The Metropolitan Museum of Art has launched a blockchain powered smartphone game with engagement and … [+]
The Metropolitan Museum’s new blockchain-powered smartphone game, Art Links is the institution’s newest bid to embrace the cultural currency of gaming.
Designed in partnership with innovation platform TRLab, the serialized game invites players to identify common threads or ‘chains’ between some 140 works of art across its collection. New challenges will be released weekly over the course of 12 weeks to maximize on engagement.
Gaming: A Powerful Tool For Engagement
“By bringing works of art from collections across the Museum from Modern and Contemporary Art to Asian to Egyptian Art players can broaden their engagement and understanding of culture and creativity in a fun and compelling way. Art Links truly exemplifies how The Met continues to connect audiences to ideas and to one another while exploring emerging technology,” Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer said in a statement.
“As a company at the forefront of art and technology, we’re committed to creating new ways for audiences to discover, engage, and immerse themselves in art and culture,” added Audrey Ou, Co Founder and CEO of TRLab. “Partnering with The Met on its first Web3 experience reflects our belief that deepening connections between creators, collectors, and fans is the future of art. We’re combining digital innovation with artistic expression to create truly transformative experiences.”
TRLab’s notable collaborations include “The Calder Question,” a multi-season educational project developed with the Calder Foundation;
Edutainment
Each chain includes at least one work from TheMet’s collection of 20th and 21st century art while placing these works in a broader creative context.
The game features four types of connections: “Highlights,” showcasing key works, artists, or movements; “Material,” focusing on how works are made; “Emojis,” highlighting signs, symbols, and visual culture; and “Web3,” showing how artists across time have engaged with core concepts underpinning blockchain, such as randomization, security and ledgers.
Themes include: “Art x Tech,” with works that touch on artists’ dialogue with technological innovation across time, including Matthew Jensen’s The 49 States; and “Harlem as Muse,” featuring artists who looked to Harlem for inspiration, including Romare Bearden and Faith Ringgold whose work featured in a recent Dior Couture show.
The game also features additional edutainment moments where players can discover more about particular works and artists
Built with accessibility in mind, it uses screen reader friendly code along with visual descriptions of all in-game artwork and imagery which were developed in partnership with The Met’s Access team.
How It Works
In each game, players create a chain that consists of seven artworks and six connections. The connections can be words, emojis, or artworks. The chain is completed in three rounds, with each round becoming progressively more difficult.
Players can collect a maximum of 12 free badges, one from each weekly chain, with opportunities to earn seven achievements linked to in game challenges. Five of the achievement tokens are free, while two tokens can be purchased “at an affordable price.”
Players can collect NFT badges and win physical experiences and digital rewards from exhibition catalogues and store discounts to private, curator led tours.
Optimizing Value
In 2023 the Met teamed up with Roblox on an augmented reality quest-based app linked to an experience on the gaming platform. Created with technology partner Verizon, it guided visitors via an interactive map to 37 selected artworks, elements of which they could import onto their Roblox profile. Later that year The British Museum launched an experience on blockchain based gaming platform the Sandbox.
That this new initiative remains anchored firmly on a Met owned platform, though, is telling. Gaming has proven itself a powerful tool for engagement so it makes sense to optimize its value, retaining its users rather than sending them elsewhere. NARS did similar in September when it launched Maison Explicit, an immersive virtual commerce experience on its own website.
Convergence Of Technologies
Art Links is built on Coinbase’s Base L2 Etherium blockchain and accepts both cryptocurrency and credit card payments through MoonPay and Stripe.
While no longer perhaps the innovation du jour, as it continues to converge with other technologies and ignited by the Bitcoin hike, blockchain is coming of age and experiencing a resurgence, not least for its value in securing real world assets in conjunction with Artificial Intelligence.
Likewise when linked with the enduringly popular medium of gaming and gaming as cultural currency. As technologies converge they can only become more potent.
