A number of video games were selected by the
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.
It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of t ...
, located in
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
, as part of its permanent collection. These games were chosen by the Museum of Modern Art in order to showcase design elements within them. Fourteen initial games were announced in November 2012, with plans to expand the collection to up to forty games over time, as the museum is able to acquire the display rights for them. Six more games were added to the collection in June 2013, as well a
game console
A video game console is an electronic device that outputs a video signal or image to display a video game that can be played with a game controller. These may be home consoles, which are generally placed in a permanent location connected to a ...
.
Curated by
Paola Antonelli, the collection was included in the exhibition ''Applied Design'' in the
Philip Johnson Architecture and Design Galleries. In these galleries, around a hundred objects that represent contemporary design were displayed. Most games in the collection are playable on some level and all are displayed in a manner to minimize the influence of
nostalgia
Nostalgia is a sentimentality for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations. The word ''nostalgia'' is a learned formation of a Greek compound, consisting of (''nóstos''), meaning "homecoming", a Homeric word ...
.
Background
The exhibition stirred up controversy, as video games are
not commonly considered art among critics and therefore might not have a place in an art gallery.
However, the collection is modeled after
Philip Johnson
Philip Cortelyou Johnson (July 8, 1906 – January 25, 2005) was an American architect best known for his works of modern and postmodern architecture. Among his best-known designs are his modernist Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut; the po ...
’s 1934 exhibition "
Machine Art," in which pieces of machinery such as propeller blades were displayed in a minimalist fashion to lay focus on their
mechanical design. This set-up would create a "strange distance, this shock, that made people realize how gorgeous formally, and also important functionally, design pieces were," which, according to the exhibit's curator Paola Antonelli, is the desired effect of the exhibition.
In order to minimize factors such as nostalgia, the games are displayed in a minimalist fashion where only a screen and controlling-device are visible on an otherwise blank wall.
At least one other video game, namely ''
Katamari Damacy
() is a third-person puzzle-action video game developed and published by Namco for the PlayStation 2. It was released in Japan in March 2004 and in North America in September 2004. Designer Keita Takahashi struggled to pitch the game to Namco' ...
'', has been displayed in MoMA's design galleries before.
The exhibition is part of a movement to include forms beyond traditional media that the Museum of Modern Art began in 2006, starting with
digital font
A computer font is implemented as a digital data file containing a set of graphically related glyphs. A computer font is designed and created using a font editor. A computer font specifically designed for the computer screen, and not for print ...
s and later moving on to video games. MoMA has taken cautious care of traffic flow, as this had proved to be an "interesting" challenge. Games that are likely to be heavily played, such as ''Pac-Man'', have been placed near entrances and exits to assure a constant flow from these games, while games that would require a larger amount of time to play have had a
demo version developed for them, so that visitors can beat those and move on.
Though the MoMA is mainly interested in acquiring a game's hardware and interface, the