MOSES LAKE — The company known as Museum Hack is designed to encourage people who normally wouldn’t go to a museum to engage – no, wait. Ethan Angelica of Museum Hack said the best way to demonstrate would be to play a game. A museum mystery game where the victim is a tour guide named Ethan.

The game had to be modified for the venue, the Moses Lake Civic Center Auditorium. Normally the guide has been dispatched by a character in one of the artworks, using an object from an artwork or the museum’s collection. For this game the detectives used characters and objects from a list of artists, looking up the works online.

So who killed the tour guide? Participants had 2 minutes to make up a story, using the artworks. For one group he was lunch for a vampire in training who just got hungry. For another he was Done In by a pair of impoverished aristocrats turned art thieves. Two of the killers carried lethal parasols.

Angelica was the keynote speaker at the annual Washington Museum Association conference, Thursday and Friday in Moses Lake, The conference draws museum directors, staff and volunteers from around the state.

The two-day conference included lunch with Mrs. America 2017, Natalie Luttmer of Moses Lake, and a number of workshops and discussion groups.

Angelica said museums do a good job of programming for kids; Museum Hack's tours are targeted at adults. Its market niche comes from an insight discovered by founder Nick Gray while on a date at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City – museums can be fun places to hang out, with the right attitude.

Museum skeptics, he said, look at a museum as a one-way street, where they should “be silent and let the objects walk over them.” But actually museums are full of objects with stories to tell, and “we (the tour guides) really love telling stories.” The goal is to tell those stories in a way that get people interested in the object, the people, culture and historical circumstances that produced it, he said.

Museums should look through their collections to see what objects can be used as the basis for those interesting stories, he said.

Angelica said he was an actor whose day job was as a tour guide in the New York City zoo system. “It was something I had really fallen in love with,” he said, and he joined the fledgling company about three and a half years ago.