younger generations. From then on, the traditional Chinese art style and elements have become a new trend in Chinese society, especially on social media. From this case, we can see that gamification can make arts more interactive, more authentic, and even rejuvenate a traditional art piece.

Another surprising thing is that via this gamified digital program, both the “Thousands of miles of mountains and rivers” and the Palace Museum obtained fans from younger generations: the game has more than 1.2 million followers on TapTap, a game channel for GenZers and Millenials in China. I believe this is not the end of this story. Imagine how many kids, teenagers, and young adults would be interested in traditional Chinese art and may become a member of the art community. An excellent gamification digital arts program could do more than improve audience engagement, and it can help a niche arts genre maintain sustainable development.

Another choice would be organization-based programming. In this field, the Metropolitan Museum of Arts in the U.S. and the Center Pompidou in French would be the two best examples. In 2012, only one year after the world’s first gamification summit closed in San Francisco, The Met published a game called “Murder at the Met: An American Art Mystery” which is a “web-based application (app) that guides users of smartphones and tablets through the galleries of American paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art to solve a murder mystery.”

The game is still accessible on the website today. From a 2022 point of view, this game is not visually appealing or attractive in gameplay design, but the concept it used was Avant-guard at that point. The Met’s foresight of the gamification trend is so precise that it keeps inspiring other organizations today. Going back to the game, we could quickly tell the difference between the Murder at the Met and the Mountains and Mystery: the prior one represents the organization while the latter focuses on the art piece. To better understand the outcome differences of these two different kinds of gamification digital arts programs, we can just take a look at another game produced by the Centre Pompidou, the Prisme 7. 

The Prisme 7 is “designed in collaboration with digital artists Bright and Game in Society, and with the support of the Ministry of National Education”, in the game, the players can “discover seven levels of play and interact with 40 major works from the biggest collection of modern and contemporary art in Europe. It also offers a unique sound immersion designed especially for the game by Ircam Amplify. ” Unlike the Murder at The Met, Prisme 7 doesn’t have a clear storyline, which more aligns with most casual and hyper-casual games. I attribute this to the different types of the two organizations. As the most famous visual arts organization with a heavy focus on art history, The Met would like to utilize a gamified digital program to do art history education. By contrast, the Center Pompidou is more contemporary, which means their collections and exhibitions are not that easy to interpret for the public, so they tend to use the interactive and attractive nature of the casual game to present their collections vividly and generate more audience engagement. 

Compared with the Mountains and Mystery, these two games create more brand exposure for the arts organizations and are more severe in terms of arts. The Met basically presented the whole story behind that piece, and Prisme 7 tries to convey contemporary art concepts as much as possible by utilizing the play-reward mechanism in games. Also, both of them have a solid organizational identity. The Met uses one of its most identical masterpieces, Portrait of Madame X and Prisme 7 restored the special building of Center Pompidou in the digital space. However, the Mountains and Mystery only picked some elements from the original painting and tried to modify the art further to make it easier to spread. Users can not find many clues about the original art piece or the organization behind it. What they know is only the beautiful, fictional story that happened in the blue-green landscape. The differences are mainly from distinct business collaboration models. The Murder in The Met and Prisme 7 is developed and published by the organizations, so the two games are just like two digital gamification programs conducted by the organizations. They should make the programs align with the organization’s mission and focus on the academic and educational features. But the Palace Museum cooperated with NetEase, which was entirely in charge of the game development and publishing. So, It’s easy to find the commercial elements in the Mountain and Mystery.

I would not judge which kind is right and which is wrong. I would rather say that there are always pros and cons. The Met and Center Pompidou definitely took a giant step in informative and interesting arts education, but their productions are still targeting arts fans, which constrained the scope of the impact. The Palace Museum approached audiences from the outside art world, but they sacrificed a lot on artistry. If the organization doesn’t have a strong voice, the art may be threatened by over-entertained. 

A glimpse of future: Gamification, XR technology and Arts

For decades, VR/AR/XR technology has been a viral topic. Most arts organizations have also paid attention to this trend for a long time. However, we still have less idea about what’s next to XR technology and how we can use it more creatively, or at least make it beyond a digital venue. However, with the raising gamification concept, we may garner a chance to look at the future.

In the field of arts education, there are some research and experiments on the effectiveness of VR-based gamified art history education. A research team in the Department of Systems Engineering, Universidad Nacional de San Agustin de Arequipa in Peru has tried to achieve the “implementation of a virtual reality game using gamification by elements of video games to improve the teaching of Art History“ To do so, they ”simulate a virtual museum, with predefined stages that expose works from different artistic currents with their respective representations all owing interact with the characters, objects, animations and sounds presented in the application.” The result shows that navigation activities, tasks, and movements are statistically correlated in the VR environment and significantly influence the outcome of learning. And, compared with implementing VR or gamification separately,  the combination of VR and Gamification has higher efficiency in arts education. 

Another possible development direction is the Metaverse. In general, Metaverse is “an immersive virtual world that people “enter” through the use of technologies like AR and VR” 

In terms of the art world, leading arts organizations such as Sotheby have just announced the launch of Sotheby’s Metaverse, the auction house’s new platform designed specifically for digital collectors.  Another well-accepted opinion is that humans need to interact with Metaverse via gamification. The most significant supporter of this idea is Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft and the key character behind that shocking acquisition between Microsoft and Activision Blizzard. He told the media that “Metaverse is essentially about creating games,” and “It is about being able to put people, places, things [in] a physics engine and then having all the people, places, things in the physics engine relate to each other.” As I stated before, the game is closely related to the arts, just as it’s related to Metaverse and XR technologies. Metaverse somehow creates a platform for arts, technologies, and gamification, but right now, we cannot predict what will happen.

Conclusion

Through previous analysis, we can conclude that gamification is and will always be a key concept for every entity in the art world. Arts enterprises recognize it as a management tool,  artists use it as a vehicle of artistic creation, and audiences enjoy spending time with it. Overall, gamification significantly helps the short-term growth and the sustainable development of art. In addition, new technologies and technological concepts give gamification more possibilities. We can tell that gamification will combine with different emerging elements and build connections between arts and the future.