The history of the first mass media of digital culture as a technological and commercial career reaches several museums to analyze its powerful cultural legacy
What is the most successful exhibition of the 21st century? Like any data-based question, the answer depends on how it is measured, but one of the clearest candidates is titled Game On and has been in the renowned Foundation for a few weeks. For no less than 18 years, this exhibition on the history, genres and forms of the videogame has traveled more than 20 cities, updating its contents periodically, in an endless tour that is the dream of every curator resigned to the ephemeral nature of the environment, of the temporary exhibition.
On May 16, 2018, an international institute in London started this project and became the pioneer cultural institution to open its doors to the first mass media of digital culture. With this, a genre is also invented, the exhibition that asks whether videogames already officially deserve the treatment of culture. Dozens of samples around the world have asked themselves this question in the last two decades, and three of them are now open simultaneously in Spain.
There are multiple reasons that justify the progressive Frictional Games Studio Starts Teasing Their Latest Release With New Website For Next Horror Survival Game and the fascination that arouse in more and more cultural institutions. Forty-seven years after the first machine was turned on in a San Jose bar, in the heart of Silicon Valley, his sentimental memory spans up to four generations, from the youngest among the baby boomers to the first natives of the touchscreens. In addition, it would be unrealistic to draw accounts of contemporaneity without taking into account an industry with such force that for eight years it has been moving more money each season than that of cinema and music combined.
At the starting point of almost all the projects that have been dedicated to this territory there is the same argument, an idea that has been the subject of passionate debates: that video games can no longer be seen only as a humble form of unpretentious leisure, and It is their turn to receive the treatment reserved for the most complex and ambitious cultural production fields. The hypothesis has had furious opponents, such as the legendary American film critic, who at the end of his life raised the idea that, by definition, the playful structure of a game, with its rules, challenges and rewards, made the artistic experience The discussion is unlikely to be resolved in the foreseeable future, but in the meantime, in 2016 and 2017, 20 video games became part of the MoMA permanent collection – through, yes, from the door of the design and architecture department. The list includes the predictable foundational classics, but also more unknown titles that have expanded the vocabulary and aesthetics of digital gaming, such as Myst, the classic graphic adventure that first proposed a more meditative and atmospheric gaming experience than stimulating.
The three exhibitions have a similar starting point, the importance of the historical legacy of the video game, its cultural influence and the weight of its industry, but soon put the emphasis on different dimensions of the phenomenon. As expected in a sample of the itinerant blockbuster genre, Game On is an openly nostalgic exercise, which is reaffirmed in the official history of the medium and its most recognizable icons to reach the most familiar public. Who only look for a spectacular encyclopedic recreation room, in which to recover scenes and characters that have accompanied him at some point in the last decades, will not be disappointed.
Barry Lachey is a Professional Editor at Zobuz. Previously He has also worked for Moxly Sports and Network Resources “Joe Joe.” He is a graduate of the Kings College at the University of Thames Valley London. You can reach Barry via email or by phone.
