As videogames challenge players by putting them into a solution finding situation, players themselves take responsibility and build up experience: “games are not designed to teach players they are designed for players to learn” (Stapleton, 2004, pp. Games are based upon well-thought out scenarios with specific aims and objectives (Dannenberg & Fischer, 2017) and are recognised today as forms of learning tools. Game studies comprise an interdisciplinary scientific field focusing on learning, art, playing, mass production and related phenomena (Mayra, 2008, p. It is part of an ongoing research project on museums in popular videogames (MPVG), run by the Museology Research Laboratory of the Ionian University, Corfu, Greece.

The spark of inspiration for this article was a presentation done by the authors for the “The Future Museum in the Future City” (authors, 2021) in Qatar, 2021. We focus on how the future of museum is represented in popular videogames. It aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion on the future of museums in the physical and the digital world. This article relates to the role of museums in popular videogames as a possible indicator of how museums will be (or not) in the future. Museums, Science Fiction, Future, Videogames This research has indicated that the speculative creativity of videogame developers concerning museums in the future is likely to be diverse, within cityscapes, into the ocean or in the sky, fully functional with different interiors, preserving objects of the past and offering shelter to humans, or destroyed because of natural disasters, external attacks and/or human actions. Museums were grouped and analysed by four museum-oriented aspects to further understand their nature in future settings: location the museum as a building and as an institution the museum exhibits, their nature and their state of care or preservation museum visitors that the game character may encounter. Twenty-nine videogames with forty-two museum settings were identified and discussed. Taking into consideration that science fiction literature is strongly linked with visualising aspects of the future, we use its genres to classify the museums in videogames. In terms of popular videogames, data were collected from the ‘The Museums in Popular Videogames’ research project at the Museology Lab, Ionian University, Corfu, Greece. This article relates to the envisioning of museums in popular videogames as a possible indicator of how museums may or may not function in the future. Aristoteles Georgios Sakellariou 1, Georgios Papaioannou 2ġ Researcher / PhD Candidate, Museology Lab, Ionian University, Corfu, GreeceĢ Associate Professor, Director Museology Lab, Ionian University, Corfu, Greece

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