This Thursday, May 9, we are partnering with The Go Game to offer a mobile scavenger hunt for singles. All you have to bring is your sense of adventure (and ideally a mobile device, you need one per team); we’ll take care of the rest. We’ll divide you into teams based on your dating preference, and you get to roam the museum completing missions, meeting new people, and perhaps enjoying a cocktail afterwards. Even if you don’t find “the one,” it will be hard not to have fun playing this game. There are several types of missions, including trivia, location-based puzzles, team photo ops, interacting with planted actors, and more.

I hope you’ll stick around after the game to share you thoughts because Elisabeth, Shelley, and I want to pick your brains. Was the scavenger hunt fun? Would you like more of them, perhaps with different topics or themes? Was it a good way to meet new people? Would you like to see more events like this? More singles events in general? The Go Game is kind enough to work with us for this experimental version, and if you like it, we might partner with them to do more scavenger hunts. So gather your single friends and flap your little wings over to the Museum Thursday at 7!

This is an interactive tagging scavenger hunt that (we hope) motivates people to find and look at the work in the gallery. In addition to the find and look idea, there are a few other internal motivations that we’ve incorporated into the design.

Roam! One of our institutional aims is to get visitors looking across collections and that’s always a challenge in this very large building.  To encourage players to cross boundaries in the building, they gain more points if they tag objects on different floors.

Crossover! One of the big issues we’ve seen with BklynMuse is that it’s chock full of information and various paths to take and that can be an overwhelming amount of choice.  The recent simplifications are going to help, but we want to implement different ways to get people into that content.  As players use Gallery Tag!, there are links that crossover into BklynMuse.

Convergence!  All of the tags created go right back into the online collection, bridging the physical and virtual.

We’re going to do a launch meetup at this month’s Target First Saturday and I’ll post more details on that next week!  In the meantime, if you are coming here with your device hit m.brooklynmuseum.org to get started!

We designed our system to accept tags from users who might not want an account and that’s been both valuable and a bit of trouble.  On one hand, the 7,657 tags by anonymous contribution are nothing to sneeze at, but we’ve had to keep a close eye on those submissions and have deleted roughly 6% of them due to complete inaccuracy.  We could eliminate the capability to add tags anonymously, but 94% of those contributions are of great value and, more importantly we want our online collection to be welcoming to anyone with or without an account.  That said, there are plenty of people testing us just for fun and when the tags “how long will it take you to delete this tag” and “are you going to block me” showed up on the scene, there was only so long it was going to take an overworked Technology department to do something about it.  We knew the Brooklyn Museum Posse would have a lot to do with the solution.

The hunt for the Governor gang of bushrangers. A posse of mounted police, aboriginal trackers and district volunteers. Jimmy & Joe Governor were sighted at Stewarts Brook on 12 September 1900 – Stewarts Brook, NSW / by A C Jackson (via State Library of New South Wales on the Flickr Commons).

Today we are introducing a new game called Freeze Tag! which puts control of the tags back into the hands of our most valued community members.  If you are a member of our Posse, you can delete tags from object pages−this is new, previously we were not allowing tag deletion except by system admins. For any tag that is deleted, it takes another two pairs of Posse eyes to “agree” within Freeze Tag! before that tag’s fate is sealed.  On the other hand, if three Posse members within the game think the tag should be saved, it will be restored.  After a short stint on the live site, all tags created anonymously will automatically be “challenged” and moved into the game for vetting by Posse.  Freeze Tag! is designed with all that great Wisdom of Crowds mentality−influence is minimized by each Posse member coming to their own decision independently, then we aggregate into a collective decision to determine if a tag should stay or go.  After all, why should one person decide the worth of a tag, when a collective decision may be more accurate?  It will be interesting to see the results of this and we’ll report back as we see what happens.

To start Freeze Tag! off with a bang, we’ve populated it with all the anonymous tags to date and, in addition, thrown in all those auto-generated tags that need a bit of human review.  This may sound complicated, but I think when you play Freeze Tag!, you’ll agree that all the complicated goings on behind-the-scenes is bundled up in a pretty simple package that, we hope, is fun to play.  No spoilers or anything, but be on the lookout for cameos from our own on-site security posse.

Rock on, Posse—thank you for all your incredible work to date and we hope you continue to have fun with us as we move forward with our collection online!

We’ve just launched our collection online and now we need some help tagging, so visitors can better find objects within it. Of course, we were thinking, why does tagging have to be such work? Why not try and do something fun with it? So, Tag! You’re it!

We’ve all seen Google’s Image Labeler and it’s a really fun tagging game. Google pairs you with someone live via the web and you both tag the same image independent of each other. At the end of the timed session on that image, the “matches” are revealed and you gain points if your tagging terms match your partner’s. Google gets two things here: tags and relevance. If two people independent of each other tag the same image with the same terms, Google can establish that term with that image as more relevant when searching. Pretty cool. Alas, Google has traffic we all wish we had and it’s easy for them to match partners up on the spot. Chances are there will always be at least two people in Google’s universe who will play Image Labeler at the same time. We don’t have that kind of circumstance, so we had to re-envision our game to work in a slightly different way.

We may not have Google-like traffic, but we do have a Posse (now sortable by most recent, most active, top taggers), so why not design the game so the Posse can play against each other, but perhaps not in real time? Zing!

When Posse members login to play the game (yup, we are requiring an account for this) they tag away at objects that appear on screen. When a Posse peep tags he/she can’t see what other taggers have termed an object. [Think The Wisdom of Crowds where we know independence and minimizing influence is key.] As a Posse member tags, they move up the ‘tag-o-meter’ scale and pass other posse members in the standings. The ‘tag-o-meter’ has few surprises in store as you move up the scale—no way am I giving anything up, so you’ll have to go play for yourself to find out what I’m talking about. If you get to the top tagger position, there’s an even bigger surprise and you get the option to get an email notification if someone out-tags you from the top spot. When you’re tired of playing and want to end, we’ll show you your term matches with other Posse members (matched terms then become more relevant when visitors search our collection) and you’ll also see your standings (both for that session and overall, from the start of your Posse account).

That’s it: A simple and fun activity for the Posse which, in turn, establishes better relevance for the visitor trying to search our collection. Sweet!

Why no screenshots in this post? Go play Tag! You’re it! and see for yourself.