I’m not a rollercoaster tycoon or a football manager but I do work in a museum, so, naturally, the recent game Two Point Museum grabbed my attention. It’s a tumultuous time for my field: I’m in the UK, where the arts are still recovering from the impact of covid, after struggling with dwindling funding during 14 years of successive Conservative governments. The recently elected Labour government are yet to turn the taps back on, so budget cuts and job losses are rife in organisations across the country.
Then there is the seemingly never-ending culture war. Museums find themselves in the middle. The right hates us for being too “woke” and wasting public money. The left (more reasonably) criticise issues such as the colonial roots of many collections or unethical sponsorship deals, such as those with fossil fuel companies. Meanwhile across the world, Donald Trump recently issued an executive order targeting “anti-American ideology” within the Smithsonian, museums face strict government censorship in China, voices advocating for Palestine are silenced almost everywhere, and no one seems to have enough money.
Understandably then, at many museums and arts organisations, relationships between workers and management can be strained. Management face financial and political pressures and have to find ways to keep things going, keeping funding bodies and trustees happy in the process. Workers feel taken for granted, always asked to do more with less, and worry that their job might be at risk whenever there is a new round of cuts. In my own workplace I’m a union rep, so these are issues that I experience first-hand.
With all of that in mind, why not recreate the experience at home? For… fun?
Thankfully, Two Point Museum is genuinely very engaging, quickly dragging you into its rewarding gameplay loop as you grow your museum collection and obsess over how to arrange it. I’m enjoying my time with the game, even as it brushes up against real-life issues. But I wondered if, given my real-life experience, could I run my museum better than my actual museum directors? Could I create a workers’ paradise and decolonise my collection while balancing the books and drawing in the paying public?
The short answer is no, because my staff keep getting severely injured while they travel the world taking whatever objects they like home with them.
For the purposes of this piece, I’m going to focus on the game’s “pre-history” museum. The game starts you here, and it’s one of the more realistic venues, modelled on the type of natural history museum found across the Western world and full of displays of dinosaur skeletons, fossils and other artefacts. Certainly it’s a little closer to reality than the game’s “supernatural” museum, where you rip ghosts from the “netherworld” and imprison them for the entertainment of the viewing public. There’s an unfortunate echo of the “human zoos” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries there, where colonised peoples were put on display for White audiences in Europe and North America. (In Two Point Museum, your ghosts simply leave if they decide they no longer like their accommodations, terrorising visitors on the way out.)
Staffing was my first concern. For obvious reasons, the game streamlines museum jobs, leaving you with Experts, Assistants, Janitors and Security Guards. My own real-world job – writing, editing and producing what’s referred to within the industry as the interpretation materials (labels, leaflets, audio guides, that sort of thing) – is reduced to purchasing readymade Info Stands, which feels a little insulting. Experts are a combination of curator, conservator and tour guide, with the added bonus of leading Expeditions to secure objects for your museum.
Once I’ve hired some staff, I need some actual stuff to go on display. Typically, a museum begins with an existing collection, rather than going out finding things one at a time. The British Museum started with Sir Hans Sloane, who amassed a collection of over 70,000 objects including books, artworks, and natural history specimens. All of this was bequeathed to King George II on Sloane’s death. In the US, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City was built around the collections of people such as Henry Gurdon Marquand and Luigi Palma di Cesnola. Given the time period, these museums are often intrinsically linked to colonialism.
Looking at the British Museum, there are high profile examples of objects that were straightforwardly looted, such as the Benin Bronzes, seized during an attack by British Forces on Benin City. Then there are cases such as the Parthenon Sculptures, often referred to as the Elgin Marbles. These were legally acquired by Lord Elgin in the early 19th century; however, he was dealing with the Ottoman Empire, which ruled over Greece at the time, and Greece would like the sculptures back.
In the UK, it is illegal for the British Museum and other National Museums (those funded directly by the government, rather than an intermediary funding body) to remove objects from their collections outside of very limited circumstances. This means such a return would require a change in the law, which is possible but would be difficult and slow to achieve. (There is also easily identifiable hypocrisy in this area of law, as it is perfectly legal to return artwork stolen by the Nazis during World War Two, as the Tate gallery did in March this year.)
In Two Point Museum, the Expedition mechanic carries its own echoes of the colonial era. At my direction, my team of Experts are constantly Indiana Jonesing it around the world in the museum helicopter (we don’t have one of those at my work). Or, for a real-world example, they follow in the footsteps of former US President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1909, Roosevelt led an expedition through East Africa to ‘hunt specimens’ (i.e., kill animals) for the Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History. His team killed or trapped over 11,000 animals; regarding this number, Roosevelt stated that “I can be condemned only if the existence of the National Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, and all similar zoological institutions are to be condemned.”
Along with dinosaur bones and fossilised insects, at one point an Expedition returned a frozen caveman. For fairly obvious reasons, human remains are another area of controversy in museum collections. It sounds grotesque, but it’s fairly commonplace; if you’ve ever been to see a display of Egyptian mummies, you were looking at human remains. Thankfully, this is an area where communities are able to reclaim from British museum collections (some remains are a little more recent than ancient Egypt), and museums today are much more considerate in how such things are displayed, if they are displayed at all.
I immediately put my caveman on display. Without making Expeditions, the game would be unplayable, and as that ethical bridge had already been crossed, why not continue? I’ve since read that apparently this caveman isn’t dead, and if you don’t maintain a cold environment, he unfreezes and runs amok in your museum (which I’m inclined to let happen, as it sounds funny).
Having compromised my ethics with the collection, perhaps there was more luck to be had with the staff and administration of the museum.
Hiring is a never-ending process in this game: As the museum grows, you need more staff across all roles. You might think that this is extremely obvious, but compared to reality it’s maybe even more unrealistic than the helicopter. In my video game museum, I hire people whenever I need them and, somehow, the money doesn’t seem to run out. The few times I’ve been low on funds, the speedy progression of in-game time means that entry fees and donations allow the bank balance to bounce back.
This also enables me to increase salaries whenever necessary. As staff gain experience, they expect a raise. Back in the real world, union reps spend long periods of time negotiating with management to achieve annual raises for staff, with the possibility of industrial action if we’re unhappy with the offer on the table. In the game, my team exist at my whim, and they should consider themselves lucky that I am a kind and benevolent leader.
I do everything in my power to look after my in-game team. As well as regular raises, I’ve built them a generous staff room, with free snacks and coffee (I even remembered to add a window, once I remembered I could). They receive regular training to aid their professional development. They’re even provided with trips to a medical spa resort, which I can’t say I’ve ever been offered by my employer. That said, I have also never gotten a tropical illness or been bitten by a poisonous snake in the line of duty. But surely they knew the risks when they signed up? Isn’t this what I pay them for?
But even with all of this, I can’t make them happy. I have a current objective to achieve 75% staff happiness, and no matter what I try, that number is stuck in the 60s. I increase everyone’s wages, I add more amenities to the staff room, I provide ample training opportunities. I even tell them when to go on breaks, as they don’t seem able to make these decisions for themselves. Even so, that 75% remains unachieved.
So, it seems I’ve become another bad manager, a leader who is out of touch with their staff and whose professional ethics are practically non-existent. But eventually, through my own efforts or just time and luck, I feel confident I’ll hit that 75% and move on with the game. It’s a remarkably stress-free experience, which is part of why I enjoy it.
I also enjoy my actual job, which is a luxury not everyone has, even if that is decidedly not stress-free. Where the game is simple and streamlined, the real thing is messy and complex. But this complexity is part of the reward, when you get a chance to dig in and really do the work, dealing with thorny issues from history and trying to figure out how to present them to the public. I ultimately wouldn’t trade my in-game role as the boss for the real thing.
Tom Emery is a curator and writer living in Manchester, UK.
