In New York, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is collecting works for an upcoming exhibit in interaction design: Video Games.
As part of the Architecture and Design collection, they’ve procured classic games such as Pac-Man, Tetris, Another World, Myst, and SimCity 2000 for the initial exhibit to be held in March 2013.
Other games which will be featured in the exhibit include vib-ribbon, The Sims, Katamari Damacy, EVE Online, Dwarf Fortress, Portal, flOw, Passage, and Canabalt.
The 14 games will eventually grow to 40, in which MoMA would like to include Spacewar!, Pong, Space Invaders, Asteroids, Zork, Tempest, Donkey Kong, Yars’ Revenge, M.U.L.E., Core War, Marble Madness, Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, NetHack, Street Fighter II, Chrono Trigger, Super Mario 64, Grim Fandango, Animal Crossing, and Minecraft, among others.
MoMA will focus on four design traits , namely Behavior, Aesthetics, Space, and Time:
- Behavior refers to the world created by game designers in which they induce a particular type of behavior or response from the game players.
- Aesthetics refers to the use of visual intention to come up with a game’s unique identity.
- Space refers to the coding architecture created by game programmers to bring the game design to life.
- Time refers to the dimension of time involved and how it passes in the real world and in the world in the game.
MoMa’s vision for this interactive exhibit will be for museum visitors to get the chance to play with the games, especially those which can be finished in just a short time. For other games, like massive multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPG) which normally involve years of game play and more players than can actually fit in the museum, the exhibit will try to create guided tours. Older games will be featured in interactive emulations, where “a programmer will translate the original code, which was designed for a specific platform, into new code that will create the same effect on a newer computer.”
“Are video games art? They sure are, but they are also design, and a design approach is what we chose for this new foray into this universe. The games are selected as outstanding examples of interaction design—a field that MoMA has already explored and collected extensively, and one of the most important and oft-discussed expressions of contemporary design creativity,” explained Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator at MoMA, in a post entitled “Video Games: 14 in the Collection, for Starters.”
She added, “Our criteria, therefore, emphasize not only the visual quality and aesthetic experience of each game, but also the many other aspects—from the elegance of the code to the design of the player’s behavior—that pertain to interaction design.”
In order to properly preserve these video games, the digital conservation team at MoMA are trying to acquire original copies of the software, hardware, and source codes of the games.
(Featured Image and Article Images Credit: EVE Online, Tetris, Portal, and flOw via MoMa)
