To wander the halls of the Museum of All Things, is to wander the entire breadth of human knowledge. The interactive museum from developer Maya Claire, which you can download for free on itch.io, gives physical form to Wikipedia by rendering any page on the internet’s favorite repository of information into a digital exhibit players can explore at their leisure. While the interactive experience might not be a “game” in the way most people think of the term, the Museum of All Things is a clever use of interactive media that puts into perspective just how much information we have on demand.
When I first start the Museum of all Things I am placed into a lobby. In front of me I see a help desk with a sign and map explaining how the space is organized. Wings shoot off from the main hall for categories like people, history, culture, geography, and more. Like a real museum, the best way to explore MoAT is to pick a wing at random and start exploring. I choose the culture wing and walk down a large white corridor with smaller hallways shooting off. The sign for flood myths grabs my attention so I enter it and am met with a large exhibit complete with framed images and large posters of text explaining the different historical, cultural, and religious aspects of the term.
All of this information is pulled directly from Wikipedia, with images also sourced from Wikimedia Commons. In simple terms, that means each exhibit the player enters renders a Wikipedia page into a physical space. Each exhibit room also has more signs marking other offshoots, each one a link you’d find in the actual Wikipedia page to a connected topic. For example, After wandering the flood myths exhibit I took a detour down the Zeus hallway and fell through a rabbit hole from there.
That feeling of getting lost in the information rabbit hole is a quintessential Wikipedia experience that most people are familiar with. The hyperlinking of pages makes it so simple to click ad infinitum and find yourself somewhere completely different then when you started, with a handful of disparate facts now lodged somewhere in your mind. MoAT takes that information dive and slows it down to a more meditative process by housing it in an extensive setting that follows a dreamlike structure of never-ending corridors and exhibits. While you might be able to get from Danny DeVito to Henry VIII in a matter of seconds on Wikipedia with a few choice clicks, that same path may take minutes as you wonder about the less easily parsed structure of MoAT. I feel like I finally understand what the protagonist of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi was going through.
It forces players to take in each bit of information on display more intentionally, as opposed to the rushing stream that that same information becomes when on Wikipedia itself. There are ways to expedite the search process within MoAT if so desired. A search function in the lobby opens up a direct path to whatever exhibit you are looking for, and when you want to learn a bit more about something an option in the pause menu will take you directly to the corresponding page on Wikipedia. The novelty of rendering all this information as a physical space, however, is what makes MoAT so charming.
Museums are something of an endurance test. My own personal rule of thumb is that I can’t spend more than three hours in a museum. One minute past that and I usually feel overwhelmed with information to the point my eyes start glazing over. It’s why, despite living in New York City for so many years, I’ve yet to see every room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That’s just one museum, and while it is one of the largest in the world it does have a finite amount of information stored within its walls. By contrast, MoAT is almost impossible to quantify.
By rendering the repository of knowledge that is Wikipedia into a simulacrum of physical space, it gives us a stark reality check about just how much information we really have at our fingertips. Putting it in the form of a traditional museum also reminds us that Wikipedia is not something that just came into existence, but something that was created and actively curated by people. Information is a powerful tool, and as bad actors seek to police projects like Wikipedia, MoAT is a reminder not to take it for granted.
