When the Museum of Modern Art began collecting video games a decade ago, curators boldly asserted that games were an artistic medium. Now the contemporary culture is dominated by them.
The MoMA exhibition “Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design,” which runs through Sunday, represents the museum’s tentative foray into the gaming world at a time when digital culture has overtaken its galleries. Refik Anadol’s algorithmic homage to art history still shines in the museum lobby; an exhibition on the importance of video took up the sixth floor until July 8; and galleries for the permanent collection contain contemporary artifacts such as the Google Maps pin and a huge schematic devoted to the interwoven chain of resources required to create an Amazon Echo as an artificial intelligence system.
However, the museum could do more to break the firewall between art lovers and game designers. After all, this is the same institution that started a movie library in 1935, exhibited utilitarian toasters and cash registers as “Machine Art” in 1934, and showcased modular homes in the 1950s. Curators must unleash that same passion for games, which in the current exhibition struggle to convey the depth and complexity of their designers’ thinking.
On the first floor, old computer screens hang above visitors and are from the museum’s collection of video games. Eleven are playable; A total of 35 games can be viewed. Jammed buttons on their keyboards, users struggled to crane their necks to see the flickering screens above them — a series of 1990s digital experiments by John Maeda, a graphic designer who now serves as Microsoft’s vice president of design and engineering. artificial intelligence .
MoMA’s standards for assessing the cultural significance of video games require an upgrade worthy of the medium, which is expected to reach $385 billion in revenue by 2023 and contribute technologies to the ongoing AI revolution.
For curators Paola Antonelli and Paul Galloway, gaming is a psychological act that has defined an era in which many of our relationships are mediated through screens.
And the vision of designers like Will Wright lets players choose which lessons to learn – or none at all. One player might experience Wright’s most popular game, The Sims (included in the MoMA exhibit), as a gateway to the world of architecture and interior decoration; another might focus on the family planning aspect or the staging of murder mysteries and ghost encounters.
The decision to allow games into the museum has been debated since the 2010s, when critics such as Roger Ebert and Jonathan Jones stated that the medium would never achieve the status of art.
“Chess is a great game, but even the best chess player in the world isn’t an artist,” Jones opined in The Guardian, “She’s a chess player.”
Central to this critique was the belief that playtime belonged to children. A similar logic harmed performance art until museums began making the genre a staple of their programming, coincidentally around the same time MoMA began collecting games.
“People want to be taken to a new place,” Donna De Salvo, curator of the Whitney Museum, said of performance art in a 2012 interview with DailyExpertNews. “In the age of the digital and the virtual and the mediated experience, there’s something very visceral about watching live performance.”
The same can be said for gaming, which embraces immersion by allowing players to move into their virtual worlds with the touch of a controller. The simplicity of that relationship becomes apparent in the “Never Alone” exhibit, where Zen games like Flower ask players to weave flower petals through the wind on a journey through an imaginary landscape. But the concept runs through the veins of modern gaming, ever since Super Mario 64 tasked players to jump into paintings stored in a museum-like castle to progress through the story.
So what’s stopping museums from developing more ambitious programs around games? And why hasn’t a serious institution like MoMA staged the first major retrospective of a video game designer when it has enough material for obvious picks like Will Wright or Shigeru Miyamoto?
There are a few practical reasons. Designers rarely own the rights to their creations, which are held by the publishers who fund their games. In an interview, Antonelli mentioned other hurdles: legal negotiations, lost source codes, and outdated technology that stand in the way of the acquisition process. And then there’s the headache that comes with wiring all those electronic systems in the galleries.
Still, there doesn’t seem to be a better time for MoMA’s curators to show why gaming belongs in their museum and to help visitors understand the difference between what is a trade show and what is for sale at the Nintendo store a few blocks away in the street.
Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design
Through Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, moma.org.