This Viral Game Turns the Met’s Collection into a Daily Quiz

We at DailyArt Magazine love a good quiz. If our excellent quizzes aren’t enough to sate your appetite, check out the new online game Anthropeum. Each day the game gives players 10 artifacts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art‘s digital collection. The goal is to guess the time and place where the object originated. The closer you are to the correct answer, the more points you score. After submitting each guess, Anthropeum shows players the correct answer and may also give a brief description of the artifact. At the end of the game, players can see how well they did in comparison to others who have already played that day.

Anthropeum was created by Matthew Chu, a 21-year-old undergrad studying accounting and data science at the University of Washington. He programmed the algorithm to give players 10 different images every day for a decade! The artifacts that Anthropeum serves players aren’t totally random though.

The Met’s collection contains a large amount of art and artifacts from Europe, which would dominate the game if all pieces were weighted equally. However, Chu wanted to expose players to art from a more diverse range of times and places. Subsequently, he wrote the algorithm to give more weight to art from non-European regions.

Anthropeum’s secondary goal of exposing players to art from often overlooked places and times is absolutely amazing. Personally, I find it so fun and sometimes am quite surprised when I learn the origins of a piece that I guess wrong. Anthropeum is truly the best way to explore the Met’s online collection as well as to stumble upon art from all regions of the world.