The Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) exhibition, “Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design” closes this Sunday. This exhibition represents the museum’s approach to adding technology and digital art to its galleries.
Different Than the Others
Yet MoMA could do more to create a bridge between art lovers and game designers. After all, they were the ones that began a film library in 1935, exhibited utilitarian toasters and cash registers as “Machine Art” in 1934 and presented modular houses in the 1950s. Curators need to unleash that same passion for games, which struggle in the current exhibition to convey the profundity, and complexity, of their designers’ thinking. On the first floor, there’s a collection of video games. Eleven of them are playable, and 35 in all are viewable. They were a series of digital experiments from the 1990s by John Maeda, a graphic designer who now serves as Microsoft’s vice president of design and artificial intelligence.
Art of Gaming
For the curators Paola Antonelli and Paul Galloway, gaming is a psychological act that has defined an era when many of our relationships are mediated through screens. Gaming embraces immersive realities and embraces players into their virtual worlds with the touch of a button. The simple process of that relationship is made clear in the exhibition “Never Alone,” where Zen games like Flower ask players to weave petals through the wind on a journey across an imaginary landscape. But the concept flows through the veins of modern gaming, ever since Super Mario 64 tasked players with jumping into paintings stored within a museum-like castle to progress through its story. The impact of video games now has been unimaginable, it has spread rapidly like a wildfire, and it hasn’t stopped yet. One example would be Pac Man, an arcade game created by Toru Iwatani in the 1980’s. It is in the “Never Alone” exhibit, and remains as a classic, loved worldwide by video game fans.
Problems
So, what prevents museums from developing more ambition in its programming around games? Well, there’s a few practical reasons. Game designers and creators rarely own the rights to their creations, which are usually held by the publishers financing their games. In an interview, Antonelli singled out other issues for the designers: legal negotiations, lost source codes and obsolete technology that challenge the acquisition process. However, there seems to be no better time for MoMA’s curators to show why gaming belongs in their museum and to help visitors to understand the real beauty of video games.
Different Than the Others
Yet MoMA could do more to create a bridge between art lovers and game designers. After all, they were the ones that began a film library in 1935, exhibited utilitarian toasters and cash registers as “Machine Art” in 1934 and presented modular houses in the 1950s. Curators need to unleash that same passion for games, which struggle in the current exhibition to convey the profundity, and complexity, of their designers’ thinking. On the first floor, there’s a collection of video games. Eleven of them are playable, and 35 in all are viewable. They were a series of digital experiments from the 1990s by John Maeda, a graphic designer who now serves as Microsoft’s vice president of design and artificial intelligence.
Art of Gaming
For the curators Paola Antonelli and Paul Galloway, gaming is a psychological act that has defined an era when many of our relationships are mediated through screens. Gaming embraces immersive realities and embraces players into their virtual worlds with the touch of a button. The simple process of that relationship is made clear in the exhibition “Never Alone,” where Zen games like Flower ask players to weave petals through the wind on a journey across an imaginary landscape. But the concept flows through the veins of modern gaming, ever since Super Mario 64 tasked players with jumping into paintings stored within a museum-like castle to progress through its story. The impact of video games now has been unimaginable, it has spread rapidly like a wildfire, and it hasn’t stopped yet. One example would be Pac Man, an arcade game created by Toru Iwatani in the 1980’s. It is in the “Never Alone” exhibit, and remains as a classic, loved worldwide by video game fans.
Problems
So, what prevents museums from developing more ambition in its programming around games? Well, there’s a few practical reasons. Game designers and creators rarely own the rights to their creations, which are usually held by the publishers financing their games. In an interview, Antonelli singled out other issues for the designers: legal negotiations, lost source codes and obsolete technology that challenge the acquisition process. However, there seems to be no better time for MoMA’s curators to show why gaming belongs in their museum and to help visitors to understand the real beauty of video games.
