Are the videogames an art? If the question may never have an answer, some cultural institutions have not waited for it to display the medium in their exhibitions. Witness the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), one of the most renowned museums in the world, put video games in the spotlight with the exhibition “Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design “.
A very abstract name at first glance, but which actually concerns most of our lives. “Design influences all the interactions we have with machines, whether it’s with an ATM, a phone or a video game,” Paul Galloway, collections specialist in the museum’s Department of Design and Architecture, explains to Tech&Co.
And what better gateway to talk about design than video games, with their controls that range from the sober to the improbable, their infinite worlds to explore and their sometimes unpredictable interactions? “Video games are defined by these ideas of machine interaction.”
“What’s amazing is what people do with it”
11 video games are thus exhibited in the MoMA gallery, ranging from classics like Pac-Man and Simcity to curiosities like Katamari Damacy or Flowers, going through complete UFOs that are more of a visual experience than the game itself. And more are projected on the walls of the museum, from Pong to Getting over it with Benett Foddy.
The museum approaches interactive design through three aspects: first, the “input”, that is, the way in which the human signal is received by the machine. The exhibition reconstructs the history of these interfaces, from the Pac-Man joystick to touch screens, including the buttons on arcade terminals and the Playstation controller.
MoMA, of course, looks at “the role of the designer, who builds the experience and story for the player,” and finally “the player’s perspective, with creative freedom and interactions with the environment” that can transform the gaming experience. . in a totally unforeseen way, even for its creators.
“We should never have an answer”
And that’s just a sample of MoMA’s collection, which has patiently accumulated 36 games since 2012. Why is an institution like MoMA so interested in video games? A must, for Paul Galloway:
Because the video game has long since escaped from arcades and consoles to colonize every moment of our lives thanks to its mechanics (point systems, comparison with other users…). “I often meet people who tell me they don’t play video games and I ask them: do you play crossword puzzles on the site of the New York Times? Do you use Duolingo? These are all video games.”
The eternal debate remains: is the video game an art? “I think this is a very important question… because it should never be answered,” said Paul Galloway. “The important thing is to keep asking yourself, asking yourself what you value and why.”
Source: BFM TV
