Even though the "Are games art?" debate continues to swirl, it's clear that video games have gained a permanent cultural presence. Game designers are becoming more ambitious with their projects, and The Modern Museum of Art announced last year that it would begin putting titles on display. At the Twofivesix conference in New York City, Journey's Robin Hunicke and MoMA's Paolo Antonelli spoke about games as interaction, as well as the challenge of putting them on display in a museum setting.
For Hunicke, video games have the capacity to initiate "feeling with a capital F." They can move you in profound ways because games push on you as you push on them, "like a dance."
As she elaborated, Hunicke said that games aren't really about complicated things and intricate systems; they're about the initial feeling. For example, the simple feeling that Katamari Damacy is immediately evident from the title's opening level. You're rolling a ball at the outset, collecting items that stick to it, and that's the entire concept. Things change aesthetically as the ball gets bigger, but the core experience throughout the game is the same as it in the first level.
As for MoMA, it now has 14 games on display, including Eve Online, Katamari Damacy, and Tetris. Antonelli put together a group of game experts to think about the criteria needed to introduce gaming to the museum's collection. "I wanted to acquire them as interaction design," and not as some kind of narrative or experience. MoMA is interested in interaction design, and it considers video games "the testing ground" for this kind of art.
An interesting example of this was mentioned via The Sims. As Hunicke said, there are so many possibilities in the space of that game, but when players create their homes it feels extremely personal. Even for designers, their games hold plenty of surprises. During testing for The Sims, two characters that generally hated each other got in a fight. Halfway through their hated argument, though, the argument bubbles turned into hearts and the two fell in love. Designers code the worlds, yes, but they also embrace unexpected developments more than other artists.
So how does an institution like MoMA get these kinds of feelings across in a museum setting? This was one of the challenges Antonelli faced during the curation process. Some games, like Pac Man and Tetris, can be played at the displays, but for other, time-consuming experiences like Eve Online, that's simply not a practical option. In these cases, Antoneli said some developers created a special demo for their exhibit, while Eve Online developers created a video of "a day in the life" of an Eve player.
As the barrier to entry for video games continues to lower and more designers push the limits of what games are capable of, the challenge going forward will come from deciding how to best convey the core experiences to those who don't or can't invest the time needed to play many of them.
