Will my expertise be a help or a hindrance?
You know you’ve worked in museums for too long when you get irrationally excited about staff-only doors. While this is a new feature introduced in Two Point Museum, I know that if it had been in Hospital and Campus, I wouldn’t have had the same unbridled jolt of glee. I didn’t think I could be much more boring, but here we are. Uh, don’t worry—there is a lot more to see in my museum than just special doors.
As a current and former employee of some of London’s major attractions, I’ve worked across visitor experience roles which have involved gallery patrol, admissions, retail and occasionally family activities, events, and tours. I currently work in a gift shop, which is a great place to observe the comings and goings of the environment.
The question is, will any of that real-world experience be of any use in the decidedly unreal world of Two Point Museum? And is it possible to build a museum in the game that stands up to realistic standards? Let’s find out.
I wanted to go in as blind as possible, but I spent a few short hours in Career Mode to get to grips with the basics and understand how museums function in the game. Turns out, not as differently as I feared. Well, outside of things like the Blooming Buffoon, a man-eating plant that devours handsy visitors and spits them out as clowns—which is a neat riff on visitor behaviour, if you ask me. It’s also unlikely you’ll see yetis, frogbornes (space frogs), cheese-moongers (cheesy space dwellers), and clones of Tom Baker’s Doctor Who visiting in real life. Though the latter is the most plausible, at least. I’ve seen a few in my time.
To up the challenge, I set myself a pretty specific goal: to create a maritime-themed museum. Located at the game’s Passwater Cove location, and fondly known as ShipShape, it’ll feature artefacts from the briny deep and maybe a ship or two.
How feasible that would be, using the Marine Life path, I wasn’t sure—but this was the closest to my real world experience and area of interest. I dove into Sandbox mode with a decent amount of starting cash and a reasonable monthly grant, in order to create strong foundations while also simulating real-world financial support. You can set up your toggles to run entirely off donations and grants like government or council funded museums that are free entry, but seeing as my exhibits won’t yet draw in that much cash, I kept the ticket fees to stay afloat.
Passwater Cove’s initial building set-up was the perfect place to create the landing zone, where visitors begin and end their journey. It typically features a couple of small displays, a cafe, toilets, and a catch-all gift shop. After donations, the shop is a prime money maker. “People will buy anything in a museum,” a pop-up tells me, and it’s true—my keys are outnumbered by keychains 10 to one at this point and I regularly see people choose to commemorate their visit with something entirely random. As a professional gift shop dweller, it was satisfying to play around with merchandising, pick the themes, create a familiar layout, and keep up on restocking.
Museums are places of illusion, driven by the visitor experience, so it’s important that they remain blissfully unaware of the Daedalean labyrinth behind the walls containing the staff network. This is where my aforementioned obsession with staff-only doors came in, and I ended up spending at least 30% of my overall playtime setting up shortcuts and exhibit access, and creating a hub which included the staff room, marketing office, analysis room, and workshop. The camera room for security also nestled in nicely near the entrance with a hidden route via the admissions area. Yes, I am fun at parties.
Pushing the boat out
To justify all that fine-tuning, next I needed some actual maritime stuff to display—and that means getting some experts to track it down. This is definitely a bit of a break with reality—real museums already have established collections, so going out on an expedition isn’t something they have to do to sustain themselves. There’s a greater focus on acquisitions and travelling exhibitions to build ‘buzz’. Two Point Museum’s exhibit showcases and collection inspectors are perfect examples of this, even if the popular Impressionist Statue is rather literal in its title as an imprint of someone’s face. Wouldn’t blink an eye at that at the Tate Modern, though.
Staff are often wearing multiple hats—particularly those working front-of-house. Museums are places of passion and shared interests, so, beneath the surface of retail and gallery assistants, you’ll find whip-smart, creative individuals; from historians and freelance writers (hello), to business owners, and performers. Nine times out of ten you’ll be interacting with someone who has a fascinating story to tell and may be involved in all kinds of other activities within and outside of the day job.
That being said, I wasn’t planning to send out Tig Sweat the janitor or Sally Duckworth the shop assistant to the depths of the ocean with the Indy-style experts. Two Point’s unique brand of management-based chaos came out in full force, as teams faced seasickness, incidents of broken face, and fought off a giant squid by singing a sea shanty. Just a mildly life threatening away day month for the team, I told myself, turning a blind eye as they crawled to an ominous box to heal. Don’t worry, they were snapping selfies of themselves a few days later, enjoying the sights as much as the visitors. We’ve all done it.
As time went on, things ran smoothly in the background, thanks to getting granular with the staff rota and zone assignments. However, I grew concerned that I’d picked an overly challenging theme that’s more aquarium than maritime history. Aquariums are excellent, but my lack of experience with them became evident as a Lionhead Fish devoured a Flambuoyant Fish within seconds of introducing them to my tropical tank.
That may just display my lack of common sense more than anything else, but I like to think it was a symptom of my heart being set elsewhere. I’d found an Exterragator Skeleton (prehistoric sea beastie), but that piece alone wouldn’t cut it. Could I find anything more beyond the basic Wetlantean artefacts I started with?
20,000 leagues under the sea
My prayers were finally answered as I found the shipwrecked S.S. Silverbottom. Here you can salvage ghost pirates and the famous spirit Captain Dredge. Now, these ghostly mariners may seem a bit overboard in keeping things grounded, but bear with me—I’m about to do some serious mental gymnastics for the sake of my virtual maritime museum’s success.
Almost all cultural sites have ghost stories or a ‘resident ghost’. We just don’t (well, can’t) capture them and pen them off into a display case. Outside of having a bit of plastic yeeted at me one morning, I can’t say I’ve personally seen one. However, there are museums containing historical rooms which may have ambient voices or holographic imagery to demonstrate living spaces through the ages. Still with me?
On board Greenwich’s Cutty Sark, for example, there was a cabin with a hologram or ‘ghost’ of a crewmate inside, writing in a journal about life on board. To make things even more juicy, a murder took place during what was known as Cutty Sark’s “Hell Ship voyage”. Spooky, eh?
So I decided there’s precedent for these Polterguest Rooms and fastidiously built the ‘walkthrough deck’ to lead into my small aquarium zone—creating a ship-like space that takes visitors above and below deck. I’d inadvertently made a heritage site, and I was chuffed.
Things were looking up, and as I delved deeper into the sea, I was able to choose my route without heading to fish-focused areas, until I finally reached a treasure trove of Wetlantean artefacts and ruins. I now had access to enough maritime exhibits for a full Wetlantean Walk in my main building. The Exterragator Skeleton would finally have a home, along with a fantastic Viking longship-style Wetlantean Boat, Wetsuit of Armour, Mosaic, and…a ginormous Ocean Plug. Hmm. Let’s pretend that’s an anchor and that we haven’t potentially put the sea at drainage risk.
Maritime history is broad and works synchronously with other disciplines, so I built a small hilltop observatory with celestial navigation in mind—while ending up with a space full of anomalies, which, while inactive, look unassuming. But I didn’t expect my prized maritime discovery to be found in outer space. Tracking down the Bottled Spaceship became my most worthwhile obsession and fits perfectly in my house of nautical nonsense. From a distance it looks like your standard oversized ship in a bottle, but it’s a gorgeous little three-master exuding Treasure Planet vibes.
I finally had the visitor experience I had been looking for. It only cost me my best janitor, Tig Sweat, who went MIA (definitely dead), several bouts of broken face, and the loss of Donald Beer, a greedy expert prone to seasickness. Aptly named and barely missed.
World tour
Generating visitor investment is key and you need to cater and adapt to a diverse clientele. Most noticeably, the need for interactivity has grown exponentially over the years. It’s no longer enough to simply admire an artefact and read the associated plaque or go on a tour. You need QR codes, AR experiences, interactive screens, installations, simulators—as many things as possible to enhance the experience and combat the ever-decreasing attention span.
However, the more access you provide, the harder it is to tell people to STOP TOUCHING THE OLD THINGS. Two Point Museum mirrors this, with a devastating effect on my crumbling psyche. No matter how many interactives or info boards I have, nothing will stop little Timmy (or his dad) from motorboating a fossilised starfish. With no gallery assistants to stop this, I was thankful I had several exhibits in glass cabinets.
Experiments with barriers revealed that exhibits would become ‘inaccessible’ to visitors, so I could only enforce so much without assistants wandering the halls to stop them. For now, I’d have to suppress my rage and accept that my Wetlantean Hot Water Balloon would be ravaged for years to come.
I’d been holding off on designing a tour until ShipShape had a sense of coherence. This could have easily been a throwaway activity, and even though I’ve only conducted a handful of tours myself in the past, based on my experience Two Point Museum nails it.
Rather than selecting every exhibit, you pick your highlights, assign the appropriate expert, make sure it’s not too long, and that displays generate good levels of buzz. You also receive reviews at the end to see what can be improved. I set myself the goal of creating a four star tour, and had arranged Wetlantean Walk accordingly.
I’m proud to say that my tours were perfect, but litter had been spotted?! This was the second time I’d had this feedback, firstly from an inspection that said I have “enough bins” and, paradoxically, “too much litter”. That doesn’t sound like a me problem. At least it didn’t until I caught my prehistory expert Draco Malarkey fly-tipping along my tour route.
Museums are wholly unique places, full of knowledge, creativity, and bizarre activity. Most importantly there’s a sense of discovery, and while artefacts and expeditions here are (mostly) bonkers and we probably won’t be capturing ghosts as exhibits anytime soon, truth is stranger than fiction, and even at its most outlandish it all felt palatable to my museum-addled brain. Anything is possible, and that makes me fall in love with Two Point Museum and my real world haunts all the more.
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