Online video games are unique. At times, they are a messy mixture of a lot of staff, which includes coding, music and animation. Video games are a great experience especially when one is relaxing in the house for hours. Their capability to entertain has made them a fascinating subject. Their fascinating nature has also made them criticized by curators and other critics. Also, video games are not well suited for museum settings. The key reason and the ability that gives video games the power is their interactivity that allows everyone to be a participant instead of being an observer. This is the very reason that has kept video games away from where they are placed in the museums. In the museums, the games can only be seen and not played.
In some museums like Berlin’s Computers Piele Museum and other exhibitions like the Barbican’s Game have significantly focused on video games’ antiquity as a technology. Old computers and arcade cabinets give way to sleek-resembling modern consoles. The exhibited work progress from dots and lines to pixel goblins to many-sided 3D models to convincing characters in appealing-renders worlds. However, there are no Pac-man or Pong arcade cabinets, short outlines of technological modernizers or even glass displays of aged Play Stations set in the V and A’s video games. The Play, Design and disrupt exhibition was the first significant exhibition to recognize games as a part of the modern cultural force.
Anyone that has an interest in the emotional, artistic and radical potential for video games probably started to garner interest a long time ago. The design opened and selected games that were running in the past 15 years. The aim of this was to witness the beauty and the process of the game design. The design of the games opens with a journey unfolding about a mountain and traveler. The game continues to roll out. Footage and images from the video games manifest alongside artefacts from their creations. There are photographs, notebooks, mood boards, storyboards, well-thumbed novels and prototype versions that are inspired by their developers.
Typically discourse around video games focuses so forcefully on the items themselves that gamers rarely get to glance behind the blind of video game development to witness who developed them, why and how. Far from perforating the magic, witnessing a spreadsheet breaching down journey’s eight stages by color, mood and the anticipated effect upon the gamer only improves appreciation of the hustle for those that have had the opportunity to play the game.
