Reconstruction Vol. 14, No. 1

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The Midway in the Museum: Arcades, Art, and the Challenge of Displaying Play / Jennifer deWinter

Abstract Arcade games are increasingly being presented in museum spaces for both contemplation and play. By placing arcades into the museum, curators are creating narratives about the history of games, about the cultural value of these artifacts, and increasingly, about the artistic merit of computer games. However, when arcades enter the museum space, a tension arises between the critical distance demanded by museums—a distance needed to contemplate the curatorial vision of an object—and the closeness and irreverence demanded by play. To this tension, I argue museum spaces bring together these contemporary objects as part of a discourse concerning a postmodern anxiety of vanishing culture. To this, arcades in the museum act to create and sustain a sense of collective nostalgia that intimately links computer games to childhood regardless of the historical record. Ultimately, what I find in considering the arcade in the museum is the prevalence and preservation of play within the resignification of museum spaces.

Keywords Media; Museums & Archives; Rhetoric; Video Games; Arcade

<1> In 2012, two notable institutions visibly endorsed video games as important cultural artifacts: The Smithsonian American Art Museum hosted “The Art of Video Games” exhibit, and the Museum of Modern Art archived fourteen video games in their Applied Design exhibit. These exhibits act as part of an emerging discourse concerning video games and art, a discourse that has become more visible since Roger Ebert famously took a stand against games as art in 2010. Yet they are not the first stand. These exhibits join an historical trajectory of the video game in the museum, a trajectory that includes The Barbican Centre’s “Game On” exhibit (launched in 2002) and the American Classic Arcade Museum (since 1998). Video games, these exhibits all argue for different reasons, are an important cultural art form, and integral to this art form in the very interactivity of the game. As Mike Mika writes in “The Art of Video Games” curatorial book, “none of it matters without the player. It’s the human interface that makes it all work, that bring a game to life” (11). Thus, to visit a video game exhibit is to walk amongst tightly packed arcade cabinets and game consoles, dodging young running children, waiting for a familiar game or taking a chance on a game that you’ve never heard of before. To visit a video game exhibit is to stand and play, possibly with others watching over your shoulders as you try to master the rules, to get your initials onto the leaderboard, to smile in the nostalgic familiarity of Ms. Pac-Man (Bally Midway, 1982). To visit a video game exhibit is, in many ways, to go to the arcade.

<2> The video game exhibit denies museum space. Like paintings, when video games enter the museum space, they are ordered, curated, and put on display for the purpose of contemplation. Yet the very people who come to the museum space do not tend to interpolate themselves within the museum framework. This can be felt from the moment that museum-goers enter the video game exhibit to the moment that they sign the exhibit log. More than interactivity and the human interface, play comes to the forefront. Yet it is also play that museums attempt to dominate, and, in dominating play, to destroy. Here, Huizinga’s point concerning play as labile illuminates this tension: “At any moment ‘ordinary life’ may reassert its rights either by an impact from without, which interrupts the game, or by an office against the rules, or else from within, by a collapse of the play spirit, a sobering, a disenchantment” (21). Play, according to Huizinga, invokes a place where the demands of the ordinary world are suspended to allow for new rules and interactions that are safe from repercussions in the real world. In this magic circle, players are invited in and integral to the formation and perpetuation of the circle. This is markedly different from the types of magic circles that are invoked by a Benjaminian aura. These are the circles that encase objects in distance—both physical and temporal—from the viewer (“The Work of Art” 222-23). Museums, then, invoke an aura of distance, providing a lens through which we interpret the real world; thus, their purpose promotes sober contemplation, not playful dalliances. To quote Raiford Guins, “Museums are the machinery to still life” (“After Life History” <10>)

<3> In this article, I consider the arcade in the museum, and in this consideration, I aim to situate the tensions between play and contemplation in particular historical and cultural moments. In particular, I look to the Chicago World’s Fair, the birth of the midway, as a location in which play and the playful carnival undermined the designed intentionality of this important collection of exhibits. Following this, I jump forward in history to consider the American Classic Arcade Museum and other similar institutions, which together function both as an arcade and an archive of material culture. In these museums, I argue, arcades become both objects of contemporary play and objects of nostalgia brought about by a continuous sense of vanishing materials that never completely vanish. In the final section of this paper, I turn my attention to video game exhibits in more traditional museums, such as the Game On traveling exhibit and the Smithsonian’s The Art of Video Games to argue that the tensions between contemplation and play are more pronounced and juxtaposed. Further, to put these games into museums invokes through linguistic and spatial semiotics the very concept of art, and art, as Fleisch and Payne note, “exists powerfully as discourse” and “reflects a host of material connections to people’s everyday lives” (n.p.). Thus, these video game exhibits evoke what Boym calls “collective nostalgia,” a longing for childhood that becomes institutionalized through places like museums to help naturalize video game history to provide a collective framework in which individual experiences make sense in broader cultural sentiments. Video games, when placed in this childhood-nostalgia context, become more imbricated in a juvenile identity. Yet the ambivalence introduced through the institutional space of the museum is one of serious, adult contemplation, so at any moment, a museum attendee is asked to be simultaneously playful and critically distant in considering artifacts that are both ubiquitous in our daily life and vanishing into modernist longing. And here, we see the ideological influence of the midway, that place of play and pleasure, and its ability to overshadow reflective and leisurely culture.

The White City Versus the Midway: Round One, Fight

<4> In 1893, Chicago hosted the World’s Fair: Columbian Exposition to celebrate American technological and scientific progress since Columbus “discovered” it 400 years previously. Ultimately, the fair organizers had a rational argument that they were attempting to spatially make in the fair—the evolutionary move through the primitive to the eventual perfection of American modern exceptionalism found in the White City. The walk through the fair takes the fair-goer from savage to civilization. In order to make this case, the fair organizers brought in people from 46 countries and put those people on display. It created almost 200 new, temporary buildings. It was the crown jewel in Chicago’s cultural renaissance. The World’s Fair: Columbian Exposition, according to Rydell et al. (2000), would join the post Haymarket Massacre civilizing projects like the Art Institute, the University of Chicago, and the libraries in a series of conscious rhetorical actions on the art of Chicago’s elite (32). The fair was dually organized, one as the monumental White City and the other as the Midway Plaisance. The White City had the museums, the Smithsonian, the scientific and technological innovations. The Midway had ice cream, the Ferris Wheel, hootchy-kootchy dancers, and carnival-style rides and games. The White City was, according to Gilbert, about cultural control. The Midway offered diversions and delights.

<5> The Midway won.

<6> The Midway was ostensibly an anthropological exhibit. According to Rydell’s All the World’s a Fair, “On the Midway at the World’s Columbian Exposition, evolution, ethnology, and popular amusements interlocked as active agents and bulwarks of hegemonic assertion of ruling-class authority” (41). Indeed, the Midway was heralded as anthropology’s “great object lesson” (40). In designing it, Putnam organized the information in an evolutionary schema, and this, according to Rydell, is its greatest importance (64). In these ethnographic villages, spectators could travel the world and watch other people at work and at play in their savage or evolving childish state. For Putnam, the Midway provided both “‘instruction as well as of joy on the Merry Midway’” (qtd. in Rydell 64). Yet James Gilbert points out that the balance between delight and education ended up being unsustainable: “Rapidly outgrowing the objectives of ethnology, the Midway developed into a vast amusement park that, nonetheless, retained certain elements of its original purpose” (109). That purpose was used to further consumerism in the Midway; the mysterious Orientals were placed closest to the Ferris Wheel to the monetary benefit of both exhibit and ride.

<7> The Midway’s frivolity and spirit of play overturned in its carnival the expressions of high culture in the White City as well. For example, Gilbert uses the case study of Theodore Thomas’s classical concerts, concerts that were composed for the World’s Fair and were to be played in the White City, to highlight the constant event tensions between the Midway and the White City. Gilbert cites the Chicago Tribune as evidence of the Midway’s appeal to the attendant masses: “‘The crowd was too busy seeking choice spots from which to view fire works that began to paint the sky at 9 o’clock to pay more than passing attention to the music’” (128). Thus, Gilbert argues, we see the rise of popular culture and consumer culture as a dominant experience at these fairs, something that Susman finds again in the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair. In analyzing the writings of Fair designers, Susman sees evidence of the same tensions explored above, tensions between didactic lessons and popular entertainment and consumption (216). Susman adds to this that people ignored the spatial layout, and thereby the spatial rhetoric, of the fair, moving in groups like “sheep” to those locations with the largest crowds (219). Consumer capitalism, according to Susman, Rydell, and Gilbert, becomes the new ideology, the Midway its perfect expression.

<8> It is easy, even accurate, to claim that the Midway is glorious consumption par excellance. In this construction, consumption stands in opposition to the cultural education offered in the White City, a place to reflect on the successes of civilization. Yet what this binary seems to ignore is the play, the novelty, made readily available in the Midway. Just as important as the Ferris Wheel, that staple at all carnivals now, was the carnival game. We do not have a definitive list of the games played at the World’s Columbian Exhibition. We have a list of those that were displayed, catalogued in Bertuca et al.’s The World’s Columbian Exposition: A Centennial Bibliographic Guide, yet this guide does not give account for the carnival style rides and games that so many fair goers played. And all of these were found in the Midway. We do know that the World’s Columbian Exposition is the precursor of Coney Island and other replicated carnivals and amusement parks. “The Midway,” according to Kasson in his book Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century, “offered a far different conception of cultural cosmopolitanism than the Court of Honor, one oriented not to the ordered and refined past but to the heterogeneous and boisterous present” (26). A boisterous present that brought us Skee Ball, Spin the Wheel, Ducks in the Pond, among other redemption games along with mechanical horse riding and fortune telling (Applebaum).

<9> To the observation that the Midway provided fair-goers with games, with novelty and frivolity among the child-like races, I would like to add the very festive nature of the Midway. In his consideration on the ritualistic nature of these World’s Fairs, Susman writes, “These speculations bring me back to the ideas of rites of passage and ritual. Medieval fairs became a sort of temporary town that represented for the visitor a special kind of festival” (Commentary 5). Thus, for Susman, these fairs are also festivals, and as such, embody the festival spirit. And this is evidenced in contemporary writings. For example, in his article “The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893,” Rydell quotes the contemporary sentiment expressed in the Chicago Tribune: “every night was beautiful and every day a festival, in which for the time all thoughts of the great world of toil, of injustice, of cruelty, and of oppression outside its gates disappeared” (254). This festival nature is essential to understanding both the tensions between the critical engagement with displayed education and the frivolity of the Midway. In a brief passage of his book Homo Ludens, Huizinga considers the Festival and the attitudes and modes that its creates and sustains: “Consecrations, sacrifices, sacred dances and contests, performances, mysteries—all are comprehended within the act of celebrating a festival. The rites may be bloody, the probations of the young men awaiting initiation may be cruel, the masks may be terrifying, but the whole thing has a festal nature. Ordinary life is at a standstill” (21, emphasis added).

<10> Up against the power of the play spirit unleashed in dances and contests, in performances and mysteries, in the complete halting of ordinary life, is it little wonder that the Midway’s legacy continues to be seen in county fairs, arcades, and amusement parks. Further, redemption games, one of the precursors of the computer arcade, in conjunction with other Midway offerings, were so successful in invoking the play spirit that high culture displays suffered. There are a number of lessons to learn here as the field of game studies brings institutional discourses to bear on video games. The World’s Columbian Exposition brings us the Midway, the carnival-like place where people pay for each game, each ride, and each event (rather than the flat fee of the White City). The vendors make a tremendous amount of money. The people are happy. They attend the White City, but the fair organizers recognize that the people were not getting out of the fair the specified cultural lessons. The tensions between play and exhibition could not have been better exemplified than at the birth of the Midway, a place where games and rides are introduced for the first time among the novelties of the mysterious Others. The combinations of novelty, spectacle, and fun, these early amusements are what is emulated and reproduced into American popular culture, providing a blueprint of sorts for the later twentieth century arcades and the even later problems of once again bringing the arcade into the museum, into the White City.

The Arcade as Museum: Always Vanishing, Never Gone

<11> The American Classic Arcade Museum (ACAM) is integrated in the still-operating arcade Funspot. Located in Laconia, NH—a resort town known as a motorcyclist destination—Funspot occupies a three-story building and hosts a mini-golf course, a bowling alley, an arcade, and a level dedicated to redemption games. Bob Lawton started Funspot in 1952, but it wasn't until 1998 that the concept for the Classic American Arcade Museum was launched, based on a suggestion from Gary Vincent, to take advantage of the large collection of classic arcades already in operation [1]. In a 2009 interview on Joystiq, Vincent explained his motivation for this endeavor: “The organization was started because, I had seen there was really no place left for people to go and play classic games. They were being purchased by collectors and placed into home collections, where they were out of public use” (qtd. in de Matos). The steady accumulation of arcade cabinets (with an emphasis on pre-1987 games) earned Funspot its distinction as the world’s largest arcade (Guinness World Records, 2010).

<12> Funspot appears like any other arcade: Rows of machines stand in dimly lit halls, the din of digitized sound is sometimes disrupted by people talking and yelling. Yet scattered throughout the arcade-museum are nods to the museum experience, signs that provide historical context, investing these artifacts with temporally defined ‘aura’ (Benjamin, “The Work of Art”).

Figure 1: Picture of top floor of Funspot and ACAM.

This collection is not fully curated; as can be seen in the above photo, only some of the cabinets are accompanied by collection information, such as release date, production company, and sometimes the person who provided the cabinet. Then, throughout the building can be found glass display cabinets that show the paraphernalia of games, such as the Pac-Man (Namco, 1980) cabinet.

<13> With about 200 games on the arcade floor, a visitor will find all the old standbys: Ms. Pac Man (Bally Midway, 1981), Galaga (Namco, 1981), and Centipede (Atari, 1980). In addition to these more familiar games, however, a visitor to the arcade and museum will find experimental, rare, and even unheard of games, such as Kozmik Krooz’r (Bally Midway, 1982), Chiller (Exidy, 1986), and Leprechaun (Tong Electronics, 1982). Further, Funspot and the American Classic Arcade Museum host the International Classic Video Game Tournament for which the organizers pull a selection of cabinets from their collection to highlight that year. Competitors can pay the entrance fee and play a host of unannounced games (between 20 and 30), and their scores are collected on the “Scoreboard.” Without this event, fairly obscure games would continue to inhabit their places in the rows of other cabinets, underplayed by people (Vincent 2013 interview). What the competition does is act as a type of advertisement for those cabinets that do not make up the landscape of a shared 1980s arcade culture. And it is this very process of collecting these obscure games and highlighting them that gives a sense of impermanence, a sense that these arcades are vanishing.

<14> The American Classic Arcade Museum is an interesting case study when considering the museumification of arcade games. First, ACAM and Funspot was and is a functioning arcade first and foremost, which does much to preserve the culture and context of the collected artifacts. Second, in amassing the rare and vanishing cabinets of arcade history, it presents (perhaps unintentionally) a sense that this is a vanishing culture, and time is running out. And third, the games provide a spatial representation for cultural nostalgia, a shared memory of play and the cultures of play that can be tapped in to, but only at this location and at this time. In all of these, Funspot and ACAM tap into the general anxiety of postmodernity—that the material cultures of our collective experiences are disappearing, and with their disappearance, we anticipate and dread the end of meaningful individual and collective memory. Ultimately, this approach resignifies the arcade with the trappings of museum culture—the collection, the curation, and the narrativization of arcades. But this resignification is a veneer, yet a veneer demanded by the continued sense of vanishing culture maintained for the continued safeguarding of capitalism.

<15> The tension then arises between this sense of nostalgic longing and sense of impending loss against the desire to play. Every person who visits receives a cup full of tokens and must choose between three levels of play, spending their hours at the arcade, at the redemption machines, at the bowling alley, at the onsite bar, at the bingo hall, a the mini golf course. Each time a person plays in the arcade, he or she places a coin into the machine, engaging in what Kocurek calls “coin-op capitalism,” or the seemingly small investments in time and money needed to play arcade games [2]. In the case of Funspot, the economic model of the arcade is now turned toward the added goal of preservation of cultural texts. However, this capitalism continues to drive many of the arcade preservation efforts in general. The Strong National Museum of Play, for example, asks visitors to pay the admission price to the museum and then also spend their coins and tokens on the arcade machines, and the money generated from the arcade coins funds the maintenance and preservation of those same arcades. While an ideological shift happen from profit to preservation, the fact remains that the economic structure remains the same and both ideological structures are invested in maintaining the game cabinets, albeit for different reasons. And within this consumptive practice, there is little compulsion to sit back and consider the material and play cultures of the arcade as a museum artifact. Similar tensions exist when importing the arcade into traditional museum spaces, such as the Smithsonian, but before turning my attention to those, I want to first consider more fully the three points made above.

<16> ACAM’s curatorial vision pertains mostly to collecting and making available early arcade cabinets. And while there are some signs of museumification—accompanying signage, display cases, and vintage posters—arguably, the real museum is the arcade itself. ACAM has managed to sidestep the death and preservation practices that are common in many museums. As Maleuvre (1999) argues, too much of museum culture tends to pull objects out of their lived lives, depriving them of their vitality: “Beauty, the value of an artwork, is therefore contextual, dependent on affiliations with use and cultural provenance” (16). While these pre-1987 games are temporarily removed, they remain in the cultural provenance of the arcade. People still come through with large soda in hand, a fist full of tokens, and a willingness to stand for hours playing for the fleeting satisfaction of putting their three initials onto the scoreboard.

<17> In this way, ACAM and Funspot may be doing more for preserving arcades than many other attempts. The road sign outside of the building omits ACAM. Only in two places—above one of the external doors and inside the building and over a class case—can visitors find a backlit sign reading “Welcome to The American Classic Arcade Museum,” but even then, the relationship between the two names is jumbled. Funspot still uses many of the recognizable tropes of the arcade—dim lights and tokens—harkening back to the dark rooms of the 1980s. And there’s no real policing of the classic arcades; people do not approach them with reverence. People are free to play or not. With rows and rows of classic games lined up, each appealing to passing players, visitors can experience the strategies of 1980s arcade competitions for space, attention, and money. The act of play, then, becomes the penultimate expression of success in any of these categories. When the arcade is full, as it often is around tournament time or in the summer, then there is a manic energy of play and spectatorship. When the arcade is less populated, there is a type of sadness that shrouds the dingings and zoinks, the blinking lights. These cabinets, built to human scale and part of the dialectic of human play, demand people. And this is the impressive success of Funspot and ACAM: The imperative to amass and make available a time-limited collection of arcade cabinets preserves not only the material objects but makes available a lived experience of those objects, saving them from the obsolesce of history. The arcade lives because the ideologies of the museum preserves and presents those practices to leisurely consumption.

<18> Nevertheless, there is a strange tension here between the arcade of the moment and the past to which it belongs. When standing back and looking at the room packed with arcade cabinets, it becomes easy to recall Benjamin’s comments about the role of collections as a symptom of people’s passions. A collector brings together items with encyclopedic goals, adding more and more together and providing cohesion through historical imagination and narrativizing the past. “Every passion,” according to Benjamin, “borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories” (“Unpacking” 60). Yet because this is a public collection, the collector and the visitor are both imbricated in this chaos of memories, forming and reforming their collective memories of arcades together. Matthew Thomas Payne speaks to this formation of collective memory in providing a framework for re-released classic games, such as MAME cabinets and plug-and-play systems: “The game and the gamer… are the historically contingent dialectic that are the foundational elements of classic gaming culture” (54). Thus, through the constant replaying of games, or iterative and reiterative play, are shared memories formed. And for many visitors of Funspot and ACAM, these shared memories are linked to a collective sense of childhood.

<19> Nostalgia has long been linked to childhood as both a place to locate longing and a conflation with childhood as an idyllic time (c.f. Moran, 2002; Hutcheon, 1998; Austin, 2007). That play gets absorbed into this is not surprising. In her article “Child’s Play,” Gillian Brown notes that experts over the last three hundred years see play as “a crucial feature of childhood,” and that more importantly, “[c]hildren retain these feelings about their pleasures even after they have become adults” (84, 85). Therefore, the fact that play evokes collective nostalgic longing for childhood makes sense in the context of Funspot and ACAM. Consider Ocker’s blog review “Funspot and American Classic Arcade Museum”: “But the point of all this is that the video games of our childhood are in a museum. … Basically, they are old. But they are venerated.” Or Ghathaway’s post from “Did Arcades Kill Themselves?”: “I could buy a destroyed Pacman from a local bar, restore it and fulfill my nostalgia until I find one of those Star Wars cabinets. Until this happens, we will continue to meet at Funspot and carry out our childhood memories.” Or even Gary Vincent’s quotation in the Kotaku review of ACAM “‘I think we’re preserving a lot of people’s childhood memories, and a part of gaming’s heritage here. I think people will see the value in keeping this part of history alive’” (qtd. in McWhertor). Evident throughout these and many other comments is this idea of “our childhood,” and an appeal to that nostalgia as the main impetus for collecting and preserving. Yet this collective nostalgia is tenuous at best, and is constantly presented as part of a vanishing culture, always on the brink, never gone.

<20> Arguably, this sense of vanishing is both accidental and purposeful. By accidental, I mean that the simple collection of these cabinets into a single space provides a material argument that these are disappearing. Visitors are likely to realize that they haven’t seen certain game arcades in a while if ever. Further, the slow degradation of the materials heightens the sense that these are on the verge of obsolesce, a topic that both Newman (2012) and Guins (Game After 2014) discuss. By purposeful, I mean that members of ACAM are invested in collecting and preserving this consciously because they witness the increasing scarcity of these materials. This creates a very specific type of nostalgic overlay onto the arcade in museum spaces. In writing about modernity and nostalgia, Marilyn Ivy states, “Despite its labors to recover the past and deny the losses of ‘tradition,’ modernist nostalgia must preserve, in many senses, the sense of absence that motivates its desires” (10). In engaging with the rhetorics of loss and recovery, Ivy explores this idea of “vanishing,” or “the movement of something passing away, gone but not quite, suspended between presence and absence, located at a point that both is and is not here in the repetitive process of absenting” (20). This creates in collective nostalgia a sense of reflective nostalgia, which according to Boyd, “has elements of both mourning and melancholia” (55). But this reflective nostalgia, which is embedded in affective connection with pain and loss, is further complicated by childhood nostalgia and the memory of play and pleasure.

<21> This practice of museumifying arcades, then, adds cultural signifiers that have real historical and cultural significance. However, the addition of nostalgia and loss as it is felt toward play, games, and childhood has real implications for the contemporary rhetorics of computer games and arcades as significant objects with artistic and expressive value. This becomes even more evident when the arcade moves into traditional museum space. And these signifiers become even more complicated when play as a contemporary activity joins nostalgia: The arcade in the museum presents a contemporary play experience imbricated in the past that seemingly denies the contemplation demanded by museum space.

The Midway in the Museum: Arcade Games as Joyous Play and Nostalgic Loss

<22> As the arcade enters more traditional museum spaces, we see the combination of play as predominant (like the midway in the Columbian exhibition) and play and video games as part of collective nostalgia. This all acts to complicate any argument presented by museum spaces, such as those attending to art, culture, and historical significance. “Are video games art?” MOMA’s Senior Curator in Architecture and Design Paola Antonelli asks. “They sure are, but they are also design, and a design approach is what we chose for this new foray into this universe.” Likewise, Chris Melissinos, one of the leaders in bringing “The Art of Video Games” to the Smithsonian, discusses the selection criteria for the eighty games on display: “The criteria used for selection included visual effects, creative use of new technologies, and how world events or popular culture influenced the game design” (9). Taxonomically, the curators organized the games into four “genres”—Target, Adventure, Action, and Tactics—again, emphasizing design, production, and intended use. And finally, Game On and Game On 2.0 is “the first major international touring exhibition to explore the vibrant history and culture of computer games” (Barbican International Enterprises).

<23> Throughout these three contemporary position statements is a strong statement about the need to collect, curate, and preserve arcades and computer games as important cultural and artistic artifacts. Yet the curatorial narrative suggests that the culture of these games is removed, and specifically in the case of the Smithsonian exhibit, play is contradictory to the narrative of games as art. It is in the players, then, that these games are reinvigorated, the museum discourse subverted, and the act of visiting and playing brings both nostalgic and contemporary pleasure to the people who play. In the actions of players, video games are art because they are “the expression of vital culture” (Maleuvre 17) that denies the quiet contemplation of the past. What the museum provides is a platform for play that legitimizes this part of vital culture, and in doing so, enters the discourse of ‘games as art and culture.’ Players, in paying the fee for admittance, then punctuate this discourse with their engagement and complicity. The act of play in these types of exhibits (rather than within a traditional arcade) acts to reframe play within a different set of game discourses. The games are the same; the play is not.

<24> The Smithsonian American Art Museum presented The Art of Video Games: From Pac-Man to Mass Effect from March 16th, 2012 to September 30th, 2012 before becoming a traveling exhibit. The dominant narrative of this exhibit was that video games provide players immersive environments in which they can experience a range of human emotions and events. And it is this emotional impact that makes them art. Thus, visitors to the exhibit were funneled past an avocado green wall into a room that showcased concept and design art, a video of people’s reactions to playing games (emphasizing their emotional and immersive engagement with play), and an interview video in which notable designers and scholars talked about why video games are important. Following this room, visitors could go into a dimly lit room in which five games were set up for play.

Figure 2: Smithsonian’s Art of Video Games room for play.

Five games—Myst (Cyan, 1993), The Secret of Monkey Island (LucasArts, 1990), Pac-Man (Namco, 1980), Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985), and Flower (Thatgamecompany, 2009)—were projected onto a wall, and low controllers materially seemed to make the argument that these games were for children to play [3]. Each game was limited to two minutes before restarting, and in the case of Pac-Man, the leaderboard was disabled. The time limitation seemed to undermine the narrative of immersive stories, and this was especially felt in games such as Myst and Monkey Island, where players are not able to accomplish much in the scant time allowed.

<25> In the final room, visitors can explore the history of video games as organized by consoles (such as Atari 2600, PlayStation, Nintendo). Each console station highlighted four games, one for each of the genre categories. This was not a play exhibit; rather, visitors could pick up an audio phone, press the button of one of the game titles, and watch the short edited film that explains the significance of the chosen game.

<26> Such an exhibit might have been fairly conservative, fitting with the contemplative and educational missions of museums, had it not been for the people who visited. In the actions and reactions of the museum attendee/player, what becomes evident is the ways in which the desire to play rose above the desire to see original concept art. There was an air of frivolity in the play room, with children running around and lines forming around games as players played and spectators watched and waited for their turn. People would return to the play room rather than exiting the exhibit with surprising frequency. And within the two separate days that I spent in the exhibit, I saw new rules being formed within the affordances of the two-minute play rule. One group of young adults, for example, started to keep track of their scores on Pac-Man in order to see who could get the most points in the allotted time. And in another instance, I watched two people play Myst multiple times, seeing who could get furthest in this slow-paced environmental game—distance became the metric of success, not the experience of the environment.

<27> In addition to people trying to maximize their play, they also reflected on the games in a deeply personal way. For example, in the visitor’s log, attendees expressed a deeply personal history of video games—one that connotes nostalgia except that each game is still available, repackaged yet digitally reproduced. Also within these recollections is a sense of absence in collective memory; the absence of a game or genre of game is a failure in the exhibit to represent the past accurately. Consider this fairly kindly worded entry in figure 4:

Figure 3: Comments from the Smithsonian’s Art of Video Games exhibit

Other comments were far more strong in their opinions, decrying certain choices for inclusion (“Brutal Legend? WTF”) and certain absences (“What, no Resident Evil?! Who put this together?”). But overall, the pages in the visitor’s log were positive, and references to memory lane and childhood abounded. In this way, we see in the museum exhibit the success of planned obsolescence and its failure. These museum exhibits, in packaging the history of games in the way that they do, suggest a disappearing medium while promoting the engagement and even sales of the games that are available for play. The exhibit provides an institutionalized space for collective memory that advertises consumer commodities still available for nostalgic play.

<28> The challenges that the Game On 2.0 exhibit face are even more complicated in many ways because of the emphasis on play rather than art [4]. Like most video and arcade exhibits, the Game On exhibits are typically arranged historically, starting with earlier games and moving forward in time. The Game On 2.0 exhibit in particular, also used hardware as an organizing principle, so consoles were together, arcade cabinets were together, and so on. Throughout the exhibit were glass-cased materials with supporting narratives, concept and other game art, and objects from the material cultures of games. Game On is conceived broadly: “Game On is intended to be a broad survey of the whole medium, of the history culture and future of videogames. Each section giving an insight into different aspects of the medium be that history, genres, or regions of development” (Moran, 2013 Personal Email). The audience, too, is intended to be broadly defined as anyone who might have an interest, including those who don’t play games (ibid.).

<29> If ever the arcade entered the museum, Game On is it.

<30> The two exhibits that I attended were both in science and technology museums: Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry and Toronto’s Ontario Science Center. Science and technology museums already organize themselves as family friendly and typically cater to children’s education. Thus, locating the Game On exhibit in these halls makes a number of rhetorical arguments. First, that computer games are important technological innovations and industries, rather than primarily artistic in nature. Second, that this exhibit is for children and their educational needs. And third, that computer games should be touched and manipulated to understand them better (a common pedagogical approach in science museums). All three of these get trumped by play.

<31> The Game On exhibit is dynamic and exhilarating. It is even sometimes too much as children and adults jockey for position at a game and wander in a haze of being overwhelmed. The sheer history and collection of that history is somewhat overwhelming. There are some adults who travel from printed plaque to printed plaque, but mostly, these are ignored or quickly abandoned. Yet when a visitor looks to the curated displays, the narrative is again about the dynamic yet vanishing culture. Within the signs, visitors are told that there is simply too much, that objects are hard to find. The Pokémon exhibit and the hand held exhibit seem to be pointing in this direction. These sentiments seem to point to Maleuvre’s argument concerning the dangers of museums: “In sepulchral museum culture, history itself seems to bow to the verdict of its own obsolescence. It agrees with the touristic mindset which holds that culture does not really pertain to the present but to a glorious past—which is a feeble past because it cannot survive unaided in the present” (17). And indeed, these are the sentiments expressed by both James Newman in Best Before: Videogames, Supersession and Obsolescence and by the Strong National Museum of Play. Video game technologies, the argument goes, were never planned for long-term use; they were planned for obsolescence. And the very materials of form break down and can rarely be repaired (Newman 134). Thus, this type of exhibit is expensive and difficult to maintain. The Barbican has a team of technicians who install the exhibit and one staff member who stays with it continuously in order to continually fix the ‘out of order’ games.

<32> Yet even this feeble and tenuous hold on the present is effaced by the carnivalesque of the arcade. Once again, the visitor’s log suggests that video games belong to personal history, but personal history collectively conceived through the institution of the museum. The arcade experience brings back the pleasures of childhood, maybe once removed, but always sought (Brown). This is probably most evident when walking through the exhibit and hearing the exclamations of delight: “I loved this game when I was a kid!” For the children, then (and there were many), the act of participating in this exhibit is not a personally nostalgic act. It is action within institutionalized nostalgia in which video games are now the heritage of future play (Boyd 15). Yet the nostalgia is not even necessarily the collection of artifacts, it is the collection of artifacts that allows for play. And it is the play that leads to collective nostalgia in these institutionalizing structures. Thus, when faced with the Midway arcades or the White City’s cultural lessons, we see again in the quotidian choices of play that the pleasure of the game and the memory of that pleasure is ultimately the cultural practice preserved in these exhibits.

Conclusion

<33> Even within this process of institutionalizing nostalgia, the arcade itself becomes the cultural narrative of interaction. The very collection of computer games for play creates the arcade space, and the arcade space supersedes the museum space. The dominant actions and reactions are of delight and disappointment, not of contemplation. These spaces are noisy and dynamic. They promote both the positions of player and spectator. As Taylor and Whalen note in their introduction to Playing the Past: History and Nostalgia in Video Games, when games move platforms or are updated, players remember and are nostalgic for attributes that were afforded in order platforms. In this, they are referring to the platform, the material, and the individual player. Yet this same argument can be made about the movement of games into personal space—first the home via the home console and then the mobile device. What gets lost is the intense spatial and ontological experience of the game, the arcade and the affordances that it creates and demands from players and spectators both. Yet those affordances are close to the surface; bringing these games together and providing open space for people to move around and play evokes the arcade. Signifying that experience within the tropes of museum practices and spaces illuminates the deep cultural significance of the arcade and of play. Thus, it is not the didactic education in the museum nor the curatorial vision that makes these exhibits important. It is the preservation and promotion of play, then, that is the triumph of these exhibits.

End Notes

[1] In 2002, the American Classic Arcade Museum received its 501 (c)(3) status.

[2] Kocurek links this to a broader point concerning the training of laborers within a post-industrial workplace alongside an emergent consumer economy that seeks novel entertainment. In other words, the types of play that arcades afford are intimately linked to a changing economic landscape and the collective identities of US citizens as producers and consumers.

[3] The controller height probably had more to do with disability accommodations to be wheel chair accessible. However, they were interpreted as “child-sized” by patrons. I witnessed many adults kneeling at the controls.

[4] Personal observations about Game On and Game On 2.0 relate only to the Chicago Game On exhibit in 2006 and the Ontario Game On 2.0 exhibit in 2013.

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Aknowledgements

Jennifer deWinter would like to thank Constance Clark for her expertise and guidance, and the Interactive Media and Game Development program at WPI (especially Mark Claypool) for funding both of my research trips to the Smithsonian and Funspot.

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