Categorizing Digital Fish: The Policies and Strategies of the Animal Crossing Museum
Everywhere you go, there is history and the people who care about maintaining it. Museums are stewards of that history all over the world, and in settlements of any size, one of the most common services is a local museum. Villages that may not even be able to support a gas station or grocery store have museums. These facilities are operated and used by crowds of engaged public with a pride or interest in their local history. This is even demonstrated in Nintendo’s video game series “Animal Crossing”.
In this series, the player is a new resident (and in the most recent iteration, Animal Crossing: New Leaf, also the Mayor) of a village populated by a growing and shifting population of animal characters. The population of this village reaches about 20 on a good day, but a number of services exist for the benefit of its inhabitants all the same. This includes a couple of stores, a coffee shop, infrastructure like a landfill, a train, and a ferry, a venue for live music, and of course a museum.
So what lessons can we learn if we take a look at this museum and its director, Blathers the Owl? A surprising number of positive and negative examples for a small local museum exist in this facility, and we can consider them in our own practice.
Have a clearly-defined mandate and collections policy. The Animal Crossing museum does a pretty good job of having a locally-focused small natural history museum mandate. Its core exhibition program has four segments. Fossils, Bugs, Fish, and Art. All of the fossils, bugs, and fish are found in the village or on its adjacent island, and are collected by player characters and donated to the museum’s collection. (I take for granted that proper documentation exists for the locations that the items, fossils especially, are found. There is only so far that a video game needs to go on this matter. I’m sure their crack team of palaeontologists is getting right on solving the mystery of the T. Rex skeleton I found in three distinct segments, two on opposite corners of the map, and the third received as a gift from a villager for making a delivery. The museum displays these as a unit. I’m sure they have a *perfectly* good reason to do so.) It is clear what the relevance of these objects is to the community, and it is worth having them on display. The museum knows what it needs and they accept donations of these objects, and publicly thank their donors. But just as importantly, if they are offered an object they do not need, they respond politely and gratefully, but stating in no uncertain terms that they cannot accept the object. So the first three make sense, but why also art?
But why also art?
This is a question that we ask of a lot of small-town museums. Why do they have a collection of art despite the staff not being informed on the distinct nature of art? Why does your village have a collection of obviously stolen paintings or random irrelevant works? It falls back on the same traditional assumption that a museum wants old things because they are old. Someone happened to have this thing, and they decided to donate it to their local museum because they wanted to be responsible with the item without having to do any extra work to get rid of it. Museums that are unclear on what they do and do not collect suffer from this and end up with collections of mysterious objects that remain simply because they are difficult to get rid of. Why might a museum in a town that never saw a railway have an entire floor of model train? Lack of clear policy. Except Blathers the Owl has demonstrated through the rest of the museum’s operation that his collections policy is clear and effective, and through his ability to detect forgeries at the point of donation, he demonstrates some knowledge of the art itself. It’s even clear that he has a list in mind of what the museum should be displaying Why, then, does the Animal Crossing museum want to create a collection laden with Caravaggio, Seurat, and Michelangelo, sourced exclusively from Crazy Redd, a shady furniture dealer that only comes to town occasionally and trafficks in obvious forgeries in addition to original works? What does this have to do with a locally mandated otherwise-natural-history museum? While it is clearly because this is a video game and a painting by Rollo, the Hippo down the hill, is perhaps not as engaging for the player to collect, it is an example of a real-life trend nonetheless. Just like a museum must turn down many a beautiful taxidermy Chinese Pheasant because it makes no sense for them to take it, in terms of mandate or legality, there will be many a Japanese ink wall scroll. Don’t treat artwork any different than your other acquisitions, and if it seems relevant, just not to you, try to help direct them to a more relevant facility.
Engagement Model
One of the most successful things the Animal Crossing museum does is engage the public in their operations. When the player begins the game, the museum has nothing in its collection, but a building with a series of rooms designed to hold certain sets of fossils, insects, fish, and art. You are implored to go out into the community and collect these objects. When you bring an item, you are thanked profusely, and taught some information about the donated item. Additionally, your name is documented with your list of donations for all to see. As well, to encourage people to go out into the town and collect the items, eventually the museum acquires a gift shop that sells an upgraded bug net, shovel, and fishing rod to help you continue to expand their collection. When the collection is deemed complete, the donor is presented with a model of the museum to keep in their own house.
Programming Development
In various iterations of the game, the museum attempts a few new side programs. They are willing to attempt a variety of new programs and services to further engage the audience, but they are also willing to move away from those programs when they have run their course. In Wild World and City Folk, there is an observatory where the player can look at stars and define their own constellations, but is gone for New Leaf. In those games as well, the museum plays host to a coffee shop with a weekly live music program. As occasionally happens in a museum though, this program proves so successful that in New Leaf the coffee shop spins off as its own stand-alone business, and the live music moves to a new facility, Club LOL, which functions as a dance hall and comedy club in addition to the original Saturday night music performances.
Public Curation
In New Leaf, the player is given the option of expanding the museum as a public works project for the town. This builds the gift shop addition, as well as a series of empty exhibit spaces. These spaces are interesting, because they can be used by the player however they see fit. Items can be placed in the space similarly to how they are in houses, so the player can create exhibits in the space with items they have collected. Additionally, the gift shop sells display items like a thermohygrometer, rope stanchion, plinths, frames, etc. The player can design their own exhibits to display for their own benefit or for visitors to the town. This is of course a level of public engagement and interactivity not seen especially often in real-life museums, but one that is perhaps aspired to. The problem this runs into in real life though is the very real concern of private collectors who are excited about what they have and want to display it somewhere, but, like a well-meaning donor, may not be paying much attention to the mandate of the museum. And just as someone in the real world may not understand that their collection of Richard Nixon themed mason jars is not relevant to their local museum, a show in these in-game spaces could be irrelevant or even detrimental to the museum’s organizational goals.
Meeting the Needs of the Users
The museum pays clear attention to the needs of the users and makes their services as available and easy-to-use as possible. The player is encouraged to bring fossils for appraisal regardless of whether the player intends to donate it to the museum’s collection. (Clearly in the Animal Crossing world, unlike our own, fossils do not automatically belong to the Crown.)
Additionally, the museum takes stock in when the players might choose to attend the museum and designs its hours accordingly. This leads to the museum being open 24 hours a day, while many stores in the game close at night. Although, one must consider that this is a staff who lives there and a director who is nocturnal and is asleep when you enter the museum during the day. Operating a museum in real life sometimes feels like this anyway, even though most museums are not 24-hour facilities. It is definitely worth having a museum open at the optimal times for your target audiences though, and for the Animal Crossing museum, that seems to mean open all the time.
Lessons Learned
It seems that even in video games, the goals of a museum are similar, being to find the best fit for your mandate, your audience, and your resources. If that means your director naps during the day in order to operate a 24-hour museum, you sell silver bug nets to afford the upkeep on a state-of-the-art facility and encourage the growth of its collection, or that you risk having temporary exhibitions made up of objects of no clear relevance in order to greater engage your public, that is what it means. And if your strategy changes over the years to reflect a different set of audience needs in your community, then don’t be afraid to change with it.
