Future Arts Centre – Serious Game

A serious game to imagine the Future Arts Centre!

SUMMARY:
You are appointed as the CEO of a brand new interdisciplinary arts centre – a culture hub designed for tomorrow’s world. As you’re making strategic decisions and reacting to global and local events, which principles and values will guide your choices?

You can play solo or decide to collectively debate the choices with peers, colleagues, or partners… to think together about what cultural centres need today to thrive tomorrow.

Bilingual game in French and English.

Game modes: you can play directly online in several rounds (keeping your web page open). However, it is recommended to DOWNLOAD the game to save your sessions in several steps (e.g. team games and training sessions). Complete duration of the game: about 75 minutes.

DEVELOPED BY Master students of the Centre for Digital Media (Vancouver, BC, Canada)

An original idea and a production of the cultural service of the Embassy of France in Canada.

LAUNCH DATE: May 3rd, 2022

TAGS: Serious game, Simulation, Coaching, Culture, Prospective

This game is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

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PRESENTATION

As part of its strategy to support the creative industries, the Embassy of France in Canada, in partnership with the Alliance Française de Vancouver, Art of Festivals, and the Centre For Digital Media (Vancouver), developed a digital simulation (“serious game”) to explore the skills and strategies needed to create and manage future artistic production and presentation venues.
This project was based on a pilot phase (2021), built as an awareness game to understand the environment and organizational challenges of a music festival: Fête Accomplie

Objectives
To design innovative tools to promote skills development and support the cultural sector in a perspective of ecosystems change.
To build a simulation game as a training – coaching or even team building resource, to understand the environment and organizational challenges in order to imagine and experiment major trends and issues of a professional production and presentation centre in the future.

Perspective
The aim is to develop a prospective and long-term vision of a creation-presentation space over 8 multi-year cycles. To experiment with what is possible, in order to prepare a desirable future and to unblock the processes of innovation within the sector.

The complex includes a modular performance hall, an art gallery, a media library, a cinema, creation studios and rehearsal rooms, a bar-restaurant, a reception and community space. The players have to build a strategy and explore a number of tasks and realities of a multi-disciplinary cultural space, considering different fields, constraints or steps to follow. Each question has a pedagogic dimension, which, through several indicators, will define the final profile of the players.

Team and organization
The cultural cooperation team of the Consulate General of France in Vancouver has brought together a pool of French and Canadian professional organizations: representatives of RIM and UFISC in France, the Alliances françaises network and local partners in Canada, to produce a shared expertise on the topics and contents explored in the game.

Five decision areas were identified and a number of options to choose from in terms of:

Strategy and policy
Artistic and programming
Governance
People, in and around the centre
Building and equipment

Built as a tool for dialogue and cooperation among peers and across borders, the issue of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and respect of Cultural rights (Unesco) play a central role in the Future Arts Centre.
Registered in Creative Commons, it leaves freedom to organizations, institutions and operators, both French and Canadian, who wish to leverage the content and infrastructure of the game, to create other elements that respond, playfully, to a skill development need of the creative sector.

See at the end of the article for access to the game’s source files.

CREDITS

This project was developed based on an original idea from the cultural team of the Embassy of France in Canada – Consulate general in Vancouver, and with the expertise of French and Canadian professional organizations.

Technical Development Team – Centre for Digital Media (Vancouver, BC, Canada):