Displaying Games in the Museum
Posted 2015-03-30 - Archived under: experience, games, museum, Tekniska Museet - Reply
In the games research mailing lists there’s been a discussion around exhibiting games in museums recently. A large portion of the argument is around two main ways of displaying games. First, to display games as games, whether this means a design, an interactive play piece or a way of showing the social and the community happening. I have myself been involved in similar discussions at Tekniska Museet, here in Stockholm, Sweden, where they are right now working on a project to save games for the future, and where the social part is one of the big issues. How do you preserve something like World of Warcraft, where a large portion of the game is to meet people? If you play it in fifty years, all the servers will be empty! Then other solutions is necessary to be able to show this for the future museum audience. Secondly, there is a discussion on displaying games as art. This is often more obvious, as these are exhibits with an artist displaying something, as it is meant to be seen right now. But also here there are of course problems with documenting this for the future.
As I know several of my readers are interested in the subject I have gathered the main references cited in the discussion. I hope some of these will be of use for you, and as always, feel free to comment if you have special interests and I will do my best to answer or send you on to someone who can!
Here are the references:
- Discussions on current game exhibits in EDGE Magazine # 277
- ”Gameplay” at the German ZKM Karlsruhe
- German Computer-Game-Museum at Berlin
- Guins, Raiford. Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife
- Skot Deeming and Martin Zellinger’s work with curating the Vector Game Art festival in Toronto, Canada
- deWinter, Jennifer, “The Midway in the Museum: Arcades, Art, and the Challenge of Displaying Play.” in Kocurek and Tobin (eds.) Reconstruction
- Fleisch and Payne’s. “V9N1: Gaming Art” in the International Digital Media and Arts Association
- The exhibit ”Krazy! – The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art” at the Vancouver Art Gallery (The exhibit is gone, but the catalogue is available)
- Stuckey, Helen. Several pieces, start with the MA-thesis.
- And some names to look into: Hughes, Lynn; Sharp, John;
Also, there are lots of references to MOMA’s work with collecting gmaes:
- The MOMA collection
- WIRED
- Polygon
- The Guardian
- Aesthetics online
- Gamastutra
- Proceedings from Museums and the Web
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