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Cultural institution

Cultural institution: an educational serious game made reliable in 2 days

The Philharmonie de Paris is a leading cultural institution and an international concert hall dedicated to music. For the opening of its school, its communications department brought me in to make the serious game that trains students in festival marketing fully reliable: a custom Notion system, delivered in a few days.

1 · Context

The Philharmonie de Paris is a leading cultural institution and an international concert hall dedicated to live music. For the opening of its school, each department trains students for careers in festival production.

The communications department designed a serious game around playing cards, budgets, and choices of campaigns, advertising and resources, with a single objective: filling the halls. Each day, the groups play their cards. At the end of the day, the trainers assess their decisions and measure the effects.

The team wanted to bring it all together in Notion: a results board, a ranking between groups and a competition able to hold the class’s engagement.

2 · Challenge

The brief at a glance

  • Make the game reliable before the school year
  • Respect the capacity of each hall
  • Simplify judging for trainers
  • Make the ranking easy to read
  • Match the real constraints of cultural marketing

The challenge was not to design the game, which had already been carefully thought through, but to make its engine reliable. The simulation built in Notion had become too complex to administer, with a fragmented structure the teaching team struggled to master.

The ticketing formulas were unreliable: sales could exceed the hall’s actual capacity, and the split of tickets across seating categories skewed the results. Rankings and progress charts were broken, and every duplicated festival introduced new bugs.

The calendar left no margin: with the start of the school year approaching, trainers needed to judge the groups’ decisions with complete confidence.

3 · Roadmap

  1. 1

    Instructional design

    A competitive experience for students, simple for trainers to judge and true to the reality of cultural marketing.

  2. 2

    Mechanics audit

    A full review of the game mechanics, the databases and the inherited configuration: what to simplify, remove or rebuild.

  3. 3

    Relational architecture

    A central “Actions” database linked to festivals, concerts and seating categories, replacing scattered tables.

  4. 4

    Ticketing engine

    Formulas that cap sales at the hall’s capacity and distribute them proportionally across seating categories.

  5. 5

    Impact of decisions

    Every jury decision instantly translated into tickets sold, awareness and budget.

  6. 6

    Single dashboard

    Awareness, ticket sales, rankings and spending brought together in one clear interface.

4 · The transformation

Before

  • A simulation too complex for the teaching team to administer.
  • Ticket sales that exceed the hall’s capacity.
  • A split by seating category that skews the results.
  • Broken rankings and progress charts.
  • New bugs with every duplicated festival, as the school year approaches.

After

  • A game made reliable in two days, in time for the school’s opening.
  • Four festivals simulated on one stable engine: symphonic, popular music, young audiences and charity.
  • Scores that respect capacity, pricing tiers, VAT and budgets.
  • Simple judging: every decision instantly translates into tickets, awareness and budget.
  • A clear competition between groups, more engaging for students.
Thank you to Warren, who in a few days optimized our scoring and tracking board for our serious game. He was responsive and showed great creativity. The tables in Notion made quite an impression and contributed to the success of this educational game. Thanks again for your availability and your skills.
Portrait of Ariane FermontAriane FermontVisual Communications team, Philharmonie de Paris

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