IMMERSION, EMOTION, NARRATIVE, AND GAMEPLAY
Ed Rodley
(Routledge – 2025)
WHY READ IT
“Designing for Playful Engagement in Museums” offers an essential framework for practitioners seeking to create more memorable and engaging visitor experiences – whether digital, analogue, or hybrid. It begins from the premise that people, not things, are at the heart of the museum experience.
The framework identifies four key pathways to deepen playful engagement: immersion, emotion, storytelling, and gameplay. Its value lies in providing a clear yet robust theoretical foundation for developing one’s own practice as an experience designer across all types of museums – large or small, science or art – as well as a lens through which to evaluate and enhance existing visitor experiences.
TOPIC
The author offers a profound reflection on what occurs in the mind and body of a visitor as they engage with a museum experience. As awareness grows that audiences for cultural experiences require more than mere access to content, visitors should be regarded as whole individuals with intellectual, emotional, and physical needs that can—and should—be addressed through intentional and thoughtful design. Rodley articulates this perspective, introducing a distinctive form of engagement which he terms “playful engagement”—a concept that captures the transformative moment when visitors encounter museum works and are genuinely moved by them.
As people enter a museum, they become visitors – seekers of something – it may be learning, contemplation, or social connection; often, they don’t have a specific goal, they attend hoping that something will capture their attention and speak to their condition or experience. They go looking for that magic. The author introduces a way of thinking about museums – drawn from sociology and play theory – as a magic circle which is a designed space where participants interact with things and each other with the support of explicit guidelines that allow them to take on new roles and, ideally, emerge having had a meaningful, satisfying time.
The magic circle lies at the core of Rodley’s playful engagement model. Visitors engage with something and emerge transformed. They choose to focus their attention not for an external reward, but because they find the experience intrinsically satisfying. As part of that process, they experience an emotional reaction. If they are not moved by it, genuine engagement has not occurred. This emotional response helps them remember the experience, and once the experience becomes part of their memory, it influences their future behavior.
His endeavor to understand engagement from the visitor’s perspective, combined with his extensive experience, led him to recognize that four elements—sensory immersion, emotional evocation, narrative transportation, and gameful participation—recur throughout his work; they rarely appear in isolation and usually support and amplify each other.
Sensory immersion—the sense of embodied presence—helps us pay closer attention to our surroundings, allowing us to experience them more richly and remember them more vividly. Emotional evocation enhances the memorability of experiences by generating satisfying emotional moments. Narrative transportation draws upon our innate predisposition to structure experiences as narratives, helping us make sense of and retain them. Finally, gameful participation provides a scaffold for playfulness, activating our intrinsic motivation to engage in challenges that bring a sense of personal triumph and mastery.
If museum practitioners can create a magic circle of playful engagement by harnessing these four elements, it is likely that visitors will experience moments that are both memorable and transformative.
Reflections from leading practitioners from around the globe and across the experience design spectrum provide unique insights into the current state of practice. This is augmented by examples from the author’s 30-plus years of experience developing visitor experiences in a variety of science, art, and history museums.
GLOSSARY
Magic Circle: a designed space where participants interact with things and each other with the support of explicit guidelines that allow them to take on new roles and personae and emerge hopefully having had a meaningful, satisfying time.
Interaction Alibi: an explicit framework that gives people permission to behave differently than they might in their everyday lives. It helps you understand what you’re expected to do, feel safe trying something new, and trust that the outcome will be worth your time.
Playful Engagement: an intrinsically motivated process where a person directs their conscious, focused attention to a satisfying experience which triggers an emotional response, lead to the creation or reinforcement of a memory, and influences their behavior afterward.
Sensory Immersion: providing rich multisensory environments to focus visitors’ attention.
Emotional Evocation: increasing the memorability of experience by building emotional triggers into experiences.
Narrative Transportation: taking advantage of narrative transportation to increase memorability of experience.
Gameful Participation: leveraging visitors’ intrinsic motivation to have experiences where they can feel satisfaction, mastery and autonomy.
AUTHOR
Ed Rodley, with an academic background in anthropology and archeology, is Co-Founder & Principal at The Experience Alchemists. He is an award-winning experience designer and lifelong museum lover with over thirty-five years’ experience in envisioning, creating, and implementing visitor-focused projects for cultural organizations large and small. Incorporating emerging technologies into museum practice has been a theme throughout his career.