The Smithsonian American Art Museum has launched a website to help develop an upcoming exhibition called The Art of Video Games that will showcase the evolution of art in the medium of interactive entertainment. It’s set to run March 16th through September 30th, 2012.
The venerable institution is asking for the public’s help in selecting games from the last 40 years that they would like to see included in the exhibit. The curators have done most of the legwork by picking hundreds of games spanning dozens of platforms and sorting them into genres. All visitors have to do is register—to ensure they only vote for each game once—and begin scrolling through and picking their favourites from batches of three. From classic mega-hits like The Legend of Zelda and Doom II to modern indie darlings such as Limbo and Minecraft, game lovers of all creeds are sure to find plenty of titles worth their votes. Eighty will end up making the cut for the show.
Keep in mind, though, the museum wants to centre the exhibit “on visual effects and the creative use of new technologies.” We’re not being asked to elect our favourite games, but rather those that were most visually compelling and technologically innovative for their time (the selections have been divvied up into five eras). That means conscientiously selecting between a couple of games like Disney Epic Mickey, which delivered mediocre play but offered up some amazingly authentic interactive versions of 70-year old cartoons, and Super Mario Galaxy 2, which had great play scenarios but didn’t advance the graphical bar much beyond its predecessor, isn’t as cut and dry as you might think.
Sadly, choosing from groups of three might not be an ideal system. How, for example, can you force a person to judge the artistic merit of such seemingly disparate games as Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, LittleBigPlanet 2, and Call of Duty: Black Ops? It will prove an unusual form of torture for some. A better system might have allowed players to simply select a set number of games from each time period or platform rather than fitting them into cramped genres and forcing them to choose from limited groupings.
However, the fact that even the process of selection can get the juices flowing in an old gamer like me bodes well for the success of the exhibit. We can argue all we like about which games are chosen and how they are selected, and lament that other artistic elements—such as music, acting, and storytelling—aren’t being considered, but the fact that one of the world’s most prestigious museums is developing a major, six-month exhibit devoted to games is a significant step forward for the medium.
I’m already trying to think up some way for my family’s 2012 summer vacation to detour through Washington, D.C.
