How SFMOMA Built a 15-Year Game-Based Arts Program From the Inside Out

About this episode

Erika Gangsei discusses her 15-year journey in building a game-based arts program at SFMOMA, focusing on collaboration and the challenges faced in cultural institutions.

Erika Gangsei has run the interpretive media team at SFMOMA for nearly two decades, and for 15 of those years she's been quietly building one of the most coherent game-based programming initiatives inside any major cultural institution in the country. In this conversation, we get into the origins of Play SFMOMA, which launched in 2011, before games as an art form had any real institutional legitimacy, and what it actually took to sustain a program built on deliberate experimentation rather than proven outcomes. Erika talks about the decision to treat game designers the way SFMOMA treats sound artists and filmmakers: as essential creative collaborators, not afterthoughts. She makes a sharp distinction between gamification (which museums were chasing then, and still are) and authentic game-based programming — and explains why that difference matters for visitors. We also talk about the institutional immune system. Erika uses the phrase literally: museums have white blood cells that attack unfamiliar things, and Play SFMOMA has spent 15 years slowly inoculating SFMOMA to interactivity. That means running an AR game jam knowing none of the prototypes would go into production, because…

People in this episode

Host: Jamin Warren

Guest: Erika Gangsei

Topics covered

• game-based programming
• cultural institutions
• interactivity
• collaboration with game designers
• gamification vs authentic programming
• institutional challenges
• AR game jam

Keywords

• SFMOMA
• game-based programming
• cultural institutions
• interactivity
• gamification
• AR game jam
• collaboration
• interpretive media

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: SFMOMA, Play SFMOMA

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